Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

They reveal the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. They also indicate that police claims that the technology will be used for maritime surveillance fall well short of their intended use – which could span a range of police activity – and that officers have talked about selling the surveillance data to private companies. A prototype drone equipped with high-powered cameras and sensors is set to take to the skies for test flights later this year.

The Civil Aviation Authority, which regulates UK airspace, has been told by BAE and Kent police that civilian UAVs would “greatly extend” the government’s surveillance capacity and “revolutionise policing”. The CAA is currently reluctant to license UAVs in normal airspace because of the risk of collisions with other aircraft, but adequate “sense and avoid” systems for drones are only a few years away.

Five other police forces have signed up to the scheme, which is considered a pilot preceding the countrywide adoption of the technology for “surveillance, monitoring and evidence gathering”. The partnership’s stated mission is to introduce drones “into the routine work of the police, border authorities and other government agencies” across the UK.

Concerned about the slow pace of progress of licensing issues, Kent police’s assistant chief constable, Allyn Thomas, wrote to the CAA last March arguing that military drones would be useful “in the policing of major events, whether they be protests or the Olympics”. He said interest in their use in the UK had “developed after the terrorist attack in Mumbai”.

Stressing that he was not seeking to interfere with the regulatory process, Thomas pointed out that there was “rather more urgency in the work since Mumbai and we have a clear deadline of the 2012 Olympics”.

BAE drones are programmed to take off and land on their own, stay airborne for up to 15 hours and reach heights of 20,000ft, making them invisible from the ground.

Far more sophisticated than the remote-controlled rotor-blade robots that hover 50-metres above the ground – which police already use – BAE UAVs are programmed to undertake specific operations. They can, for example, deviate from a routine flightpath after encountering suspicious activity on the ground, or undertake numerous reconnaissance tasks simultaneously.

The surveillance data is fed back to control rooms via monitoring equipment such as high-definition cameras, radar devices and infrared sensors.

Previously, Kent police has said the drone scheme was intended for use over the English Channel to monitor shipping and detect immigrants crossing from France. However, the documents suggest the maritime focus was, at least in part, a public relations strategy designed to minimise civil liberty concerns.

“There is potential for these maritime uses to be projected as a ‘good news’ story to the public rather than more ‘big brother’,” a minute from the one of the earliest meetings, in July 2007, states.

Behind closed doors, the scope for UAVs has expanded significantly. Working with various policing organisations as well as the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Maritime and Fisheries Agency, HM Revenue and Customs and the UK Border Agency, BAE and Kent police have drawn up wider lists of potential uses.

One document lists “detecting theft from cash machines, preventing theft of tractors and monitoring antisocial driving” as future tasks for police drones, while another states the aircraft could be used for road and railway monitoring, search and rescue, event security and covert urban surveillance.

Under a section entitled “Other routine tasks (Local Councils) – surveillance”, another document states the drones could be used to combat “fly-posting, fly-tipping, abandoned vehicles, abnormal loads, waste management”.

Senior officers have conceded there will be “large capital costs” involved in buying the drones, but argue this will be shared by various government agencies. They also say unmanned aircraft are no more intrusive than CCTV cameras and far cheaper to run than helicopters.

Partnership officials have said the UAVs could raise revenue from private companies. At one strategy meeting it was proposed the aircraft could undertake commercial work during spare time to offset some of the running costs.

There are two models of BAE drone under consideration, neither of which has been licensed to fly in non-segregated airspace by the CAA. The Herti (High Endurance Rapid Technology Insertion) is a five-metre long aircraft that the Ministry of Defence deployed in Afghanistan for tests in 2007 and 2009.

CAA officials are sceptical that any Herti-type drone manufacturer can develop the technology to make them airworthy for the UK before 2015 at the earliest. However the South Coast Partnership has set its sights on another BAE prototype drone, the GA22 airship, developed by Lindstrand Technologies which would be subject to different regulations. BAE and Kent police believe the 22-metre long airship could be certified for civilian use by 2012.

Military drones have been used extensively by the US to assist reconnaissance and airstrikes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

- From Prophecy News Watch

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared on Thursday that Palestinians would not accept any alternative to Jerusalem as the capital of a future state, despite other proposals.

Abbas told Russian television that Jerusalem should not be divided and that there should be free passage for people of various faiths. The Palestinian leader added it must be made clear what belongs to the Palestinians and what belongs to Israel.

Abbas said that he could only recognize Israel as a Jewish state in the framework of a conclusive peace agreement that leads to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Abbas also said that he could not agree to resume the stalled peace negotiations with Israel as long as construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem continue. The peace process would collapse after the first meeting of such negotiations, said Abbas.

“If Israel says in the meeting that it will not accept the 1967 borders and that it is not prepared to discuss Jerusalem and the refugee situation, what is there to talk about?” Abbas said in the interview.

“If I enter negotiations with them and the building in East Jerusalem continues, Israel will be saying that Jerusalem is theirs. So why would I agree to negotiate while building in East Jerusalem continues?”

Israel has already turned down two initiatives formulated by the Palestinians, Egypt and Jordan to re-launch talks, Abbas said. Those proposals would have Israel agree to freeze all settlement building for at least a short period and recognize international resolutions. Also, the negotiations would be renewed from the point where they left off during the Ehud Olmert administration.

Abbas said that U.S. had asked Israel to make gestures to the Palestinians, including transferring additional territories in the West Bank to Palestinian control, halting Israeli military incursions, releasing prisoners, dismantling checkpoints and allowing building materials to enter the Gaza Strip.

According to Abbas, Israel said it would consider these gestures but had not yet responded.

Fayyad sees no agreement yet to resume Israel talks

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said on Thursday there was no agreement yet to resume talks with Israel, and Palestinians would have no faith in a process which failed to halt Israeli settlements.

A Palestinian official said this week President Mahmoud Abbas was studying a U.S. proposal for talks at a level below full-scale negotiations between leaders, which have been frozen for 13 months.

“We heard about low-level, mid-level, high-level (talks),” Fayyad told Reuters. “I don’t think there is anything yet that has been crystallised in terms of going forward.”

U.S. Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell has been trying to bring about a resumption of negotiations but Abbas has insisted first on a full halt to Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

He has rejected a 10-month, partial Israeli freeze, announced in November, as insufficient.

“I don’t know when the process will be resumed.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

Israel’s intelligence community has determined that Hamas was developing a capability to fire rocket salvos.

The sources said Hamas, with increased help from Iran and Hizbullah, was seeking to enhance the accuracy of Palestinian unguided missiles and rockets as well as connect batteries to a command and control system, Middle East Newsline reported. They said Hamas has accumulated more than 5,000 missiles and rockets in the aftermath of the 2009 war with Israel.

In 2009, Hamas tested its first rocket with a range of 60 kilometers, the sources said. They said Hamas has acquired at least 50 Iranian-origin Fajr-3 rockets, modified to contain a range of up to 80 kilometers, sufficient to strike Tel Aviv as well as Israel’s nuclear facility in Dimona.

“Hamas wants to develop a capability where it could use its missiles and rockets to stop an Israeli ground advance,” the source said. “Firing one or two rockets is insufficient. Instead, you have to fire 10 to 20 rockets toward a specific area.”

Israeli military sources said the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip was developing launchers that could fire a range of rockets and missiles in succession into Israel. They said the development included the assembly of vehicles with the capacity to fire up to 20 missiles at a time.

“Some of the techniques were similar to those the Americans have seen in Iraq,” a military source said.

The sources said Hamas was testing vehicles that could contain up to 12 launch tubes each. They said the launch vehicles could form a cluster and fire at least 20 122 mm Katyusha-class rockets within 30 seconds.

“The military assessment is that another war with Hamas is likely in 2010 as Iran rebuilds the Hamas army,” the source said. “All of the efforts by Hamas concentrate on how to stop or at least slow down an Israeli invasion while striking strategic facilities.”

Hamas has also acquired Russian-origin anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. The sources cited the SA-7 and SA-14 air-to-air missiles as well as the AT-3 and AT-5 anti-tank weapons.

The Israeli assessment also asserted that Hamas has developed a command and control network that could maintain contact with field units, particularly missile and rocket batteries. The assessment said many of the batteries would be stored in a maze of tunnels throughout the Gaza Strip.

“We see the Gaza Strip as the greatest potential source of conflict in the short term,” the source said.

- From Prophecy News

The U.S. Army is reportedly building up stockpiles of missiles, armored vehicles, artillery shells and other equipment in Israel that the Israelis will be allowed to use in an emergency.

The increase in the U.S. arsenal in the Jewish state now under way, reported by the Washington-based Defense News weekly, will reinforce support for Israel by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama in the confrontation with Iran over its contentious nuclear program.

That commitment was evidenced by a two-week joint air-defense exercise, Juniper Cobra 10, by U.S. and Israeli missile forces in October-November 2009, the largest exercise ever held by the two allies.

Some 1,500 U.S. personnel, along with 17 warships from the 6th Fleet, participated in countering simulated attacks by ballistic, medium-range and short-range missiles and rockets on Israel.

These efforts are also seen as an attempt by the Obama administration to reassure Israel that the Americans will support them in a confrontation with Iran — though not necessarily with combat forces — and to encourage the Jewish state not to launch unilateral air and missile strikes at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In 2008 the Pentagon also installed a strategic long-range X-band radar system at Nevatim air base in the Negev Desert south of Tel Aviv. It can detect incoming missiles from hundreds of miles away.

At the time Juniper Cobra was being held, there were reports that the Americans would leave several Patriot PAC-3 air-defense systems behind once the maneuvers ended.

It is not clear whether they are included in the reported increase in U.S. stockpiles.

The expansion of these stockpiles emerged amid a heightening of tension with Iran, as a U.S.-led dialogue with Tehran appeared to flounder after four months of tortuous negotiations that have failed to produce any concrete agreement by Iran to curb its nuclear program.

The Israelis view a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat and have said they will launch unilateral military strikes against the Islamic Republic if it believes Tehran is close to acquiring nuclear weapons.

Israel’s leadership believes Iran is using the talks to buy time to push forward with its program and that 2010 will be the year of decision regarding military action.

This has led to reviews of Israel’s strategic position in the event of hostilities.

Any conflict that erupts will probably not be a swift exchange of airstrikes and missile salvoes, as many expect, but will probably drag on for weeks or months.

According Amos Harel, an analyst with the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, a key Israeli Defense Ministry researcher, Moshe Vered, has concluded that “the ideology of the Iranian regime will dictate a prolonged war.”

Harel wrote that Vered argues that the length of that war “will be measured in years, not in weeks or days” because of the Shiite perception “by which one must fight and sacrifice for the sake of justice and to correct wrongs to Islam and to Muslims.”

“This outlook sees Israel’s existence as a wrong that must be corrected for the sake of world redemption. …

“Iran’s willingness to sacrifice many victims for a long period of time in a conflict with Israel will dictate a prolonged war between the two states that will be difficult to end.”

If that is the case, U.S. military stockpiles in Israel may be increased further.

Israeli forces ran critically short of ordnance and military equipment in the October 1973 war when the Jewish state was attacked by Egypt and Syria and was nearly overwhelmed.

Only a major U.S. airlift ordered by President Richard Nixon saved the day.

In the 34-day 2006 war with Hezbollah, Israeli stocks of air force bombs and artillery ammunition were seriously depleted, almost to what the army deemed a critical level.

According to Defense News, the current buildup “is the final phase of a process that began over a year ago to determine the type and amount of U.S. weapons and ammunition to be stored in Israel.”

That, it added, was “part of an overarching American effort to stockpile weapons in areas in which its army may need to operate, while allowing American allies to make use of the ordnance in emergencies.”

The United States began stockpiling $100 million in military equipment in Israel in 1990.

- From Prophecy News Watch

Tensions have escalated along the Israeli-Lebanese border and Syria has begun calling up troops from its Fourth Reserve, sources told the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat.

The newspaper, printed on four continents, reports that the Israeli military has been carrying out drills on Israel’s northern frontier, as the second anniversary of the death of senior Hizbullah commander Imad Mughniyeh approaches. Mughniyeh was killed when a car bomb exploded in Damascus on February 13, 2008.

“Well-informed Lebanese sources” told the newspaper that Hizbullah is on a state of alert in the face of IDF “military maneuvers.” The sources added that Hizbullah is concerned Israel may launch a surprise attack on its bases and posts. “Israel has accustomed us to aggression and we are used to being vigilant and on the lookout all the time. That is what we are doing,” a source said.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, in Paris, said that “France does not expect that there will be an Israeli military offensive” at present. However, he expressed concern that “some Iranian leaders” might try to cause escalation in southern Lebanon.

‘Heading for Battle’

“Without a doubt, we are heading for another round of battle with Hizbullah in the north,” Cabinet Minister Yossi Peled said Saturday. Peled, who was the head of Israel’s Northern Command, said at an event in Be’er Sheva that “no one knows” when a conflict will occur, “but it’s clear that it will happen.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

Hezbollah has dispersed its long-range-rocket sites deep into northern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, a move that analysts say threatens to broaden any future conflict between the Islamist movement and Israel into a war between the two countries.

More than 10,000 U.N. troops now patrol traditional Hezbollah territory in southern Lebanon along the Israeli border, and several thousand Lebanese armed forces personnel also have moved into the area. A cross-border raid by Hezbollah guerrillas in summer 2006 triggered a month-long war that prompted the United Nations to deploy its force as part of a cease-fire.

The United Nations is confident that the dense presence of its troops in the comparatively small area is helping lower the risk of conflict and minimizing Hezbollah’s ability to move weapons across southern Lebanon, but analysts in Lebanon and Israel say the U.N. mission is almost beside the point.

Hezbollah’s redeployment and rearmament indicate that its next clash with Israel is unlikely to focus on the border, instead moving farther into Lebanon and challenging both the military and the government. The situation is important for U.S. efforts in the region, whether aimed at curbing the influence of Hezbollah’s patrons in Iran or at persuading Syria to moderate its stance toward Israel and its neighbors.

Hezbollah “learned their lesson” in 2006, when vital intelligence enabled the Israel Defense Forces to destroy the group’s long-range launch sites in the first days of the conflict, said reserve Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash, a former head of IDF intelligence. In effect, he said, “the ‘border’ is now the Litani River,” with Hezbollah’s rocket sites possibly extending north of Beirut.

In a December briefing, Brig. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the IDF head of operations, said some Hezbollah rockets now have a range of more than 150 miles — making Tel Aviv reachable from as far away as Beirut. The Islamist group has talked openly of its efforts to rebuild, and Israel estimates that Hezbollah has about 40,000 projectiles, most of them shorter-range rockets and mortar shells.

The group “has been fortifying lots of different areas,” said Judith Palmer Harik, a Hezbollah scholar in Beirut. With U.N. and Lebanese forces “packed along the border,” she said, “we are looking at a much more expanded battle in all senses of the word.”

Just a matter of time?

The border has been relatively quiet since the 2006 war, a fact that officials with the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon attribute at least partly to the 400 or so patrols they send out each day to search for weapons stores and prevent border violations.

Armored U.N. vehicles sit at the entrance to southern Lebanon, alongside Lebanese army and intelligence checkpoints; blue-flagged U.N. troops occupy mountaintop posts that Hezbollah used as firing sites in 2006.

“We are covering every square inch,” said Maj. S.K. Misra, a spokesman for the battalion of India’s 3/11 Gurkha Rifles corps that patrols southeastern Lebanon. “It’s impossible for anything to move.”

At the same time, debate is raging in political and military circles between those who argue that the damage to each side in 2006 has created a sort of respectful deterrence between Israel and Hezbollah and those who say it is only a matter of time before violence erupts again.

Hezbollah lost hundreds of fighters in the conflict and was put on the defensive in Lebanon, where some questioned whether the group’s vow to continue “resistance” against Israel was worth letting an unregulated paramilitary organization effectively make decisions about war and peace.

With Iran backing and supplying Hezbollah and the United States backing and supplying Israel, “the battlefield is Lebanon,” said Marwan Hamadeh, a Lebanese member of parliament and supporter of a government coalition that is trying to curb Hezbollah’s arms and limit Syrian and Iranian influence in the country. “This is where the Iranian missiles sit, and this is where the Israeli air force can reach.”

Israel, meanwhile, lost more than 100 troops and uncharacteristically large numbers of tanks, helicopters and other equipment — prompting it to rewrite its war doctrine and adjust its perception of Hezbollah’s militia. Military analysts now see Hezbollah not as primarily a guerrilla force but as an organization that practices “hybrid war,” mixing classic guerrilla tactics with the strategy, equipment and capability of a standing army.

In a 2008 report for the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, analysts Stephen D. Biddle and Jeffrey A. Friedman concluded that Hezbollah had performed more effectively in 2006 than any of the Arab armies from Egypt, Syria or Jordan that had fought conventional wars with Israel over the years, and better in some ways than the Iraqi army in its two wars with the United States.

A wider struggle

In Beirut, politicians and analysts agree that the group has only grown stronger since 2006. As they hear Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hasan Nasrallah, speak of a conflict that will “change the face of the region,” many assume that the IDF will not allow the organization to rearm, recruit and train much longer before striking.

In Israel, Hezbollah is seen as part of a wider struggle for regional influence between Iran and U.S.-allied moderate Arab states, given the group’s ties to Iran and Syria and arms supplies assumed to run through both countries.

There is no reason the current calm cannot continue, said retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser who is now a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

But if a conflict does break out, “Israel will not contain that war against Hezbollah,” Eiland said. “We cannot.”

Given Hezbollah’s capabilities, he said, “the only way to deter the other side and prevent the next round — or if it happens, to win — is to have a military confrontation with the state of Lebanon.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

Ominous developments in America have been a long time coming, in part precipitated by “we the people” — a citizenry that has been asleep at the wheel for too long. And while there have been wake-up calls, we have failed to heed the warnings.

Just consider the state of our nation:

We’re encased in what some are calling an electronic concentration camp. The government continues to amass data files on more and more Americans. Everywhere we go, we are watched: at the banks, at the grocery store, at the mall, crossing the street. This loss of privacy is symptomatic of the growing surveillance being carried out on average Americans. Such surveillance gradually poisons the soul of a nation, transforming us from one in which we’re presumed innocent until proven guilty to one in which everyone is a suspect and presumed guilty. Thus, the question that must be asked: Can freedom in the United States flourish in an age when the physical movements, individual purchases, conversations and meetings of every citizen are under constant surveillance by private companies and government agencies?

We are metamorphosing into a police state. Governmental tentacles now invade virtually every facet of our lives, with agents of the government listening in on our telephone calls and reading our emails. Technology, which has developed at a rapid pace, offers those in power more invasive, awesome tools than ever before. Fusion centers — data collecting agencies spread throughout the country, aided by the National Security Agency — constantly monitor our communications, everything from our internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected — the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police — a relationship which will make a transition to martial law that much easier. We may very well be one terrorist attack away from seeing armed forces on our streets — and the American people may not put up much resistance. According to a recent study, a greater percentage of Americans are now willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in order to feel safer in the wake of the failed bomber’s attack on Christmas Day.

We are plagued by a faltering economy and a monstrous financial deficit that threatens to bankrupt us. Our national debt is more than $12 trillion (which translates to more than $110,000 per taxpayer), and is expected to nearly double to $20 trillion by 2015. The unemployment rate is over 10% and growing, with more than 15 million Americans out of work and many more forced to subsist on low-paying or part-time jobs. The number of U.S. households on the verge of losing their homes soared by nearly 15% in the first half of last year alone. The number of children living in poverty is on the rise (18% in 2007). As history illustrates, authoritarian regimes assume more and more power in troubled financial times.

The White House and our representatives in Congress bear little resemblance to those they have been elected to represent. Many of our politicians live like kings. Chauffeured around in limousines, flying in private jets and eating gourmet meals, all paid for by the American taxpayer, they are far removed from those they represent. What’s more, they continue to spend money we don’t have on pork-laden stimulus packages while running up a huge deficit and leaving the American taxpayers to foot the bill. And while our representatives may engage in a show of partisan bickering, the Washington elite — that is, the President and Congress — moves forward with whatever it wants, paying little heed to the will of the people.

We are embroiled in global wars against enemies that seem to attack from nowhere. Our armed forces are pushed to their limit, spread around the globe and under constant fire. The amount of money spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is nearing $1 trillion and is estimated to total somewhere in the vicinity of $3 trillion before it’s all over. That does not take into account the ravaged countries that we occupy, the thousands of innocent civilians killed (including women and children), or the thousands of American soldiers who have been killed or irreparably injured or who are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Nor does it take into account the families of the 1.8 million Americans who have served or are currently serving tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

America’s place in the world is also undergoing a drastic shift, with China slated to emerge as the top economy over the next decade. Given the extent to which we are financially beholden to China, their influence over how our government carries out its affairs, as well as how it deals with its citizens, cannot be discounted. As of July 2009, China owned $800.5 billion of our debt — that’s 45% of our total debt — making them the largest foreign holder of U.S. foreign debt. Little wonder, then, that the Obama administration has kowtowed to China, hesitant to overtly challenge them on critical issues such as human rights. The most recent example of this can be seen in the Obama administration’s initial reluctance to confront the Chinese government over its reported cyberattacks on Google and other American technology companies.

As national borders dissolve in the face of spreading globalization, the likelihood increases that our Constitution, which is the supreme law of America, will be subverted in favor of international laws. What that means is that our Constitution will come increasingly under attack.

The corporate media, increasingly acting as a mouthpiece for governmental propaganda, no longer serves a primary function as watchdogs, guarding against encroachments of our rights. Instead, much of the mainstream media has given itself over to mindless, celebrity-driven news, which bodes ill for our country. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about tabloid news, entertainment news or legitimate news shows, there’s very little difference between them anymore. Unfortunately, most Americans have bought into the notion that whatever the media happens to report is important and relevant. In the process, Americans have largely lost the ability to ask questions and think analytically. Indeed, most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their rights or how their government even works. For example, a national poll found that less than one percent of adults could name the five freedoms protected in the First Amendment.

Finally, I have never seen a country more spiritually beaten down than the United States. We have lost our moral compass. A growing number of our young people now see no meaning or purpose in life. And we no longer have a sense of right and wrong or a way to hold the government accountable. We have forgotten that the essential premise of the American governmental scheme, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, is that if the government will not be accountable to the people, then it must certainly be accountable to the “Creator.”

But what if the government is not accountable to the people or the Creator?

As Thomas Jefferson writes in the Declaration, it is then the right of “the People to alter or abolish it” and form a new government.

- From Prophecy News Watch

The United States has renewed pressure on Israel to refrain from any operation that could spark another war in the Middle East.

Government sources said the administration of President Barack Obama has renewed appeals by senior officials for Israel to refrain from massive retaliation to missile and rocket launches from either the Gaza Strip or Lebanon.
The sources said the White House warned Israel that renewed military tension in the Middle East could harm U.S. plans to withdraw from Iraq and expand the NATO stabilization campaign in Afghanistan.

“This message was relayed to Israel in no uncertain terms,” a government source said.

In January 2010, National Security Adviser James Jones reviewed regional threats with Israel and reiterated the administration’s warning not to launch any major military operation in the Gaza Strip. The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under military pressure to intensify air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip amid daily Palestinian rocket attacks.

During his visit, Jones sought to gauge Israel’s intentions toward the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip and Hizbullah in Lebanon. The sources said the U.S. security adviser also urged Israel to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in an effort to renew peace talks.

The Obama administration has also been closely monitoring tensions along the Israeli-Lebanese border. The sources said the White House demanded that Israel assure Beirut that a current exercise along the northern border of the Jewish state was not directed against Lebanon.

At the same time, the White House was preparing to accelerate efforts toward Middle East peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The sources said Obama has approved a plan in which the United States would issue security guarantees to Israel and any new Palestinian state.

“These things depend on the details and whether they are possible,” National Security Council spokesman Michael Hammer told the London-based A-Sharq Al Awsat daily.

The sources said Israeli leaders, particularly Defense Minister Ehud Barak, urged Jones to approve requests for weapons for Israel. Israel has privately complained of the administration’s refusal to approve a range of requests for new military platforms and upgrades over the last year.

The White House has also relayed warnings to Israel to halt preparations for an attack on Iran and its nuclear program. The sources said Jones and other senior Obama aides have been concerned that Israel’s military preparations would harm U.S. efforts to reconcile with the Teheran regime.

“As the administration sees it, U.S. arms exports to Israel have become dependent on whether this upsets Iran and the Arab world,” the source said. “The fear in Washington and Europe is that Israel will do something unilaterally against Iran.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

When al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off a planned chemical attack on New York’s subway system in 2003, he offered a chilling explanation: The plot to unleash poison gas on New Yorkers was being dropped for “something better,” Zawahiri said in a message intercepted by U.S. eavesdroppers.

The meaning of Zawahiri’s cryptic threat remains unclear more than six years later, but a new report warns that al-Qaeda has not abandoned its goal of attacking the United States with a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon.

The report, by a former senior CIA official who led the agency’s hunt for weapons of mass destruction, portrays al-Qaeda’s leaders as determined and patient, willing to wait for years to acquire the kind of weapons that could inflict widespread casualties.

The former official, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, draws on his knowledge of classified case files to argue that al-Qaeda has been far more sophisticated in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction than is commonly believed, pursuing parallel paths to acquiring weapons and forging alliances with groups that can offer resources and expertise.

“If Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants had been interested in . . . small-scale attacks, there is little doubt they could have done so now,” Mowatt-Larssen writes in a report released Monday by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Deadly strains of anthrax

The report comes as a panel on weapons of mass destruction appointed by Congress prepares to release a new assessment of the federal government’s preparedness for such an attack. The review by the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism is particularly critical of the Obama administration’s actions so far in hardening the country’s defenses against bioterrorism, according to two former government officials who have seen drafts of the report.

The commission’s initial report in December 2008 warned that a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction was likely by 2013.

Mowatt-Larssen, a 23-year CIA veteran, led the agency’s internal task force on al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and later was named director of intelligence and counterintelligence for the Energy Department. His report warns that bin Laden’s threat to attack the West with weapons of mass destruction is not “empty rhetoric” but a top strategic goal for an organization that seeks the economic ruin of the United States and its allies to hasten the overthrow of pro-Western governments in the Islamic world.

He cites patterns in al-Qaeda’s 15-year pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that reflect a deliberateness and sophistication in assembling the needed expertise and equipment. He describes how Zawahiri hired two scientists — a Pakistani microbiologist sympathetic to al-Qaeda and a Malaysian army captain trained in the United States — to work separately on efforts to build a biological weapons lab and acquire deadly strains of anthrax bacteria. Al-Qaeda achieved both goals before September 2001 but apparently had not successfully weaponized the anthrax spores when the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan forced the scientists to flee, Mowatt-Larssen said.

“This was far from run-of-the-mill terrorism,” he said in an interview. “The program was highly compartmentalized, at the highest level of the organization. It was methodical, and it was professional.”

‘Not just trying to scare people’

Mowatt-Larssen said he has seen no evidence linking al-Qaeda’s program with the anthrax attacks on U.S. politicians and news outlets in 2001. Zawahiri’s plan was aimed at mass casualties and “not just trying to scare people with a few letters,” he said.

Evidence from al-Qaeda documents and interrogations suggests that terrorists leaders had settled on anthrax as the weapon of choice and believed that the tools for a major biological attack were within their grasp, the former CIA official said. Al-Qaeda remained interested in nuclear weapons as well but understood that the odds of success were much longer.

“They realized they needed a lucky break,” Mowatt-Larssen said. “That meant buying or stealing fissile material or acquiring a stolen bomb.”

Bush administration officials feared that bin Laden was close to obtaining nuclear weapons in 2003 after U.S. spies picked up a cryptic message by a Saudi affiliate of al-Qaeda referring to plans to obtain three stolen Russian nuclear devices. The intercepts prompted the U.S. and Saudi governments to go on alert and later led to an aggressive Saudi crackdown that resulted in the arrest or killing of dozens of suspected al-Qaeda associates.

After that, terrorists’ chatter about a possible nuclear acquisition halted abruptly, but U.S. officials were never certain whether the plot was dismantled or simply pushed deeper underground.

“The crackdown was so successful,” Mowatt-Larssen said, “that intelligence about the program basically dried up.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Political Secrets of the Middle East: Intimidation Works (If You Really Mean It)

By Barry Rubin

Intimidation works. That might seem obvious, and it certainly seems to be understood by some people regarding domestic American politics, but it is very much neglected when thinking about foreign policy.

Here’s an obscure little story that caught my attention. There’s a Muslim imam in the town of Paris, near Drancy, named Hassan Chalghoumi. He was leading a service with around 300 people in the mosque when about one-third of them interrupted him, screamed he was an infidel traitor, and threatened to kill him. He thought he would not escape alive.

What was Chalghoumi’s sin? He has spoken against Islamic extremism, the very ideology the demonstrators espouse, and condemned antisemitism. After he requested Muslims to respect the memory of Jews killed in the Holocaust, his home was vandalized.

Will Chalghoumi give in and shut up? I don’t know. But the point is that dozens of others will never get started in the first place. There are always a few people who will not be intimidated even by death threats. Yet they will be few.

Perhaps if huge numbers of French citizens took to the streets in huge marches to extol Chalghoumi–who after all is precisely the moderate, tolerant Muslim they profess to applaud—this would not only encourage him but also inspire others to step forward.

If huge numbers of Muslims in France and around the world took to the streets in huge marches to extol Chalghoumi, thus showing they are the moderates they claim to be, then that, too, would inspire others to step forward.

And yet while for decades, Western intellectuals, artists, journalists boasted of their courage in defending the right to free speech, how quickly, faced with a real, albeit extraordinarily minimal and remote, threat did they crumble.

But it gets even better (or actually, worse). They can now boast of their enlightened tolerance for being cowardly and put those who disagree with them, who are willing to risk intimidation, on trial. And of course if you want a job in publishing, journalism, academia, Hollywood, or various strongholds of the current dominant ideology, toe the line or forget about a job.

Let’s list the three main categories of intimidation.

First and most obviously there is the physical: the threat or act of violence. While thousands of Westerners have been killed by random Islamist terrorism, probably no more than a half-dozen individuals have been murdered in attacks from the same sources targeting them because of their use of free speech. Yet this has been sufficient to silence the main institutions of Western society that are supposed to function as truth-tellers, fearless critics of everything. .

Probably even more people have been intimidated by verbal intimidation, which alone has several varieties.

Second, there is ridicule. One of the most effective weapons in intimidating people in Western elite society is to make fun of them and the most successful tool of all—the Weapon of Mass Destruction in this context—is to portray them as unfashionable. Rather than being part of the elite, they are among the uneducated, uncultured hicks, those bigoted people clinging to guns and religion. So if you want to be part of the elite, holding the “right” views is like a membership card.

A great gimmick here is to take some proposition that is easily demonstrable to be wrong and make it sound extremely silly. For example, regarding the Middle East:

“Wow, these people really believe that a nuclear Iran would be a threat; that we are not on the verge of Israel-Palestinian peace; that Israel is a great country; that Islamism is a form of totalitarian ideology; that Syria is wedded to its alliance with Iran; that Islamist terrorists actually have some connection to Islam; that the United States has played—despite errors—a noble role in the world. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? Hahaha! What a bunch of uneducated, uncultured hicks.”

Labeling: Beyond the unfashionable, the “wrong” views have to be presented as fitting into categories which most observers—not only the dedicated supporters of the dominant view but also independent, undecided bystanders—will consider to be wrong and even evil.

We now have a multiplicity of such labels: racist, imperialist, reactionary, conservative, Republican, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and so on. Indeed, contemporary political debate often seems like a parade of insults. But if you can label an idea as falling into a forbidden category you can scare off lots of people from accepting or even considering it. Those intimidated fall into two categories: those who believe that the idea is evil and those who may be sympathetic but fear being tarred with a sin in their brain.

Misrepresenting: The systematic misquoting and distortion of ideas or actions to make them seem evil. To pick one example, Israel was attacked by thousands of rockets from a terrorist group which openly called for genocide against its people. After the other side—let’s call it Hamas—tore up a ceasefire and attacked, Israel defended itself while using serious efforts to limit civilian casualties, though Hamas used civilians as human shields.

The mission: To make Israel look like an aggressive war criminal by distorting what happened. Mission accomplished. And that’s only one of dozens of such missions achieved on a wide variety of issues during the last decade or so.

Remember when we used to say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me?” During the era of Political Correctness, that kind of sticks and stones rule the West culturally and intellectually.

Third and last there are legal methods, suing those who say something you don’t want or trying them as purveyors of hate speech. These are few in number but panic vast institutions, especially in publishing.

In the Middle East, the traditional instruments of intimidation as part of statecraft are very much alive. In the West, however, the goal of foreign policy nowadays seems to try to prove that you have no intention of intimidating anyone. Intimidation seems reserved largely for internal social and political matters. When it comes to foreign policy, such methods are relics of the bad old days for which apologies are now given.

A society cannot win at home if its free institutions succumb to intimidation. A country cannot win abroad if it isn’t willing to use intimidation against the enemies of freedom.

Forget Che! Where are the Hassan Chalghoumi tee-shirts?

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books. To see or subscribe to his blog, Rubin Reports.