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Amnesty: Human rights in Iraq ‘disastrous’

Monday, March 17th, 2008

LONDON - Amnesty International on Monday said the rights situation in Iraq five years after the US-led invasion was “disastrous” and that the country had turned into one of the world`s most dangerous zones.

“Five years after the US-led invasion that toppled (former president) Saddam Hussein, Iraq is one of the most dangerous countries in the world,” it said in a 24-page report, entitled “Carnage and Despair. Iraq Five Years On”.

Against a backdrop of insecurity, law and order and economic recovery were a “distant prospect” while most Iraqis were living in poverty, with food shortages, lack of access to safe drinking water and high unemployment.

More than four in 10 Iraqis lived on less than one US dollar a day — the UN standard for measuring poverty — while the health and education systems were at near collapse and women and girls at risk of violence from extremists.

“Saddam Hussein`s administration was a byword for human rights abuse,” said Amnesty`s director for Middle East and North Africa, Malcolm Smart. “But its replacement has brought no respite at all for its people.”

The failure to investigate alleged abuses “is one of the most worrying aspects for the future”, he added.

“Even when faced with overwhelming evidence of torture under their watch, the Iraqi authorities have failed to hold the perpetrators to account — and the US and its allies have failed to demand that they do so,” he said.

Amnesty also criticised the extensive use of the death penalty, the international community`s failure to cater for Iraqi refugees and despite the more stable situation, the lack of free speech in the Kurdistan region.

“Despite claims that the security situation has improved in recent months, the human rights situation is disastrous,” the London-based group said, highlighting the kidnap, torture and murder of civilians by armed groups.

“All sides have committed gross human rights violations, including war crimes and crimes against humanity,” it added, referring to militia groups, Iraqi security forces, US-led troops plus private and military security guards.

Amnesty pointed to the detention of about 60,000 people by the Iraqis and multi-national forces, most of them without charge, saying torture and ill-treatment of prisoners and miscarriages of justice were “routine”.

But it said no-one, including the divided Iraqi government, appeared serious about investigating claims of abuse, torture, rape and murder of civilians and bringing those reponsible to justice.

A recent World Health Organisation and Iraqi health ministry report estimated that 151,000 people were killed between the start of the invasion on March 20, 2003 and June 2006.

Other estimates have put the number of civilian deaths as a result of the conflict between nearly 48,000 and 601,000.

phz/ach

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Guantanamo: The Bigger Picture?

Monday, March 17th, 2008

The U.S. base at Guantanamo has been called many things. The “gulag of our time” (Amnesty International General Secretary Irene Khan, May 2005). “The key strategic intelligence platform in the war on terror” (Charles Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, January 2007). The “legal equivalent of outer space” (unnamed Administration official). The right place for “the worst of a very bad lot” (Vice President Dick Cheney, January 2002) and for the “most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth” (former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, January 2002).

Guantanamo is now best known as the home of oversized iguanas, banana rats, and the more than 700 “enemy combatants” who have been detained, tortured, and interrogated there over the past six years as part of the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism. But, the history of the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay stretches much further back — to the beginning of the last century — when the United States wrestled this prime real-estate from Spain to become the colonial power in the hemisphere.

Twenty-first century experiences at Guantanamo have now been exposed in a sheaf of books, including difficult, vivid memoirs from former detainees and powerful poetry, and dramatized in plays and films, such as the best-documentary Oscar winner Taxi to the Dark Side and the critically-acclaimed Road to Guantanamo. The iconic orange jumpsuits are on display at every anti-war protest and the word “Guantanamo” is often used as shorthand for the Bush administration’s whole system of indefinite detention, rendition, torture, and abuse of power established since September 2001.

Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo

Calls to “shut down Guantanamo” from legal and human rights experts, politicians, and the international community are now strong, irrepressible and growing louder each day. At the same time, the facility has finally penetrated pop culture. This spring, movie-goers can enjoy the sequel of the 2004 slacker-stoner Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. In the new film, the two friends are arrested after smuggling a bong on a flight to Amsterdam and end up at Guantanamo. Yep, the movie is titled: Harold and Kumar II: Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Promoted with the tag-line: “This Time, They’re Running from the Joint,” the film is described as “an irreverent and epic journey of deep thoughts, deeper inhaling and a wild trip around the world that is as ‘un-PC’ as it gets.”

Guantanamo is getting more attention (both outraged and outrageous), but the question of how the United States came to control a swath of Cuban territory is worth more discussion. If the Guantanamo prison is shuttered tomorrow, and the prisoners get their day in court, the U.S. base will continue to exist as a key colonial outpost in a post-colonial world. Now that Fidel Castro has turned over power to his brother Raul and the United States is again poised to “democratize” socialist Cuba, this question has even greater resonance.

Booty from a “Splendid Little War”

Perched on the south-eastern corner of Cuba, the U.S. Naval Base straddles the deep water harbor of Guantanamo Bay and occupies 45 square miles of Cuban territory.

In 1898, the United States and Spain battled for control of Cuba and other Spanish colonies in what Washington had come to see as part of its “sphere of influence.” The Spanish-American War is known for the Rough Riders and the “Remember the Maine” call to arms (which refers to the now historically suspect attack on the USS Maine battleship sunk in the Havana Harbor). In a letter to his good friend Teddy Roosevelt, the U.S. Ambassador to England dubbed it a “splendid little war.” Ignoring the countless (literally) Cubans, Filipinos and others who were killed, one could see his point. The United States won a lot in the war: it lasted less than four months, resulted in the death of fewer than 1,000 U.S. soldiers and put the United States in charge of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam — all former Spanish colonies — and gave the United States control of Hawaii. The U.S. Navy also discovered the benefits of Guantánamo Bay when they sought refuge from summer hurricanes. One hundred and ten years later, they are still there.

While the U.S. Congress promised Cuba independence after the war, the Platt Amendment forced a peace treaty that granted the United States the right to “stabilize” the island militarily and established a permanent U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Cuban-American Treaty

The Cuban-American Treaty was signed in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt and Tomas Estrada Palma, the President of Cuba — a U.S. citizen fully backed by Washington. According to the text of the treaty, the U.S. military presence will “enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the Cuban Government will sell or lease to the United States the lands necessary for coaling or naval stations.” The treaty goes onto acknowledge Cuba’s “ultimate sovereignty” over the territory, but asserts that while the United States occupies it, they have “complete jurisdiction and control” over the land.

It’s difficult to call an agreement between a world power and a conquered colony a treaty, but it has governed operations there ever since. Only a few restrictions were placed on U.S. freedom of operation, even when the treaty was updated in 1934. The document stipulated that the site could only be used for the purposes outlined and prohibited the U.S. from conducting private enterprise there. The U.S. granted Cuba and her trading partners free access through the bay and agreed to pay Havana $2,000 in gold per year. Finally, the two countries promised to return fugitives from justice who crossed into the others’ territory.

As U.S. Navy Rear Admiral M.E. Murphy, a military historian, put it in his 1953 History of Guantanamo Bay: the land is “a bit of American territory, and so it will probably remain as long as we have a Navy.” He goes on to note “we have a lease in perpetuity to this Naval reservation and it is inconceivable that we would abandon it.”

And we have not abandoned it.

After the Revolution

When Washington’s close ally Fulgencio Batista was overthrown by the Cuban Revolution in 1958, the relationship between the U.S. base and the nation it occupied changed dramatically. When Batista fled to Spain (where he lived the rest of his life in luxury), thousands of Cubans with ties to his regime sought refuge on the base, and the rest of the island was deemed off limits to U.S. servicemen and civilians in 1959. Washington cut diplomatic relations in 1961.

In February 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis, Cuban President Fidel Castro cut water and supply lines to the base and since then, the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay has been self-sufficient. It is outfitted with a de-salinization plant to produce water, and windmills and other technology produce all of the base’s electricity.

In 2002, the first “enemy combatants” in the global war on terrorism landed at the Base. But this was not the first time the U.S. had confined internationals at the base. In the early 1990s, civil unrest in Haiti and economic crisis in Cuba drove tens of thousands of people from both countries to seek refuge in the United States. In little boats overcrowded with migrants, these people set off from the United States — only to end up at Guantanamo Bay. As many as 45,000 migrants were “processed” through the base, with many of the Haitians sent home to deprivation and the majority of the Cubans granted asylum.

“Honor Bound to Defend Freedom”

“Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” is the proud sentiment emblazoned above the entrance to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo. The website for the Commander of Navy Installations Command Guantanamo features a large picture of an iguana and the greeting: “welcome to the website for the oldest overseas U.S. Naval Station and the only one in a country with which the U.S. does not maintain diplomatic relations.”

Navy Commander Jeffery D. Gordon explains that the U.S. presence at Guantanamo serves “a vital role in Caribbean regional security, protection from narco-trafficking and terrorism and safeguards against mass migration attempts in unseaworthy craft.” The Navy’s Atlantic fleet is based there and the base is described as being “on the front lines of the battle for regional security.”

Changing the Rationale

The military aggressively makes the case for the base. Eighty years ago, Guantanamo was crucial to colonial expansion and the smooth extraction of resources from Latin America; 30 years ago, it would have been justified as playing a key role in supporting anti-democratic regimes in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. More recently, the war on drugs served as rationale.

But, before 2001, the number of military personnel stationed at the base had dwindled to about 300. And many saw Guantanamo’s greatest value as a carrot to dangle before the Cuban people in Washington’s long project to unseat Fidel Castro. Part of the 1996 Helms Burton Act (the chief aim of which was to strengthen and continue to U.S. trade related embargo on Cuba) — for example — offered to open negotiations with a “democratically elected Cuban government” to return the base at Guantanamo to Cuba or redefine the lease.

Then, Washington decided that the Guantanamo base would be an ideal place to try and hide war on terrorism detainees from the law and public scrutiny. And planeloads of shackled prisoners wearing blacked-out goggles, noise canceling headphones, and orange jumpsuits began landing at the U.S. base. Initially, many were housed in chain-link cages. In June 2005, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that the Pentagon had invested $100 million to construct new prisons and barracks and upgrade other facilities. Operating the base and the prison cost another $95 million a year. For U.S. soldiers and Marines stationed there, Guantanamo is a slice of the American mall culture transported to coastal Cuba — there is a weekly newspaper, The Guantanamo Bay Gazette, a movie theater that offers current films like “I Am Legend” and “The Spiderwick Chronicles.” McDonalds and Starbucks are both on base.

With no end in sight to the global war on terrorism, more than 8,000 military personnel are now based at Guantanamo. So, for the time being, the military has a new way to fend off calls to shut down the U.S. military base there. In a January 2007 interview on C-SPAN, Charles Stimson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, justified the U.S. base at Guantanamo, saying “It is important during time of war to have a place where, number one, you can take people off the battlefield and not allow them to go back to the battlefield, but also, exploit intelligence that they may possess… Guantanamo today remains the key strategic intelligence platform in the war on terror.”

“To my knowledge, the Cubans have never officially asked for it back” John Regan, the acting Officer at the State Department’s Cuba Desk, is quoted as saying in an April 2007 Los Angeles Times article. He goes on to say that they have not raised objections to the presence of war on terrorism prisoners. He must not be listening very closely.

In June 2002, at the United Nations General Assembly, Cuba demanded that the Guantánamo territory be returned to the island. And two years later, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque proposed a resolution before the United Nations Human Rights Commission that would have condemned the violation of human rights at Guantanamo. More recently, these calls have grown louder. In a December 2007 speech in Havana, Roque said: “We demand today, on the World Day of Human Rights, that the President of the United States and that the U.S. Government close down the torture center in Guantánamo and return to our homeland the territory that they occupy illegally.” Cuba protests in other ways as well. The U.S. Treasury continues to pay the “gold” that Roosevelt promised 105 years ago. Annual checks for $4,085 are deposited into an account for the Cuban government, but not a single one has been cashed in 47 years.

Toxic Brand

Cuba doesn’t like Guantanamo, and many in the administration agree that the detention facility has become a problem. During Robert Gates’ first week as Secretary of Defense following the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, he argued that the detention facility should be closed, pointing out that the U.S. image abroad is so tainted that any legal proceedings for detainees at the base will be viewed as illegitimate. He commented: “I think that Guantanamo has become symbolic, whether we like it or not, for many around the world.” He also cut one big zero off Rumsfeld’s plan to spend $100 million on new infrastructure, resulting in a more modest (but still significant) $10 million expenditure for air-conditioned pods and other amenities for the military commissions hearings.

President George W. Bush acknowledges Guantanamo as a problem too, saying during a June 2006 press conference: “I’d like to close Guantanamo. No question: Guantanamo sends a signal to some of our friends and provides an excuse — for example, to say the United States is not upholding the values that they’re trying to encourage other countries to adhere to.” Despite his claims to being the “decider in chief,” Bush has not taken any executive steps to change the signal we are sending.

What is at the heart of the administration’s discomfort with Guantanamo? It is not torture — President Bush just vetoed a law that would have prohibited water-boarding. It is certainly not respect for Cuba’s sovereignty — the State Department has a whole office devoted to meddling in the country’s affairs. It is the PR problem. In March of last year, William Taft, a former State Department adviser, testified before the House of Representatives on Guantanamo. He acknowledged that the logistical advantages of housing prisoners at Guantanamo are outweighed by the “political costs of continuing its operation. At some point a brand becomes so toxic that no amount of Madison Avenue talent can rehabilitate it.”

One solution is to give the base back to Cuba. But, Julia Sweig, the Director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, is not sure Havana would want it back, saying “it’s become such a global symbol of what has gone wrong with America — not just a symbol of our colonial impulses, but of the anti-imperialist fight throughout Latin America — it is something Cuba uses to greater benefit than getting the base back.” Rhetorical benefits are of value — but you can’t eat, trade or wield geo-political power with rhetoric.

What Next?

But closing the prison and relinquishing control of the territory are two completely different things. Can Cuba get Guantanamo Bay back?

The Guantanamo prison is not a hot-button campaign issue. Lee Feinstein, Director of National Security for Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign, says that “as President, she would direct the Justice Department to evaluate the evidence amassed against these prisoners and make a determination.” Not exactly a rousing and definitive call to shut down Guantanamo, but at least she has a process. For his part, Senator Barack Obama does not see the need for military justice proceedings there, asserting “I believe that our civilian courts or our traditional system of military courts-martial are best able to meet this challenge and demonstrate our commitment to the rule of law.” On the Republican side, Senator John McCain has pushed for Guantanamo to be closed and the prisoners sent to maximum security prison in Ft. Leavenworth, Kentucky.

On the larger issue of U.S.-Cuba relations, Obama favors engagement and dialogue without preconditions, while Clinton would predicate diplomatic overtures on Cuba’s steps towards democratization. McCain holds the position that U.S. containment policy has worked, and he would not talk to Cuba until they held free elections and released political prisoners and made other reforms.

Returning the occupied territory to Cuba has not been mentioned as an option by Presidential candidates, and it is not high on the list of objectives in Cuba policy circles. Close Cuba-watcher Patrick Doherty — the Deputy Director of the New America Foundation’s American Strategy Program — predicts it would come up only in “the later stages of a long-term process of rapprochement.” That’s because, in addition to the geographic value of an American military base at Guantanamo, Doherty says “one of our most effective areas of quiet cooperation with the Cuban government is at the mil-mil level in managing our presence and operations out of Guantanamo… and working on counter narcotics, counter-crime, and general Caribbean security issues. Without many other vehicles for official dialogue, Guantanamo, ironically, is acting like a confidence-building measure.”

Some international law experts assert that the United States is in violation of the treaty made with Cuba and that could be the basis of a movement to win the territory back. Dr. Alfredo de Zayas, a professor of international law at the Geneva School for Diplomacy, argues that even before looking at specific violations, the treaty can be nullified because, “the lease for the military base in a foreign country is conditioned on the friendly relations between states.” While relations between Cuba and the United States were friendly at the time of the treaty, that is no longer the case. De Zayas also asserts that the treaty is “voidable by virtue of a material breach,” because it clearly stipulates that the area should be used for naval purposes (coaling refers to re-fueling naval vessels when they were steam powered) and “for no other purpose” including housing war on terrorism detainees. Additionally, the treaty bars the United States from establishing “commercial, industrial or other enterprises” but the base is home to McDonalds, Starbucks, Subway sandwiches, and other commercial enterprises, another material breach.

While Washington does not make a habit of abiding by the treaty or its obligations under it, the 1903 agreement was repeatedly cited as a reason to keep Guantanamo detainees and their cases out of U.S. courts. During Supreme Court hearings for Rasul vs. Bush and Al Odah vs. United States, government lawyers argued that under the 1903 treaty and the 1934 revisions, the United States “recognizes the continuance of the ultimate sovereignty” of Cuba over Guantanamo and that the base is thus “not part of the sovereign territory of the United States,” and therefore not under U.S. law, meaning that the prisoners at Guantanamo should not be allowed access to U.S. courts.

In 2004, the Supreme Court rejected those arguments, but the legal fight continues.

Shut it Down

The decision of what to do with the prisoners at Guantanamo will most likely be left to the next administration. Washington’s policy and attitude towards Cuba will also be shaped by the next person to sit behind the big desk in the Oval Office. The next steps in the global war on terrorism; a major change (up or down) in the size, scope and objective of the U.S. occupation of Iraq; a shift in how (or if) we communicate and cooperate with the rest of the world; an exploration of the effectiveness of U.S. military might in resolving problems: these pressing issues will be seen through new eyes post-November 2008.

The U.S. military occupation and control of territory — from Guantanamo to Germany to Okinawa and beyond — should be included in this reckoning. Shutting down Guantanamo — not just the prison where men are tortured, abused, and held in contravention of U.S. and international law, but the sprawling colonial-holdover enterprise that the United States came to control and continues to occupy illegitimately and illegally — would be a huge symbolic step towards the rule of law, respect for other nations and the dawning recognition that military might is a tool of last resort not first assault. One hundred and five years later, the time has more than come.

Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Frida Berrigan is a senior program associate at the Arms and Security Project of the New America Foundation.

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MI5 Wants Oyster Card Travel Data

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Counter-terrorism experts call it a ‘force multiplier’: an attack combining slaughter and electronic chaos. Now Britain’s security services want total access to commuters’ travel records to help them meet the threat

Millions of commuters could have their private movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.

Records of journeys made by people using smart cards that allow 17 million Britons to travel by underground, bus and train with a single swipe at the ticket barrier are among a welter of private information held by the state to which MI5 and police counter-terrorism officers want access in order to help identify patterns of suspicious behaviour.

The request by the security services, described by shadow Home Secretary David Davis last night as ‘extraordinary’, forms part of a fierce Whitehall debate over how much access the state should have to people’s private lives in its efforts to combat terrorism.

It comes as the Cabinet Office finalises Gordon Brown’s new national security strategy, expected to identify a string of new threats to Britain - ranging from future ‘water wars’ between countries left drought-ridden by climate change to cyber-attacks using computer hacking technology to disrupt vital elements of national infrastructure.

The fear of cyber-warfare has climbed Whitehall’s agenda since last year’s attack on the Baltic nation of Estonia, in which Russian hackers swamped state servers with millions of electronic messages until they collapsed. The Estonian defence and foreign ministries and major banks were paralysed, while even its emergency services call system was temporarily knocked out: the attack was seen as a warning that battles once fought by invading armies or aerial bombardment could soon be replaced by virtual, but equally deadly, wars in cyberspace.

While such new threats may grab headlines, the critical question for the new security agenda is how far Britain is prepared to go in tackling them. What are the limits of what we want our security services to know? And could they do more to identify suspects before they strike?

One solution being debated in Whitehall is an unprecedented unlocking of data held by public bodies, such as the Oyster card records maintained by Transport for London and smart cards soon to be introduced in other cities in the UK, for use in the war against terror. The Office of the Information Commissioner, the watchdog governing data privacy, confirmed last night that it had discussed the issue with government but declined to give details, citing issues of national security.

Currently the security services can demand the Oyster records of specific individuals under investigation to establish where they have been, but cannot trawl the whole database. But supporters of calls for more sharing of data argue that apparently trivial snippets - like the journeys an individual makes around the capital - could become important pieces of the jigsaw when fitted into a pattern of other publicly held information on an individual’s movements, habits, education and other personal details. That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects.

Critics, however, fear a shift towards US-style ‘data mining’, a controversial technique using powerful computers to sift and scan millions of pieces of data, seeking patterns of behaviour which match the known profiles of terrorist suspects. They argue that it is unfair for millions of innocent people to have their privacy invaded on the off-chance of finding a handful of bad apples.

‘It’s looking for a needle in a haystack, and we all make up the haystack,’ said former Labour minister Michael Meacher, who has a close interest in data sharing. ‘Whether all our details have to be reviewed because there is one needle among us - I don’t think the case is made.’

Jago Russell, policy officer at the campaign group Liberty, said technological advances had made ‘mass computerised fishing expeditions’ easier to undertake, but they offered no easy answers. ‘The problem is what do you do once you identify somebody who has a profile that suggests suspicions,’ he said. ‘Once the security services have identified somebody who fits a pattern, it creates an inevitable pressure to impose restrictions.’

Individuals wrongly identified as suspicious might lose high-security jobs, or have their immigration status brought into doubt, he said. Ministers are also understood to share concerns over civil liberties, following public opposition to ID cards, and the debate is so sensitive that it may not even form part of Brown’s published strategy.

But if there is no consensus yet on the defence, there is an emerging agreement on the mode of attack. The security strategy will argue that in the coming decades Britain faces threats of a new and different order. And its critics argue the government is far from ready.

The cyber-assault on Estonia confirmed that the West now faces a relatively cheap, low-risk means of warfare that can be conducted from anywhere in the world, with the power to plunge developed nations temporarily into the stone age, disabling everything from payroll systems that ensure millions of employees get paid to the sewage treatment processes that make our water safe to drink or the air traffic control systems keeping planes stacked safely above Heathrow.

And it is one of the few weapons which is most effective against more sophisticated western societies, precisely because of their reliance on computers. ‘As we become more advanced, we become more vulnerable,’ says Alex Neill, head of the Asia Security programme at the defence think-tank RUSI, who is an expert on cyber-attack.

The nightmare scenario now emerging is its use by terrorists as a so-called ‘force multiplier’ - combining a cyber-attack to paralyse the emergency services with a simultaneous atrocity such as the London Tube bombings.

Victims would literally have nowhere to turn for help, raising the death toll and sowing immeasurable panic. ‘Instead of using three or four aircraft as in 9/11, you could do one major event and then screw up the communications network behind the emergency services, or attack the Underground control network so you have one bomb but you lock up the whole network,’ says Davis. ‘You take the ramifications of the attack further. The other thing to bear in mind is that we are ultimately vulnerable because London is a financial centre.’

In other words, cyber-warfare does not have to kill to bring a state to its knees: hackers could, for example, wipe electronic records detailing our bank accounts, turning millionaires into apparent paupers overnight.

So how easy would it be? Estonia suffered a relatively crude form of attack known as ‘denial of service’, while paralysing a secure British server would be likely to require more sophisticated ’spy’ software which embeds itself quietly in a computer network and scans for secret passwords or useful information - activating itself later to wreak havoc.

Neill said that would require specialist knowledge to target the weakest link in any system: its human user. ‘You will get an email, say, that looks like it’s from a trusted colleague, but in fact that email has been cloned. There will be an attachment that looks relevant to your work: it’s an interesting document, but embedded in it invisibly is “malware” rogue software which implants itself in the operating systems. From that point, the computer is compromised and can be used as a platform to exploit other networks.’

Only governments and highly sophisticated criminal organisations have such a capability now, he argues, but there are strong signs that al-Qaeda is acquiring it: ‘It is a hallmark of al-Qaeda anyway that they do simultaneous bombings to try to herd victims into another area of attack.’

The West, of course, may not simply be the victim of cyber-wars: the United States is widely believed to be developing an attack capability, with suspicions that Baghdad’s infrastructure was electronically disrupted during the 2003 invasion.

So given its ability to cause as much damage as a traditional bomb, should cyber-attack be treated as an act of war? And what rights under international law does a country have to respond, with military force if necessary? Next month Nato will tackle such questions in a strategy detailing how it would handle a cyber-attack on an alliance member. Suleyman Anil, Nato’s leading expert on cyber-attack, hinted at its contents when he told an e-security conference in London last week that cyber-attacks should be taken as seriously as a missile strike - and warned that a determined attack on western infrastructure would be ‘practically impossible to stop’.

Tensions are likely to increase in a globalised economy, where no country can afford to shut its borders to foreign labour - an issue graphically highlighted for Gordon Brown weeks into his premiership by the alleged terrorist attack on Glasgow airport, when it emerged that the suspects included overseas doctors who entered Britain to work in the NHS.

A review led by Homeland Security Minister Admiral Sir Alan West into issues raised by the Glasgow attack has been grappling with one key question: could more be done to identify rogue elements who are apparently well integrated with their local communities?

Which is where, some within the intelligence community insist, access to personal data already held by public bodies - from the Oyster register to public sector employment records - could come in. The debate is not over yet.

Gaby Hinsliff

London Tube Smartcard Cracked

Looks like lousy cryptography.

Details here. When will people learn not to invent their own crypto?

Note that this is the same card — maybe a different version — that was used in the Dutch transit system, and was hacked back in January. There’s another hack of that system (press release here, and a video demo), and many companies — and government agencies — are scrambling in the wake of all these revelations.

Seems like the Mifare system (especially the version called Mifare Classic — and there are billions out there) was really badly designed, in all sorts of ways. I’m sure there are many more serious security vulnerabilities waiting to be discovered.

Bruce Schneier

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An overview of the NSA’s domestic spying program

Monday, March 17th, 2008

In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, Siobhan Gorman pulled together the disparate threads of reporting on what’s known of the NSA’s secret domestic spy program, and combined them with some of her own reporting to confirm, once again, that the NSA’s program is another incarnation of the Pentagon’s erstwhile Total Information Awareness program. Gorman also describes how Carnivore, the SWIFT database snooping program, and basically every other “Big Brother” database and data snooping program that the executive branch has developed over the past two administrations* feed information into the NSA’s TIA-like system, which then looks for suspicious patterns in the data.

Gorman’s article provides a great overview of how these programs fit together in the architecture of the modern, post-9/11 surveillance state, and it’s required reading because it comes at a critical time in our national debate about privacy and the limits of executive power. However, if you’ve been following this topic closely then you know that most of the information in the article has been public since 2006.

In this post, I’m going to walk back through some of the previous reporting on the topic, both my own work and that of others, and offer corrections and adjustments where necessary based on the WSJ piece. My hope is that readers and reporters who are so inclined can dig through the details and links and follow up on any leads that others may have missed.

(*Note: Infamous codenames like “Carnivore” and ECHELON first cropped up in Bill Clinton’s second term, and I covered them when Ars launched in mid-1998. In terms of the presidential orders he signed and the programs that were inaugurated on his watch, Clinton laid some of the groundwork for the Bush administration’s pre- and post-9/11 surveillance-related lawbreaking. Or, perhaps a more accurate metaphor is that he blazed a trail that the Bush gang then paved over and turned into a six-lane highway.)

A look back at the role of the TIA in the NSA’s surveillance activities

Back in December of 2005, when the NSA warrantless wiretapping story story broke in the New York Times, I took a close look at what was then known about the program and suggested that the NSA’s program probably shared some technological DNA with the short-lived (2002-2003) Total Information Awareness program. In the years since TIA first appeared under the Pentagon’s roof, the program has moved from agency to agency in the Executive branch, as Congress catches wind of each new incarnation of it and shuts it down only to see it reemerge again with a different acronym on a different department’s budget.

In April of 2006, the MIT Technology Review published a piece by Mark Williams that moved the story forward by fleshing out the relationship between TIA and the NSA’s domestic spying program. Williams reported that elements of TIA had indeed been moved from the Department of Defense to the NSA, and he suggested that this technology was almost certainly in use as part of the domestic spying program that the New York Times had uncovered.

One month later, a very important article on the role of “transactional information”—a term that originally referred to the phone company’s call logs but has since been stretched to fit a widening array of communication types—appeared in USA Today. The article made clear that this “communication metadata” was the real target of the NSA’s vast data collection efforts. Also that May, Wired’s Ryan Singel released critical technical documents that had been sealed under court order, showing some of the nuts and bolts of how the NSA snoops Internet traffic on AT&T’s backbone.

In terms of my own understanding of the NSA’s program, the USA Today article made clear that my initial assessment of the NYT’s piece had missed the mark on an important and central point: the new surveillance technology at the heart of the TSA’s warrantless wiretapping program was not, as I had conjectured, an automated voice recognition system that sampled calls looking for “hits,” and then escalated of-interest calls to higher levels of scrutiny and, ultimately, to a human monitor. This call monitoring is almost surely going on somewhere in the intelligence pipeline, but the core of the NSA’s program really is the aggregation and analysis of communications metadata.

Based on the USA Today piece and on a number of other sources, I suggested in “TIA (aka Topsail) unveiled: the real scope of the NSA’s domestic spying program” that “the original revelations about the NSA’s SIGINT vacuum were just the tip of the iceberg,” and that “it appears there’s probably more that we’ve yet to see. Much more.”

I then put the pieces together and asked the following rhetorical question: “Now, does anyone seriously think that the NSA is not collecting transactional data (at a minimum) for Web, email, FTP and other IP-based communications, and/or that they’re not tying all of this data to individual users?”

Gorman’s WSJ piece provides sourced confirmation that the NSA is doing exactly what I and others suspected they were doing, i.e., they’re collecting e-mail headers, Web surfing histories, cell phone call logs, and every other trace of the digital and analog connections that we make to the world, and they’re synthesizing this into complete informational portraits of individuals.

Network effects

In my “TIA unveiled” piece, I appear to have overstated the scope of the NSA’s profiling by suggesting that the agency is building such informational pictures of everyone in the US. But Gorman’s article provides an important correction by suggesting that the TIA driftnet works in a much more focused fashion.

According to Gorman, counter-terrorism officials must seed the system with leads—like the name or phone number of an individual with suspected terrorist ties. The system then begins monitoring the aforementioned types of transactional data in order to build an informational profile. The system also works outward through the individual’s social network by turning its information vacuum on everyone that that person contacts, and then on their contacts in turn, in an ever-expanding web of surveillance. This way, the system can build of profiles of individuals and groups, and monitor their interactions for suspicious activity.

The fact that the driftnet is seeded by first giving it a single target—a target that is ostensibly drawn from some type of human-generated intelligence—makes it less of a lost cause than a massive, nationwide driftnet would be, but only marginally less so, depending on how far out in the suspect’s social network the surveillance extends. As I explained in this article on why the NSA’s program is a bad idea from a national security perspective, the main problem with these driftnet or “dragnet” systems is that the rate of false positives is typically so high that they produce an overwhelming flood of bogus leads that tie up law enforcement resources.

Even if the more targeted driftnet approach described by Gorman does result in fewer false positives, the constitutional, privacy, and oversight questions still remain. Let’s hope that we, the people, eventually get a shot at answering those questions for ourselves.

Jon Stokes

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England beat New Zealand in the second Test

Monday, March 17th, 2008

England beat New Zealand by 126 runs in the second Test at the Basin Reserve in Wellington.

England levelled the Test series after they bowled the hosts out for 311 on the fifth and final morning.

Left arm pace bowler Ryan Sidebottom, who captured 10 wickets in the first Test in Hamilton, provided the impetus for the visitors with five wickets in New Zealand’s second innings.

Wicketkeeper Brendon McCullum had a swashbuckling 85 in an effort to help chase down the record 438 needed for victory but they fell well short.

Resuming on 242-6, New Zealand’s hopes of pulling off an improbable victory rested squarely on the shoulders of McCullum and captain Daniel Vettori.

The aggressive McCullum had two large swishes at Stuart Broad deliveries in the first over before he hooked him to the backward square boundary to open the day’s scoring.

However, Vettori was unable to reproduce the form that had given him two half centuries and he nicked a Sidebottom delivery to Alastair Cook at third slip in the second over of the day.

Vettori’s dismissal effectively ended New Zealand’s slim hopes of fashioning the victory, and first Test series win against England since 1999.

Fast bowler Kyle Mills, who has scored a first-class century and could have possibly held up one end while McCullum blazed away at the other, did not last long when he was trapped leg before for 13 by Sidebottom.

It was the left hander’s third five-wicket Test haul and he ended with figures of 5-105.

He also completed the victory when he caught McCullum at long-on, off Monty Panesar, for 85 about 35 minutes before lunch.

England’s victory tied the three-Test series at 1-1 heading into the third Test in Napier, beginning on Friday night.

Reuters

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BBC journalists arrested in Irish probe

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Four BBC journalists were arrested at the weekend by Irish police monitoring the Real IRA, the dissident group responsible for intermittent violence in Northern Ireland.

The four were among 11 men arrested and held for questioning by Gardai in three separate police stations in the border county of Donegal.

It is believed the journalists were working for the BBC’s Panorama and BBC Northern Ireland’s Spotlight investigative programmes. Seven of the arrests were made on Saturday and a further four yesterday.

Although the BBC released only limited details, it is reported they were working on a programme on the Real IRA. A statement from the BBC said: “They were working on a BBC Northern Ireland current affairs investigation and had full editorial authorisation under the BBC’s guidelines. The other parties present were fully aware.”

Irish police said the arrests were part of “ongoing investigations into paramilitary activity”.

BBC journalists are restricted by detailed guidelines covering contacts with illegal organisations, some dating from heated controversies arising from reporting on the IRA in the 1970s.

The Real IRA will forever be associated with the Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people in Co Tyrone in 1998. Its sporadic activities since then included shootings which seriously wounded two police officers.

In recent years there have been numerous signs that the security forces have penetrated the organisation, and a significant number of Real IRA personnel have been jailed.

But the police shootings suggested the grouping may have staged a partial recovery – possibly because it has divided into several factions.

Last month increased security measures such as vehicle checkpoints made a reappearance in parts of Northern Ireland. Days earlier, in a newspaper interview, the Real IRA announced its ambition to force troops back on to the streets. A spokesman said: “We believe we can reach the stage where British soldiers are brought back onto the streets to bolster the cops. This will shatter the facade that the British presence has gone and normality reigns.”

Police sources recently described the Real IRA as “disorganised but dangerous”.

David McKittrick

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Brown: There will be a public inquiry into Iraq

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Gordon Brown has promised that the Government will hold a full-scale inquiry into the mistakes made in Iraq before and since the invasion five years ago. His concession marks a significant break from his predecessor, Tony Blair, who steadfastly refused to hold a wide-ranging inquiry into the war.

Mr Brown, however, insists it is not the right time for an immediate investigation as the situation in Iraq remains “fragile” and British troops are still trying to bring stability to the country. The Prime Minister said: “There is a need to learn all possible lessons from the military action in Iraq and its aftermath.”

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the invasion on Thursday, Mr Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, warned it could take “decades” to bring calm to Iraq. He also admitted the British and US governments had seriously underestimated the scale of the task before them in 2003.

Mr Brown’s promise came in a letter to Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society, who had urged him to mark the anniversary by announcing a public inquiry.

“There will come a time when it is appropriate to hold an inquiry,” said Mr Brown. “But whilst the whole effort of the Government and the armed forces is directed towards supporting the people and government of Iraq as they forge a future based on reconciliation, democracy, prosperity and security, we believe that is not now.”

The Prime Minister added: “Despite the progress made on the security, economic and political fronts in Iraq, the situation remains fragile and could easily be reversed. At this critical time it is therefore vital that the Government does not divert attention from supporting Iraq’s development as a secure and stable country.”

Insisting that “real progress” is being made in Iraq, Mr Brown said the transfer of all four provinces in the south of the country to the Iraqi authorities was “ample evidence” of the sterling work done by UK forces and its coalition partners. “But the work is not complete,” he said. “Our troops will remain in Iraq to train and support the Iraqi army, whilst our diplomatic missions will continue to work with the government of Iraq to use the space created by the improved security environment to make real progress on political reconciliation and economic development.”

Mr Katwala welcomed Mr Brown’s statement, saying: “It is very good news that the Prime Minister is personally committed to an inquiry on Iraq. I wrote to him to make the case for an inquiry because I was not aware of any previous statement from Gordon Brown since he became Prime Minister, or from the current Foreign Secretary, making the Government’s policy clear.”

He added: “Many people who believe this is important should be pleased to see the Prime Minister confirm that there will be an inquiry.”

Mr Katwala said he understood Mr Brown’s desire to focus on current efforts in Iraq but urged him to clarify the nature and timing of the inquiry.

“With a good deal of public reflection around the fifth anniversary of the war, this strikes me as an appropriate context for Government to make a public statement about this,” he said.

Mr Blair had insisted a public inquiry was not justified as the background to the war had been examined four times – by the Hutton and Butler inquiries, by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee and by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

He said during the 2005 general election campaign: “We have had inquiry after inquiry we do not need to go back over this again and again.”

But critics have argued that the terms of each of the inquiries were tightly drawn and failed to establish a full picture of the war and its aftermath.

The Conservatives, who backed the invasion, plan to force a Commons vote shortly in the hope of forcing an independent investigation by privy councillors into the origins and conduct of the war. William Hague, the shadow Foreign Secretary, told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show yesterday: “If we are not going to start it now, five years on from the beginning of the war, then when on earth would we have such an inquiry?”

Labour MPs who opposed the conflict had been hoping Mr Brown would use the anniversary to set up an inquiry. They argue that this would enable him to draw a line under what is widely seen as “Tony Blair’s war” and enable Labour to win back disaffected supporters.

Mr Powell told The Andrew Marr Show that the Blair government failed to prepare properly for the consequences of Saddam Hussein’s removal. He said: “The trouble with Iraq is we were kind of preparing for the wrong sort of aftermath. We made lots of preparations for humanitarian disaster, for the lack of water, of all that kind of thing, and what we hadn’t in my view, thought through, was the long-term nature of this.”

Mr Powell admitted: “We probably hadn’t thought through the magnitude of what we were taking on in Iraq, this is something that will take many decades to sort itself out.

“We were pushing [the Americans] to be prepared; we were pushing our own side to be prepared but I don’t think any of us really thought through this much bigger question of what we were dealing with.”

Four inquiries, but few answers

*July 2003

Foreign Affairs Select Committee

The first inquiry into intelligence used by the security services and claims that the Government knew it had been exaggerated. It grilled the weapons scientist David Kelly. It cleared Tony Blair’s aide Alastair Campbell, right, of the charge of “sexing up” the dossier on weapons of mass destruction.

*September 2003

Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee

It investigated the intelligence that went into the 2002 dossier that made the case for war, and exonerated Mr Campbell of the charge of sexing up the document, but concluded that the dossier was “unbalanced”, and failed to emphasise that Saddam Hussein was no threat to UK territory.

*January 2004

The Hutton inquiry

Lord Hutton was asked “urgently to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly”. During hearings over two months he ranged widely into the controversial 45-minute claim aired by the BBC and the way the September 2002 dossier that made the case for war was compiled. The judge cleared the Government of sexing up the dossier and was scathing about editorial practices at the BBC.

*July 2004

The Butler inquiry

The five-member committee headed by the former cabinet secretary Lord Butler of Brockwell was instructed in February 2004 to examine the intelligence on WMD used to justify the invasion. It accused MI6 of relying on third-hand reports and failing to check its sources thoroughly. It also criticised Downing Street’s informal “sofa-style” of government. Tony Blair said any mistakes were made in “good faith” and nobody had lied.

Andrew Grice and Nigel Morris

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Calls for Admiral to “blow whistle” on Iran strike

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Calls are growing on Admiral William Fallon and other senior military officers to make a public stand against the Bush administration’s alleged plans to attack Iran. Admiral Fallon’s resignation last week from his position as head of the US Central Command is seen as a blow for those seeking a diplomatic resolution to the current standoff with Iran. His resignation has drawn demands that he “come clean” as to his reasons for stepping down and expose the true extent of the Bush administration’s plans for military intervention.

Today the Westminster Committee on Iran claimed that Mr Fallon and other key military and political insiders had a “moral duty” to make public their private reservations and to make a stand against the push for attacks on Iran. This call comes in the wake of the British Commons foreign affairs committee report which, this month, warned that “military strikes against Iran are unlikely to succeed and could provoke a violent backlash across the region”. It is known that many senior military figures in both America and Britain, including some of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have serious reservations about US plans for military intervention against Iran. Mr Fallon reportedly made his opposition to a strike known to the White House early on in his tenure and is believed to have resigned due to pressure from within the Bush administration.

An open letter sent today to senior military and political officials states:
“It is no longer conscionable for these people to remain silent. Tendering a resignation may be an honorable thing to do on a personal level, but cannot absolve individuals from their personal responsibilities to blow the whistle on an action that they know to be misguided and illegitimate. An engineer who knows the design for a passenger aircraft is fatally flawed has a duty to make public his concerns. If he chooses to remain silent the resultant deaths will be on his conscience.

The five years since the invasion of Iraq have seen politicians and military officials queuing up to distance themselves from the strategy to attack Baghdad. Many claim that they had privately disagreed with the invasion all along. It is imperative that political and military experts who oppose attacks on Iran speak up now rather than coming out of the shadows only after another disastrous military adventure in the Middle East.

Writing in the Washington Times on 15th March the Chair of the Committee, said:

“As head of Central Command, Admiral Fallon controlled all ground, air, and naval military access to the region and could have made it very difficult for the Bush administration to carry out such a strike. His removal greatly increases the chances of pre-emptive military intervention against Iran. This issue is of such importance that it transcends allegiance to political party or administration. It is essential that parliamentarians, political analysts and military officials make clear their opposition to military intervention against Iran. If they fail to do so they will not be forgiven by their electorates nor by history.”

Notes:

1) The Westminster Committee on Iran is not a campaigning organisation per se nor is it an official parliamentary body or All Party Parliamentary Group. Instead it aims to fill the space between these two types of bodies in order to increase dialogue, understanding and trust between parliamentarians in London, Tehran and the rest of the world.

2) On 25th January 2008, Anders B. Johnsson, General Secretary of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Geneva wrote a letter stating that “…the objectives of the Westminster Committee on Iran coincide with those of the IPU, which promotes dialogue to foster understanding and avoid conflict.”

3) The Commons foreign affairs committee is appointed by the House of Commons and made up to reflect the membership of the House as a whole. Its March report states:

“We remain of the view that such a military strike would be unlikely to succeed and could provoke an extremely violent backlash across the region…We recommend that the Government urges Washington to consider offering a credible security guarantee to Iran if the Iranian government in turn will offer an equally credible and verifiable guarantee that it will not enter into a nuclear weapons programme and improves its co-operation with the international community in other areas”.

The members of the Commons Committee were:
Mike Gapes (Chairman) MP, Rt Hon Sir Menzies Campbell QC MP, Mr Fabian Hamilton MP, Rt Hon David Heathcoat-Amory MP, Mr John Horam MP, Mr Eric Illsley MP, Mr Paul Keetch MP, Andrew Mackinlay MP, Mr Malcolm Moss MP, Sandra Osborne MP, Mr Greg Pope MP, Mr Ken Purchase MP, Rt Hon Sir John Stanley MP, Ms Gisela Stuart MP .

4) Washington Times – 15/3/08 http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080315/EDITORIAL/172100791/&template=nextpage

5) Visit the Westminster Committee on Iran’s discussion forum on http://westminstercommitteeiran.ning.com/

Westminster Committee on Iran

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Chavez: Bush, genocidal terrorist

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has criticized US President George W. Bush for his latest remarks and called him a genocidal terrorist.

Chavez made the remarks on Sunday after President Bush accused him of supporting ‘terrorists’ in neighboring Colombia and fueling an anti-American campaign last week.

“The president of the United States himself has come out and attacked us and attacked me personally, calling me a demagogue. Well, I am calling him a terrorist and genocidal,” AFP quoted Chavez as saying.

“And now Bush says I have Venezuelans here going hungry,” he added, insisting Bush should take a look at the economic conditions in the United States.

“Venezuelan people today are better fed than ever,” Chavez said. “The people taking hits from their own government are in the United States, which has an economic crisis. ”

Last week, the US president said that Venezuela ‘has squandered its oil wealth to promote its hostile anti-American vision, and it has left its own citizens to face food shortages while it threatens its neighbors’.

AGB/RE

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