Bombshell: Bin Laden Worked for US Until 9/11

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It turns out that Reagan's little adventure with bin Ladin in the Middle East continued in Central Asia after the Russians quit Afghanistan. Apparently directed by the CIA, funded by at least in part, heroin sales world wide, this operation continued right up until 9/11. In 1998 after al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa that killed a dozen Americans and hundreds of Africans, Bill Clinton sent cruise missles into Afghanistan to attach al Qaeda training camps. That appears now to be a warning to reign in bin Ladin's ambitions beyond Central Asia.

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript). In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained 'intimate relations' with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, "all the way until that day of September 11."

These 'intimate relations' included using Bin Laden for 'operations' in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These 'operations' involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner "as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict," that is, fighting 'enemies' via proxies.

As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from 'actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia') as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.

Control of Central Asia

The goals of the American 'statesmen' directing these activities included control of Central Asia's vast energy supplies and new markets for military products.

The Americans had a problem, though. They needed to keep their fingerprints off these operations to avoid a) popular revolt in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and b) serious repercussions from China and Russia. They found an ingenious solution: Use their puppet-state Turkey as a proxy, and appeal to both pan-Turkic and pan-Islam sensibilities.

Turkey, a NATO ally, has a lot more credibility in the region than the US and, with the history of the Ottoman Empire, could appeal to pan-Turkic dreams of a wider sphere of influence. The majority of the Central Asian population shares the same heritage, language and religion as the Turks.

In turn, the Turks used the Taliban and al Qaeda, appealing to their dreams of a pan-Islamic caliphate (Presumably. Or maybe the Turks/US just paid very well.)

Accordingto Sibel:

This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.

Uighurs

Sibel was recently asked to write about the recent situation with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, but she declined, apart from saying that "our fingerprint is all over it."

Of course, Sibel isn't the first or only person to recognize any of this. Eric Margolis, one of the best reporters in the West on matters of Central Asia, stated that the Uighurs in the training camps in Afghanistan up to 2001:

"were being trained by Bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang, and this was not only with the knowledge, but with the support of the CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China."

And also that:

"Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, these were commando groups, guerrilla groups, being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia."

In a separate interview, Margolis said:

"That illustrates Henry Kissinger's bon mot that the only thing more dangerous than being America's enemy is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the US, these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, the most-Western province.

The CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China, or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama Bin Laden's collaboration. The Americans were up to their ears with this."

more via GlobalResearch.ca

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Bush Admin. worse than our Nightmares

Impeach Bush and Cheney, impeach them now!

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Back in the bad old days of Bush's corrupt gang, we on the left were pilloried for suggesting that the administration was manipulating terrorism-related news in order to win the 2004 elections. But when Tom Ridge says it . . .In fact, I argued in summer, 2004, that when Ridge did raise the terrorism alert, it had the unfortunate effect of outing an al-Qaeda double agent who had been turned by the Pakistani government and was helping set a trap for al-Qaeda in the UK. In turn, that caused the British government to have to move against the people it had under surveillance prematurely, harming the case.

[..]The horrible thing is that Wolf Blitzer on CNN assembled David Frum and Frances Townsend, former members of the Bush administration, to sit around on his afternoon news and analysis program on Thursday afternoon and more or less either call Ridge a liar or pooh-pooh the significance of what he is saying. There wasn't a single centrist or left of center voice to show any outrage. I mean, I know that Time Warner is not made up of people who necessarily care about the little person or social justice or anything. But a little bit of shame?

It isn't enough that the corporate media lied to us for Bush for 8 years, they are continuing to do it. Give money to Amy Goodman.

via Informed Comment: Bush Admin. worse than our Nightmares.

Where does the hatred come from?

It would appear that Homeland Security is promoting Islamo-phobia in it's recommended training for US Law Enforcement! Where is Obama? Is he just pretending to be Bush lite?

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This fall, U.S. law enforcement personnel will have their final chance to take advantage of a rare opportunity. Participants will travel to Israel to receive “homeland security training,” but the counterterrorism briefings and martial arts practice sessions are only one part of the package. The program also includes visits to Christian religious sites in the Holy Land — an aspect likely to be especially attractive to Christian Zionists — along with other sites such as the Knesset and the Israeli “security fence”.

The Israel program is run by Security Solutions International (SSI), a group that has attracted controversy due to its ties to Islamophobic propaganda groups — as well as its apparent view that indoctrinating first responders with alarmist information about Islam is an essential part of counterterrorism training.

Most striking of all, the SSI Israel trip is funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. DHS’s funding of this venture is a concrete illustration of the ways that Islamophobic fringe groups have exploited the “global war on terror” for their own purposes.[..]So what does this training involve? In addition to martial arts demonstrations including “how to take down an armed suicide bomber”, meetings with Israeli security personnel, and a three-hour presentation on “suicide terror,” the itinerary also includes more tourist-oriented activities. Tourist excursions are both political visits to the Knesset, the West Bank “security barrier,” and southern Israeli towns that have been the target of rocket attacks from Gaza, and religious trips to Jerusalem’s Old City and to “some of Christianity’s holiest sites”.While this DHS-funded trip might already seem a bit odd — especially the emphasis on Christian religious sites during what is ostensibly a counterterrorism training program — things take a turn towards the bizarre in the section of the website advertising SSI’s two day presentations on “The Islamic Jihadist Threat”.

via LobeLog.com

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The Launching of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM).

Globalresearch.ca

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates signed a memorandum on June 23 that announced the launch of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM). A scheme by securocrats in the works for several years, the order specifies that the new office will be a "subordinate unified command" under U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM).
According to the memorandum, CYBERCOM "will reach initial operating capability (IOC) not later than October 2009 and full operating capability (FOC) not later than October 2010."
Gates has recommended that this new Pentagon domain be led by Lt. General Keith Alexander, the current Director of the ultra-spooky National Security Agency (NSA). Under the proposal, Alexander would receive a fourth star and the new agency would be based at Ft. Meade, Maryland, NSA's headquarters.
Gates' memorandum specifies that CYBERCOM "must be capable of synchronizing warfighting effects across the global security environment as well as providing support to civil authorities and international partners."
Ostensibly launched to protect military networks against malicious cyberattacks, the command's offensive nature is underlined by its role as STRATCOM's operational cyber wing. In addition to a defensive brief to "harden" the "dot-mil" domain, the Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism's adversaries.
One of ten Unified Combatant Commands, STRATCOM is the successor organization to Strategic Air Command (SAC). Charged with space operations (military satellites), information warfare, missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as global strike and strategic deterrence (America's first-strike nuclear arsenal), it should be apparent that designating CYBERCOM a STRATCOM branch all but guarantees an aggressive posture.
As Antifascist Calling reported in May, the Pentagon's geek squad, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently building a National Cyber Range (NCR), a test bed for developing, testing and fielding cyber weapons.
In conjunction with "private-sector partners," the agency averred in a January 2009 press release that NCR promises to deliver "'leap ahead' concepts and capabilities."
The Armed Forces Press Service reported June 24, that Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told journalists that CYBERCOM is "not some sort of new and necessarily different authorities that have been granted." Obfuscating the offensive role envisaged for the command, Morrell told reporters: "This is about trying to figure out how we, within this department, within the United States military, can better coordinate the day-to-day defense, protection and operation of the department's computer networks."
Others within the defense bureaucracy are far more enthusiastic, and forthright, when it comes to recommending that cyber armaments be fielded as offensive weapons of war. Indeed, Armed Forces Journal featured a lengthy analysis advocating precisely that.
The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, "Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace," Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)
We have heard these Orwellian arguments before; one can take it for granted that when militarists pontificate on the need for a "deterrent," the bombers are preparing for take off.
As with other Pentagon schemes, the technological quick fix may prove as deadly as the alleged threat, particularly where botnets are concerned.
A botnet is a collection of widely dispersed computers controlled from one or more central nodes. Often built by cyber criminals to implant malicious programs or code, steal passwords and other encrypted data from targeted systems, botnets are the bane of the Internet.
In these endeavors, sophisticated hackers are aided and abetted by the miserable security code or lax practices of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) more concerned with facilitating commerce--and the bottom line--than in providing adequate protection against criminals.
Indeed in March, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the Federal Trade Commission "to shut down Google's so-called cloud computing services, including Gmail and Google Docs, if the web giant can't ensure the safety of user data stored by these online apps," The Register reported.
EPIC's petition in part, was sparked "by a Google snafu that saw the company inadvertently share certain Google Docs files with users unauthorized to view them. Google estimates that the breach hit about 0.05 per cent of the documents stored by the service," according to The Register.
Infected computers are referred to as "zombies" that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by "master" machines. Unwary users are often "spoofed" by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into "cooperating" with the installation of malicious code.
While criminals employ botnets to generate spam or commit fraudulent transactions, draining a savings account or running-up credit card debt through multiple purchases for example, botnets also have the capacity to launch devastating distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against inadequately defended computers or indeed, entire networks.
As many commentators have warned, the best defense is to write better security programs and exercise a modicum of common sense when using the Internet. The Pentagon however, has something else in mind.
Col. Williamson proposes to transform the Air Force's high-speed intrusion-detection systems into an offensive botnet by enabling "the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find." In other words, creating thousands of zombie machines.
"After that," Col. Williamson avers, "the Air Force could add botnet code to all its desktop computers attached to the Nonsecret Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). Once the system reaches a level of maturity, it can add other .mil computers, then .gov machines."
Underscoring the risks posed by out-of-control military hackers to hold America's, or any other nations' communications infrastructure hostage to a militarized state, Williamson suggests that in order to "generate the right amount of power for offense, all the available computers must be under the control of a single commander, even if he provides the capability for multiple theaters. While it cannot be segmented like an orange for individual theater commanders, it can certainly be placed under their tactical control." (emphasis added)
In other words, should an "individual theatre commander" desire to suddenly darken a city or wreck havoc on a nation's electrical infrastructure at the behest of his political masters then by all means, go right ahead! A proposal such as this, should it ever be implemented, would in essence, be a first-strike weapon.
Other plans for "defending" Pentagon computer networks are even more extreme.
STRATCOM commander Gen. Kevin Chilton has even suggested that "the White House retains the option to respond with physical force--potentially even using nuclear weapons--if a foreign entity conducts a disabling cyber attack against U.S. computer networks," according to a disturbing report published by Global Security Newswire. During a Defense Writers Group breakfast in May, Chilton told journalists:
"I think you don't take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America. Why would we constrain ourselves on how we respond?" ...
Should the breaches evolve into more serious computer attacks against the United States, Chilton said he could not rule out the possibility of a military salvo against a nation like China, even though Beijing has nuclear arms. He rejected the idea that such a conflict would necessarily risk going nuclear.
"I don't think that's true," Chilton said.
At the same time, the general insisted that all strike options, including nuclear, would remain available to the commander in chief in defending the nation from cyber strikes.
"I think that's been our policy on any attack on the United States of America," Chilton said. "And I don't see any reason to treat cyber any differently. I mean, why would we tie the president's hands? I can't. It's up to the president to decide." (Elaine M. Grossman, "U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyber Attack," Global Security Newswire, May 12, 2009)
While Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The New York Times that CYBERCOM's launch "is not about the militarization of cyber," how else can it be characterized?
Indeed, Whitman went on to say that CYBERCOM "is focused only on military networks to better consolidate and streamline Department of Defense capabilities into a single command."
How then, should one interpret moves by the Pentagon to "consolidate and streamline" DoD "capabilities" under the purview of STRATCOM? Obviously, an entity defined as a "Unified Combatant Command" as clearly stated by General Chilton's avowal to "leave all options on the table," would combine cyber "defense" with STRATCOM's global strike mission.
Antifascist Calling revealed last year, citing a U.S. Air Force planning document, that preparations are already underway to transform cyberspace into an offensive military domain. Indeed, Air Force theorists averred:
Cyberspace favors offensive operations. These operations will deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, or deceive an adversary. Cyberspace offensive operations ensure friendly freedom of action in cyberspace while denying that same freedom to our adversaries. We will enhance our capabilities to conduct electronic systems attack, electromagnetic systems interdiction and attack, network attack, and infrastructure attack operations. Targets include the adversary's terrestrial, airborne, and space networks, electronic attack and network attack systems, and the adversary itself. As an adversary becomes more dependent on cyberspace, cyberspace offensive operations have the potential to produce greater effects. (Air Force Cyber Command, "Strategic Vision," no date, emphasis added)
Echoing Air Force strategy, SecDef Gates memo clearly states, since "cyberspace and its associated technologies ... are vital to our nation's security," the United States will "secure freedom of action in cyberspace" by standing-up a unified command "that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations."
Simply put, the Pentagon intends to build an infrastructure fully-capable of committing high-tech war crimes.
Under NSA's Operational Control
Meanwhile in the heimat, CYBERCOM will effectively be under the day-to-day control of the National Security Agency. This is hardly good news when it comes to civil liberties.
Leaving aside considerations of bureaucratic trench warfare with the Department of Homeland Security, charged with defending the state's .gov and .com domains, the unprecedented power of CYBERCOM to conduct offensive military and surveillance operations within the United States itself is underlined by the preeminent role NSA will assume.
Authorized by the criminal Bush regime to carry out massive electronic surveillance of Americans' private communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, various driftnet spying operations continue under Obama's purported "change" administration. As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, the only "change" that's come to the White House has been the color of the drapes hanging in the Oval Office.
The New York Times revealed June 17, that the "National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged." According to the Times, "The agency's monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said."
I take issue with the Times' characterization that such a breach of constitutional norms merely represent "logistical difficulties." As with a Times' report in April which alleged that NSA's driftnet spying under Obama was simply a problem of "overcollection," far from being mere technical issues, first and foremost, these violations represent political decisions made at the highest levels of the national security state itself.
Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency's ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation. (James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, "E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress," The New York Times, June 17, 2009)
Last year, congressional Democrats, including Senator now President, Obama, handed the NSA virtually unchecked power to spy on the private communications of Americans. In addition to granting retroactive immunity to telecom grifters who profited from their conspiracy to illegally spy on citizens for the state, the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FIA) gave NSA the legal cover to intercept Americans' communications "so long as it was done only as the incidental byproduct of investigating individuals 'reasonably believed' to be overseas," as the Times delicately put it.
CYBERCOM's brief, and its deployment inside NSA with full access to the agency's powerful computing assets, and with a mission to conduct global Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) at the behest of their STRATCOM masters, mean that despite bromides about "privacy concerns," the Pentagon will most assuredly be interested in developing an attack matrix that can just as easily be turned inward. After all as General Chilton asserts, "it's up to the president to decide."
"One thing that is pretty clear," Wired reports, "NSA will be leading this emerging command." Indeed, NSA "may also come to dominate the wider government cyber defense effort, as well." As The Wall Street Journal revealed, the Defense Department's 2010 budget "envisions training and graduating more than 200 cyber-security officers annually." In contradistinction to DoD, "the Department of Homeland Security has 100 employees dedicated to civilian cyber security, with plans to reach 260 next year," the Journal reports.
In other words, right from the get-go NSA will be assuming operational control of CYBERCOM. This is driven home by the fact that the Pentagon is already receiving the vast majority of appropriations for state cybersecurity initiatives and have thousands of cyberwarriors across all branches of the military, including outsourced private contractors who labor for DoD, ready, willing and able to staff the new command.
As Antifascist Calling revealed in April, with billions of dollars already spent on a score of top secret cyber initiatives, including those hidden within Pentagon Special Access or black programs, the issue of oversight is already a moot point.
Defense analyst William M. Arkin in his essential book, Code Names, described some three dozen cyberwar programs and/or exercises, currently being pursued by the Pentagon. Since the book's 2005 publication, many others undoubtedly have come on-line.
While NSA Director Alexander has explicitly stated that he does "not want [NSA] to run cybersecurity for the United States government," CYBERCOM's stand-up, and Alexander's near certain appointment as commander, all but guarantees that the agency will be a ubiquitous and silent gatekeeper answerable to no one.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.

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Rise of Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Recession

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Democracy Now!

Guest: Mark Potok, Director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is facing calls for her ouster from a number of House Republicans in the wake of a department memo that warned of right-wing political extremism in the United States.
The report, which was released last week, warns that right-wing extremist groups are gaining new recruits by exploiting fears about the economy and the election of the nation's first black president. The report predicts a worsening economy will to lead more people joining militias and skinhead groups and carrying out individual acts modeled after Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
A handful of Republicans in the House are calling for Napolitano to step down in the wake of the report. House Minority Leader John Boehner said the report includes, quote, "about two-thirds of Americans who might go to church, who may have served in the military, who may be involved in community activities...I just don't understand how our government can look at the American people and say, 'You're all potential terrorist threats.'"
Idaho has long been the center of white supremacist groups in the United States.
Mark Potok is the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. They recently released a report that finds the number of violent hate groups in the US has skyrocketed since 2000. He joins us via Democracy Now! stream from Alabama.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
MARK POTOK: Well, thank you so much for having me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Mark, your reaction to the controversy now and the calls for Janet Napolitano's ouster?
MARK POTOK: I think it is completely a tempest in a teacup. You know, the things that Boehner and others have said are very hard to square with actually reading the report. You know, basically, the report has been accused of saying that all conservatives and all veterans are this huge suspect class, people who may, you know, take up arms and start blowing up federal buildings.
The reality is, is when you read the report, it doesn't say anything remotely like that. You know, the reference to veterans is--what it really says is that white supremacists are interested in attempting to recruit returning veterans because of their skills. It does not say, in any sense, that these people are prone to joining the groups, that we should look at all veterans with a wary eye. And it certainly doesn't make any suggestion like that with regard to conservatives.
You know, really, I think that this is an attempt to create a great big political storm over an essentially innocuous report. You know, there are a few, what I would characterize as, errors in the report. For instance, it describes the rise of militias in the 1990s as being essentially the result of a recession. Well, there really wasn't a recession in the '90s, and that really is not why the militias rose. But essentially, the conclusions, which are--which amount to the idea that we're at a time when these groups are poised to continue growing, I think is obviously correct.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, your group has been charting the rise of hate groups in recent years. The issue of whether the election of Barack Obama has caused a new spur, a new growth in those groups?
MARK POTOK: Well, of course, that only begins to play about July of last year, when Obama actually wins the Democratic nomination. And initially, the reaction of the white supremacist movement is utter horror. Eventually, the leaders, such as they are, begin to say, "Well, maybe if Obama wins, it will be good for us." David Duke famously wrote last year that if Obama won the election, it would be a, quote, "visual aid to white Americans." In other words, people would wake up, realize their country had been robbed from them, and rush into these groups.
You know, what we know for a fact is that immediately after the election, on November 5th and 6th, in fact, we saw the servers of at least two major white supremacist groups crash, because they did get a major surge in interest. You know, whether that really translates into a significant growth of the groups or not, I think remains to be seen. But I think it's quite likely.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Mark, I want to thank you very much, Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, for being with us.

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Cyberspies Hack Into U.S. Fighter Project: Report

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Wired.comComputer spies have repeatedly breached the Pentagon's costliest weapons program, the $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
The newspaper quoted current and former government officials familiar with the matter as saying the intruders were able to copy and siphon data related to design and electronics systems, making it potentially easier to defend against the plane.
The spies could not access the most sensitive material, which is kept on computers that are not connected to the Internet, the paper added.
Citing people briefed on the matter, it said the intruders entered through vulnerabilities in the networks of two or three of the contractors involved in building the fighter jet.
Lockheed Martin Corp is the lead contractor. Northrop Grumman Corp and BAE Systems PLC also have major roles in the project. Lockheed Martin and BAE declined comment and Northrop referred questions to Lockheed, the paper said.
The Journal said Pentagon officials declined to comment directly on the matter, but the paper said the Air Force had begun an investigation.
The identity of the attackers and the amount of damage to the project could not be established, the paper said.
The Journal quoted former U.S. officials as saying the attacks seemed to have originated in China, although it noted it was difficult to determine the origin because of the ease of hiding identities online.
The Chinese Embassy said China "opposes and forbids all forms of cyber crimes," the Journal said.
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Slain American Nazi Millionaire Had Dirty Bomb Ingredients, Was 'Very Upset' About Obama

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Look what never made it to the mass media outside of Bangor Maine.
AlterNet

James G. Cummings of Belfast, Maine, a trust fund millionaire who had ties to American Nazi groups, was murdered by his wife two months ago. But, as the FBI found out when investigating James' murder, a history of domestic abuse, nazi-sympathizing, and money was just the tip of the iceberg.
From the Bangor Daily News:

According to an FBI field intelligence report from the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, an investigation into the case revealed that radioactive materials were removed from Cummings' home after his shooting death on Dec. 9.
The report posted on the WikiLeaks Web site states that "On 9 December 2008, radiological dispersal device components and literature, and radioactive materials, were discovered at the Maine residence of an identified deceased [person] James Cummings."
The section referring to Cummings can be read here.
It says that four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were found in the home.
Also found was literature on how to build "dirty bombs" and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60, radioactive materials. The FBI report also stated there was evidence linking James Cummings to white supremacist groups. This would seem to confirm observations by local tradesmen who worked at the Cummings home that he was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler and had a collection of Nazi memorabilia around the house, including a prominently displayed flag with swastika. Cummings claimed to have pieces of Hitler's personal silverware and place settings, painter Mike Robbins said a few days after the shooting.
An application for membership in the National Socialist Movement filled out by Cummings also was found in the residence, according to the report. Cummings' wife, Amber B. Cummings, 31, told investigators that her husband spoke of "dirty bombs," according to the report, and mixed chemicals in her kitchen sink. She allegedly told police that Cummings subjected her to years of mental, physical and sexual abuse. She also said that Cummings was "very upset" when Barack Obama was elected president.

The Bangor Daily News has more on this story.
According to Raw Story, "Public safety officials were quick to claim there was no threat."
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/130959/

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Slain American Nazi Millionaire Had Dirty Bomb Ingredients, Was 'Very Upset' About Obama

Image via Wikipedia

Look what never made it to the mass media outside of Bangor Maine.
AlterNet

James G. Cummings of Belfast, Maine, a trust fund millionaire who had ties to American Nazi groups, was murdered by his wife two months ago. But, as the FBI found out when investigating James' murder, a history of domestic abuse, nazi-sympathizing, and money was just the tip of the iceberg.
From the Bangor Daily News:

According to an FBI field intelligence report from the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, an investigation into the case revealed that radioactive materials were removed from Cummings' home after his shooting death on Dec. 9.
The report posted on the WikiLeaks Web site states that "On 9 December 2008, radiological dispersal device components and literature, and radioactive materials, were discovered at the Maine residence of an identified deceased [person] James Cummings."
The section referring to Cummings can be read here.
It says that four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were found in the home.
Also found was literature on how to build "dirty bombs" and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60, radioactive materials. The FBI report also stated there was evidence linking James Cummings to white supremacist groups. This would seem to confirm observations by local tradesmen who worked at the Cummings home that he was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler and had a collection of Nazi memorabilia around the house, including a prominently displayed flag with swastika. Cummings claimed to have pieces of Hitler's personal silverware and place settings, painter Mike Robbins said a few days after the shooting.
An application for membership in the National Socialist Movement filled out by Cummings also was found in the residence, according to the report. Cummings' wife, Amber B. Cummings, 31, told investigators that her husband spoke of "dirty bombs," according to the report, and mixed chemicals in her kitchen sink. She allegedly told police that Cummings subjected her to years of mental, physical and sexual abuse. She also said that Cummings was "very upset" when Barack Obama was elected president.

The Bangor Daily News has more on this story.
According to Raw Story, "Public safety officials were quick to claim there was no threat."
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/130959/

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Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet

Image via Wikipedia

AlterNet

Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the US government and they'll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.
This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the US. The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory - the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel's top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.
Israel's spying on the US, however, is a matter of public record, and neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence. When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress concerning "Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage," Israel and its intelligence services often feature prominently as a threat second only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for example, that Israel maintains "an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States." A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that "the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret US policies or decisions relating to Israel." In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the US government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In 1954, the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone "planted by the Israelis," and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the US military attaché. In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: "Department must assume that all conversations [in] my office are known to the Israelis." The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of US missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a "standard operating procedure."
According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political secrets, also devote "a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence." These operations involved, among other machinations, "attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States." The penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using "deep cover enterprises," which the report described as "firms and organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective." At the time, the CIA singled out government-subsidized companies such as El Al airlines and Zim, the Israeli shipping firm, as deep cover enterprises. Other deep cover operations included the penetration of a US company that provided weapons-grade uranium to the Department of Defense during the 1960s; Israeli agents eventually spirited home an estimated 200 pounds of uranium as the bulwark in Israel's secret nuclear weapons program. Moles have burrowed on Israel's behalf throughout the US intelligence services. Perhaps most infamous was the case of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American employed as a civilian analyst with the US Navy who purloined an estimated 800,000 code-word protected documents from inside the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and numerous other US agencies. While Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, counterintelligence investigators at the FBI suspected he was linked to a mole far higher in the food chain, ensconced somewhere in the DIA, but this suspected Israeli operative, nicknamed "Mr. X," was never found. Following the embarrassment of the Pollard affair - and its devastating effects on US national security, as testified by then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who allegedly stated that Pollard "should have been shot") - the Israeli government vowed never again to pursue espionage against its ally and chief benefactor.
Fast-forward a quarter century, and the vow has proven empty. In 2004, the authoritative Jane's Intelligence Group noted that Israel's intelligence organizations "have been spying on the US and running clandestine operations since Israel was established." The former deputy director of counterintelligence at FBI, Harry B. Brandon, last year told Congressional Quarterly magazine that "the Israelis are interested in commercial as much as military secrets. They have a muscular technology sector themselves." According to CQ, "One effective espionage tool is forming joint partnerships with U.S. companies to supply software and other technology products to U.S. government agencies."
Best-selling author James Bamford now adds another twist in this history of infiltration in a book published last October, "The Shadow Factory," which forms the latest installment in his trilogy of investigations into the super-secret National Security Agency. Bamford is regarded among journalists and intelligence officers as the nation's expert on the workings of the NSA, whose inner sanctums he first exposed to the public in 1982. (So precise is his reporting that NSA officers once threw him a book party, despite the fact that he continually reveals their secrets.) The agency has come a long way in the half-century since its founding in 1952. Armed with digital technology and handed vast new funding and an almost limitless mandate in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bamford writes, the NSA has today "become the largest, most costly, and most technologically sophisticated spy organization the world has ever known." The NSA touches on every facet of US communications, its mega-computers secretly filtering "millions of phone calls and e-mails" every hour of operation. For those who have followed the revelations of the NSA's "warrantless wiretapping" program in the New York Times in 2005 and the Wall Street Journal last year, what Bamford unveils in "The Shadow Factory" is only confirmation of the worst fears: "There is now the capacity," he writes of the NSA's tentacular reach into the private lives of Americans, "to make tyranny total."
Much less has been reported about the high-tech Israeli wiretapping firms that service US telecommunications companies, primarily AT&T and Verizon, whose networks serve as the chief conduits for NSA surveillance. Even less is known about the links between those Israeli companies and the Israeli intelligence services. But what Bamford suggests in his book accords with the history of Israeli spying in the US: Through joint partnerships with US telecoms, Israel may be a shadow arm of surveillance among the tentacles of the NSA. In other words, when the NSA violates constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure to vacuum up the contents of your telephone conversations and e-mail traffic, the Israeli intelligence services may be gathering it up too - a kind of mirror tap that is effectively a two-government-in-one violation.
[section break]
On its face, the overseas outsourcing of high-tech services would seem de rigueur in a competitive globalized marketplace. Equipment and services from Israel's telecom sector are among the country's prime exports, courtesy of Israeli entrepreneurs who have helped pioneer wireless telephony, voicemail and voice recognition software, instant messaging, phone billing software, and, not least, "communications interception solutions." Israeli telecom interception hardware and software is appraised as some of the best in the world.
By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the US in a big way. The key to the kingdom was the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was Congress' solution for wiretapping in the digital age. Gone are the days when wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA mandated that telephonic surveillance operate through computers linked directly into the routers and hubs of telecom companies - a spyware apparatus matched in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems. CALEA effectively made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in telephonic life. Without CALEA, the NSA in its spectacular surveillance exploits could not have succeeded.
AT&T and Verizon, which together manage as much as 90 percent of the nation's communications traffic, contracted with Israeli firms in order to comply with CALEA. AT&T employed the services of Narus Inc., which was founded in Israel in 1997. It was Narus technology that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, a 22-year technician with the company, famously unveiled in a 2006 affidavit that described the operations in AT&T's secret tapping room at its San Francisco facilities. (Klein's affidavit formed the gravamen of a lawsuit against AT&T mounted by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, but the lawsuit died when Congress passed the telecom immunity bill last year.) According to Klein, the Narus supercomputer, the STA 6400, was "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets." The Narus system, which was maintained by Narus technicans, also provided a real-time mirror image of all data streaming through AT&T routers, an image to be rerouted into the computers of the NSA.
According to Jim Bamford, who cites knowledgeable sources, Verizon's eavesdropping program is run by a competing Israeli firm called Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, which was founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer in 1984. Incorporated in New York and Tel Aviv, Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli government: 50 percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. The Verint technology deployed throughout Verizon's network, known as STAR-GATE, boasts an array of Orwellian capabilities. "With STAR-GATE, service providers can access communications on virtually any type of network," according to the company's literature. "Designed to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting subscribers or disrupting service." As with the Narus system, the point is to be able to tap into communications unobtrusively, in real time, all the time. A Verint spinoff firm, PerSay, takes the tap to the next stage, deploying "advanced voice mining," which singles out "a target's voice within a large volume of intercepted calls, regardless of the conversation content or method of communication." Verint's interception systems have gone global since the late 1990s, and sales in 2006 reached $374 million (a doubling of its revenues over 2003). More than 5,000 organizations - mostly intelligence services and police units - in at least 100 countries today use Verint technology.
What troubles Bamford is that executives and directors at companies like Narus and Verint formerly worked at or maintain close connections with the Israeli intelligence services, including Mossad; the internal security agency Shin Bet; and the Israeli version of the NSA, Unit 8200, an arm of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps. Unit 8200, which Bamford describes as "hypersecret," is a key player in the eavesdropping industrial complex in Israel, its retired personnel dispersed throughout dozens of companies. According to Ha'aretz, the Israeli daily, "Many of the [eavesdropping] technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by [Unit 8200] veterans." A former commander of Unit 8200, cited by Bamford, states that Verint technology was "directly influenced by 8200 technology....[Verint parent company] Comverse's main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit's technology." The implications for US national security, writes Bamford, are "unnerving." "Virtually the entire American telecommunications system," he avers, "is bugged by [Israeli-formed] companies with possible ties to Israel's eavesdropping agency." Congress, he says, maintains no oversight of these companies' operations, and even their contracts with US telecoms - contracts pivotal to NSA surveillance - are considered trade secrets and go undisclosed in company statements.
US intelligence officers have not been quiet in their concerns about Verint (I reported on this matter in CounterPunch.org last September). "Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S. investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be 'hands on' with its equipment to maintain the system," says former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi. The "hands on" factor is what bothers Giraldi, specifically because of the possibility of a "trojan" embedded in Verint wiretap software. A trojan in information security hardware/software is a backdoor that can be accessed remotely by parties who normally would not have access to the secure system. Allegations of widespread trojan spying have rocked the Israeli business community in recent years. "Top Israeli blue chip companies," reported the AP in 2005, "are suspected of using illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals and enemies." Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny. "It is the largest cybercrime case in Israeli history," Boaz Guttmann, a veteran cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national police, told me. "Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of life of companies in Israel. It's a culture of spying."
In a wide-ranging four-part investigation into Israel-linked espionage that aired in December 2001, Carl Cameron, a correspondent at Fox News Channel, reported the distress among US intelligence officials warning about possible trojans cached in Verint technology. Sources told Cameron that "while various FBI inquiries into [Verint] have been conducted over the years," the inquiries had "been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks." Cameron also cited a 1999 internal FCC document indicating that "several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system." Much of this access was facilitated through "remote maintenance."
The Fox News report reverberated throughout US law enforcement, particularly at the Drug Enforcement Agency, which makes extensive use of wiretaps for narcotics interdiction. Security officers at DEA, an adjunct of the Justice Department, began examining the agency's own relationship with Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA had transformed its wiretap infrastructure with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a technology called "T2S2" - "translation and transcription support services" - with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the hardware and software. The company was also tasked with "support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options throughout the life of the contract," according to the DEA's "contracts and acquisitions" notice. In the wake of the Fox News investigation, however, the director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter, dated Dec. 18, 2001. Directly referencing Fox News, she worried that "Comverse remote maintenance" was "not addressed in the C&A [contracts and acquisitions] process....It remains unclear if Comverse personnel are security cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of clearances are on record....Bottom line we should have caught it." It is not known what resulted from DEA's review of the issue of remote maintenance and access by Comverse/Verint.
Bamford devotes a portion of his argument to the detailing of the operations of a third Israeli wiretap company, NICE Systems, which he describes as "a major eavesdropper in the U.S." that "keeps its government and commercial client list very secret." Formed in 1986 by seven veterans of Unit 8200, NICE software "captures voice, email, chat, screen activity, and essential call details," while offering "audio compression technology that performs continuous recordings of up to thousands of analog and digital telephone lines and radio channels." NICE Systems has on at least one occasion shown up on the radar of US counterintelligence. During 2000-2001, when agents at the FBI and the CIA began investigating allegations that Israeli nationals posing as "art students" were in fact conducting espionage on US soil, one of the Israeli "art students" was discovered to be an employee with NICE Systems. Among the targets of the art students were facilities and offices of the Drug Enforcement Agency nationwide. The same Israeli employee of NICE Systems, who was identified as a former operative in the Israeli intelligence services, was carrying a disk that contained a file labeled "DEA Groups." US counterintelligence officers concluded it was a highly suspicious nexus: An Israeli national and alleged spy was working for an Israeli wiretap company while carrying in his possession computer information regarding the Drug Enforcement Agency - at the same time this Israeli was conducting what the DEA described as "intelligence gathering" about DEA facilities.
[section break]
A former senior counterintelligence official in the Bush administration told me that as early as 1999, "CIA was very concerned about [Israeli wiretapping companies]" - Verint in particular. "I know that CIA has tried to monitor what the Israelis were doing - technically watch what they were doing on the networks in terms of remote access. Other countries were concerned as well," said the intelligence official. Jim Bamford, who notes that Verint "can automatically access the mega-terabytes of stored and real-time data secretly and remotely from anywhere," reports that Australian lawmakers in 2004 held hearings on this remote monitoring capability. "[Y]ou can access data from overseas," the lawmakers told a Verint representative during the hearings, "but [the legislature] seems restricted to access data within that system." The Australians found this astonishing. In 2000, the Canadian intelligence service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, conducted "a probe related to allegations that [Israeli] spies used rigged software to hack into Canada's top secret intelligence files," according to an article in the Toronto Star. Several sources in the US intelligence community told me the Canadians liaised with their American counterparts to try to understand the problem. According to the Bush administration official who spoke with me, "the Dutch also had come to the CIA very concerned about what the Israelis were doing with this." The Dutch intelligence service, under contract with Verint, "had discovered strange things were going on - there was activity on the network, the Israelis uploading and downloading stuff out of the switches, remotely, and apparently using it for their own wiretap purposes. The CIA was very embarrassed to say, 'We have the same problem.' But the CIA didn't have an answer for them. 'We hear you, we're surprised, and we understand your concern.'" Indeed, sources in the Dutch counterintelligence community in 2002 claimed there was "strong evidence that the Israeli secret service has uncontrolled access to confidential tapping data collected by the Dutch police and intelligence services," according to the Dutch broadcast radio station Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the respected Dutch technology and computing magazine, C'T, ran a follow-up to the EO story, headlined "Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher." The article states: "All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force [is] insecure and is leaking information to Israel."
"The key to this whole thing is that Australian meeting," Bamford told me in a recent interview. "They accused Verint of remote access and Verint said they won't do it again - which implies they were doing it in the past. It's a matter of a backdoor into the system, and those backdoors should not be allowed to exist. You can tell by the Australian example that it was certainly a concern of Australian lawmakers."
Congress doesn't seem to share the concern. "Part of the responsibility of Congress," says Bamford, "is not just to oversee the intelligence community but to look into the companies with which the intelligence community contracts. They're just very sloppy about this." According to the Bush administration intelligence official who spoke with me, "Frustratingly, I did not get the sense that our government was stepping up to this and grasping the bull by the horns." Another former high level US intelligence official told me, "The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is indisputable. How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what - these are the incendiary questions." There is also the fundamental fact that the wiretap technologies implemented by Verint, Narus and other Israeli companies are fully in place and no alternative is on the horizon. "There is a technical path dependence problem," says the Bush administration official. "I have been told nobody else makes software like this for the big digital switches, so that is part of the problem. Other issues," he adds, "compound the problem" - referring to the sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship.
And that, of course, is the elephant in the room. "Whether it's a Democratic or Republican administration, you don't bad-mouth Israel if you want to get ahead," says former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi. "Most of the people in the agency were very concerned about Israeli espionage and Israeli actions against U.S. interests. Everybody was aware of it. Everybody hated it. But they wouldn't get promoted if they spoke out. Israel has a privileged position and that's the way things are. It's crazy. And everybody knows it's crazy."
Christopher Ketcham writes for Vanity Fair, Harper's, GQ and many other magazines. He is working on a book about the history of Israeli espionage in the United States. He can be reached at cketcham99@mindspring.com.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/130891/

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Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet

Image via Wikipedia

AlterNet

Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the US government and they'll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.
This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the US. The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory - the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel's top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.
Israel's spying on the US, however, is a matter of public record, and neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence. When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress concerning "Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage," Israel and its intelligence services often feature prominently as a threat second only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for example, that Israel maintains "an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States." A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that "the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret US policies or decisions relating to Israel." In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the US government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In 1954, the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone "planted by the Israelis," and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the US military attaché. In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: "Department must assume that all conversations [in] my office are known to the Israelis." The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of US missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a "standard operating procedure."
According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political secrets, also devote "a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence." These operations involved, among other machinations, "attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States." The penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using "deep cover enterprises," which the report described as "firms and organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective." At the time, the CIA singled out government-subsidized companies such as El Al airlines and Zim, the Israeli shipping firm, as deep cover enterprises. Other deep cover operations included the penetration of a US company that provided weapons-grade uranium to the Department of Defense during the 1960s; Israeli agents eventually spirited home an estimated 200 pounds of uranium as the bulwark in Israel's secret nuclear weapons program. Moles have burrowed on Israel's behalf throughout the US intelligence services. Perhaps most infamous was the case of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American employed as a civilian analyst with the US Navy who purloined an estimated 800,000 code-word protected documents from inside the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and numerous other US agencies. While Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, counterintelligence investigators at the FBI suspected he was linked to a mole far higher in the food chain, ensconced somewhere in the DIA, but this suspected Israeli operative, nicknamed "Mr. X," was never found. Following the embarrassment of the Pollard affair - and its devastating effects on US national security, as testified by then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who allegedly stated that Pollard "should have been shot") - the Israeli government vowed never again to pursue espionage against its ally and chief benefactor.
Fast-forward a quarter century, and the vow has proven empty. In 2004, the authoritative Jane's Intelligence Group noted that Israel's intelligence organizations "have been spying on the US and running clandestine operations since Israel was established." The former deputy director of counterintelligence at FBI, Harry B. Brandon, last year told Congressional Quarterly magazine that "the Israelis are interested in commercial as much as military secrets. They have a muscular technology sector themselves." According to CQ, "One effective espionage tool is forming joint partnerships with U.S. companies to supply software and other technology products to U.S. government agencies."
Best-selling author James Bamford now adds another twist in this history of infiltration in a book published last October, "The Shadow Factory," which forms the latest installment in his trilogy of investigations into the super-secret National Security Agency. Bamford is regarded among journalists and intelligence officers as the nation's expert on the workings of the NSA, whose inner sanctums he first exposed to the public in 1982. (So precise is his reporting that NSA officers once threw him a book party, despite the fact that he continually reveals their secrets.) The agency has come a long way in the half-century since its founding in 1952. Armed with digital technology and handed vast new funding and an almost limitless mandate in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bamford writes, the NSA has today "become the largest, most costly, and most technologically sophisticated spy organization the world has ever known." The NSA touches on every facet of US communications, its mega-computers secretly filtering "millions of phone calls and e-mails" every hour of operation. For those who have followed the revelations of the NSA's "warrantless wiretapping" program in the New York Times in 2005 and the Wall Street Journal last year, what Bamford unveils in "The Shadow Factory" is only confirmation of the worst fears: "There is now the capacity," he writes of the NSA's tentacular reach into the private lives of Americans, "to make tyranny total."
Much less has been reported about the high-tech Israeli wiretapping firms that service US telecommunications companies, primarily AT&T and Verizon, whose networks serve as the chief conduits for NSA surveillance. Even less is known about the links between those Israeli companies and the Israeli intelligence services. But what Bamford suggests in his book accords with the history of Israeli spying in the US: Through joint partnerships with US telecoms, Israel may be a shadow arm of surveillance among the tentacles of the NSA. In other words, when the NSA violates constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure to vacuum up the contents of your telephone conversations and e-mail traffic, the Israeli intelligence services may be gathering it up too - a kind of mirror tap that is effectively a two-government-in-one violation.
[section break]
On its face, the overseas outsourcing of high-tech services would seem de rigueur in a competitive globalized marketplace. Equipment and services from Israel's telecom sector are among the country's prime exports, courtesy of Israeli entrepreneurs who have helped pioneer wireless telephony, voicemail and voice recognition software, instant messaging, phone billing software, and, not least, "communications interception solutions." Israeli telecom interception hardware and software is appraised as some of the best in the world.
By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the US in a big way. The key to the kingdom was the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was Congress' solution for wiretapping in the digital age. Gone are the days when wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA mandated that telephonic surveillance operate through computers linked directly into the routers and hubs of telecom companies - a spyware apparatus matched in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems. CALEA effectively made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in telephonic life. Without CALEA, the NSA in its spectacular surveillance exploits could not have succeeded.
AT&T and Verizon, which together manage as much as 90 percent of the nation's communications traffic, contracted with Israeli firms in order to comply with CALEA. AT&T employed the services of Narus Inc., which was founded in Israel in 1997. It was Narus technology that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, a 22-year technician with the company, famously unveiled in a 2006 affidavit that described the operations in AT&T's secret tapping room at its San Francisco facilities. (Klein's affidavit formed the gravamen of a lawsuit against AT&T mounted by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, but the lawsuit died when Congress passed the telecom immunity bill last year.) According to Klein, the Narus supercomputer, the STA 6400, was "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets." The Narus system, which was maintained by Narus technicans, also provided a real-time mirror image of all data streaming through AT&T routers, an image to be rerouted into the computers of the NSA.
According to Jim Bamford, who cites knowledgeable sources, Verizon's eavesdropping program is run by a competing Israeli firm called Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, which was founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer in 1984. Incorporated in New York and Tel Aviv, Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli government: 50 percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. The Verint technology deployed throughout Verizon's network, known as STAR-GATE, boasts an array of Orwellian capabilities. "With STAR-GATE, service providers can access communications on virtually any type of network," according to the company's literature. "Designed to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting subscribers or disrupting service." As with the Narus system, the point is to be able to tap into communications unobtrusively, in real time, all the time. A Verint spinoff firm, PerSay, takes the tap to the next stage, deploying "advanced voice mining," which singles out "a target's voice within a large volume of intercepted calls, regardless of the conversation content or method of communication." Verint's interception systems have gone global since the late 1990s, and sales in 2006 reached $374 million (a doubling of its revenues over 2003). More than 5,000 organizations - mostly intelligence services and police units - in at least 100 countries today use Verint technology.
What troubles Bamford is that executives and directors at companies like Narus and Verint formerly worked at or maintain close connections with the Israeli intelligence services, including Mossad; the internal security agency Shin Bet; and the Israeli version of the NSA, Unit 8200, an arm of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps. Unit 8200, which Bamford describes as "hypersecret," is a key player in the eavesdropping industrial complex in Israel, its retired personnel dispersed throughout dozens of companies. According to Ha'aretz, the Israeli daily, "Many of the [eavesdropping] technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by [Unit 8200] veterans." A former commander of Unit 8200, cited by Bamford, states that Verint technology was "directly influenced by 8200 technology....[Verint parent company] Comverse's main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit's technology." The implications for US national security, writes Bamford, are "unnerving." "Virtually the entire American telecommunications system," he avers, "is bugged by [Israeli-formed] companies with possible ties to Israel's eavesdropping agency." Congress, he says, maintains no oversight of these companies' operations, and even their contracts with US telecoms - contracts pivotal to NSA surveillance - are considered trade secrets and go undisclosed in company statements.
US intelligence officers have not been quiet in their concerns about Verint (I reported on this matter in CounterPunch.org last September). "Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S. investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be 'hands on' with its equipment to maintain the system," says former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi. The "hands on" factor is what bothers Giraldi, specifically because of the possibility of a "trojan" embedded in Verint wiretap software. A trojan in information security hardware/software is a backdoor that can be accessed remotely by parties who normally would not have access to the secure system. Allegations of widespread trojan spying have rocked the Israeli business community in recent years. "Top Israeli blue chip companies," reported the AP in 2005, "are suspected of using illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals and enemies." Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny. "It is the largest cybercrime case in Israeli history," Boaz Guttmann, a veteran cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national police, told me. "Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of life of companies in Israel. It's a culture of spying."
In a wide-ranging four-part investigation into Israel-linked espionage that aired in December 2001, Carl Cameron, a correspondent at Fox News Channel, reported the distress among US intelligence officials warning about possible trojans cached in Verint technology. Sources told Cameron that "while various FBI inquiries into [Verint] have been conducted over the years," the inquiries had "been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks." Cameron also cited a 1999 internal FCC document indicating that "several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system." Much of this access was facilitated through "remote maintenance."
The Fox News report reverberated throughout US law enforcement, particularly at the Drug Enforcement Agency, which makes extensive use of wiretaps for narcotics interdiction. Security officers at DEA, an adjunct of the Justice Department, began examining the agency's own relationship with Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA had transformed its wiretap infrastructure with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a technology called "T2S2" - "translation and transcription support services" - with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the hardware and software. The company was also tasked with "support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options throughout the life of the contract," according to the DEA's "contracts and acquisitions" notice. In the wake of the Fox News investigation, however, the director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter, dated Dec. 18, 2001. Directly referencing Fox News, she worried that "Comverse remote maintenance" was "not addressed in the C&A [contracts and acquisitions] process....It remains unclear if Comverse personnel are security cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of clearances are on record....Bottom line we should have caught it." It is not known what resulted from DEA's review of the issue of remote maintenance and access by Comverse/Verint.
Bamford devotes a portion of his argument to the detailing of the operations of a third Israeli wiretap company, NICE Systems, which he describes as "a major eavesdropper in the U.S." that "keeps its government and commercial client list very secret." Formed in 1986 by seven veterans of Unit 8200, NICE software "captures voice, email, chat, screen activity, and essential call details," while offering "audio compression technology that performs continuous recordings of up to thousands of analog and digital telephone lines and radio channels." NICE Systems has on at least one occasion shown up on the radar of US counterintelligence. During 2000-2001, when agents at the FBI and the CIA began investigating allegations that Israeli nationals posing as "art students" were in fact conducting espionage on US soil, one of the Israeli "art students" was discovered to be an employee with NICE Systems. Among the targets of the art students were facilities and offices of the Drug Enforcement Agency nationwide. The same Israeli employee of NICE Systems, who was identified as a former operative in the Israeli intelligence services, was carrying a disk that contained a file labeled "DEA Groups." US counterintelligence officers concluded it was a highly suspicious nexus: An Israeli national and alleged spy was working for an Israeli wiretap company while carrying in his possession computer information regarding the Drug Enforcement Agency - at the same time this Israeli was conducting what the DEA described as "intelligence gathering" about DEA facilities.
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A former senior counterintelligence official in the Bush administration told me that as early as 1999, "CIA was very concerned about [Israeli wiretapping companies]" - Verint in particular. "I know that CIA has tried to monitor what the Israelis were doing - technically watch what they were doing on the networks in terms of remote access. Other countries were concerned as well," said the intelligence official. Jim Bamford, who notes that Verint "can automatically access the mega-terabytes of stored and real-time data secretly and remotely from anywhere," reports that Australian lawmakers in 2004 held hearings on this remote monitoring capability. "[Y]ou can access data from overseas," the lawmakers told a Verint representative during the hearings, "but [the legislature] seems restricted to access data within that system." The Australians found this astonishing. In 2000, the Canadian intelligence service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, conducted "a probe related to allegations that [Israeli] spies used rigged software to hack into Canada's top secret intelligence files," according to an article in the Toronto Star. Several sources in the US intelligence community told me the Canadians liaised with their American counterparts to try to understand the problem. According to the Bush administration official who spoke with me, "the Dutch also had come to the CIA very concerned about what the Israelis were doing with this." The Dutch intelligence service, under contract with Verint, "had discovered strange things were going on - there was activity on the network, the Israelis uploading and downloading stuff out of the switches, remotely, and apparently using it for their own wiretap purposes. The CIA was very embarrassed to say, 'We have the same problem.' But the CIA didn't have an answer for them. 'We hear you, we're surprised, and we understand your concern.'" Indeed, sources in the Dutch counterintelligence community in 2002 claimed there was "strong evidence that the Israeli secret service has uncontrolled access to confidential tapping data collected by the Dutch police and intelligence services," according to the Dutch broadcast radio station Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the respected Dutch technology and computing magazine, C'T, ran a follow-up to the EO story, headlined "Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher." The article states: "All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force [is] insecure and is leaking information to Israel."
"The key to this whole thing is that Australian meeting," Bamford told me in a recent interview. "They accused Verint of remote access and Verint said they won't do it again - which implies they were doing it in the past. It's a matter of a backdoor into the system, and those backdoors should not be allowed to exist. You can tell by the Australian example that it was certainly a concern of Australian lawmakers."
Congress doesn't seem to share the concern. "Part of the responsibility of Congress," says Bamford, "is not just to oversee the intelligence community but to look into the companies with which the intelligence community contracts. They're just very sloppy about this." According to the Bush administration intelligence official who spoke with me, "Frustratingly, I did not get the sense that our government was stepping up to this and grasping the bull by the horns." Another former high level US intelligence official told me, "The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is indisputable. How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what - these are the incendiary questions." There is also the fundamental fact that the wiretap technologies implemented by Verint, Narus and other Israeli companies are fully in place and no alternative is on the horizon. "There is a technical path dependence problem," says the Bush administration official. "I have been told nobody else makes software like this for the big digital switches, so that is part of the problem. Other issues," he adds, "compound the problem" - referring to the sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship.
And that, of course, is the elephant in the room. "Whether it's a Democratic or Republican administration, you don't bad-mouth Israel if you want to get ahead," says former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi. "Most of the people in the agency were very concerned about Israeli espionage and Israeli actions against U.S. interests. Everybody was aware of it. Everybody hated it. But they wouldn't get promoted if they spoke out. Israel has a privileged position and that's the way things are. It's crazy. And everybody knows it's crazy."
Christopher Ketcham writes for Vanity Fair, Harper's, GQ and many other magazines. He is working on a book about the history of Israeli espionage in the United States. He can be reached at cketcham99@mindspring.com.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/130891/

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