Governor Christie is Desperate by his own Doing

Imagine that you invested in a 4 bedroom home. You raised your family and now the children are adults and have moved on. Three of those bedrooms are no longer occupied by a family member. So one room is an office, one room is a workout room one is a guest room. Well the government steps in and says, you don’t need those other bedrooms you bought and paid for so we are moving in 2 other families less fortunate and you need to provide them with medical benefits, transportation and food. What you say????

Enter New Jersey Governor Christie and his proposal to reform social security in this state. Imagine his proposal saying that anyone earning over $200,ooo per year and having paid into social security, does not really need their funds at age 65, so Governor Christie wants to offer it to others. Does this mean socialism? Why yes it does. But is he proposing this now? Simply said, he made both bad decisions and no decisions and is out of money. Then it is suggested you find out what is going on in your state.

Follow The Money

Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Weekend Contributor

 

Over the last few years we have seen many stories and articles that discuss the problems States and Municipalities are having in paying their public pension payments and how various politicians propose to fix those “problems”.  The politicians almost always seem to blame the pension problems on the overpaid government workers and their unions. The idea that Wall Street might have something to do with these government pension plans being underfunded is rarely discussed.  Until now.

A significant portion of the funds deposited in government employee pension plans is invested with Wall Street. According to one recent study, the public pension plans are paying at least $5.4 Billion dollars each year to Wall Street.

“Currently, about 9 percent — or $270 billion — of America’s $3 trillion public pension fund assets are invested in private equity firms. Assuming the industry standard 2 percent management fee, that quarter-trillion dollars generates roughly $5.4 billion in annual management fees for the private equity industry — and that’s not including additional “performance” fees paid on investment returns. But even the $5.4 billion number could be drastically understated, according to CEM.” Reader Supported News

$5.4 Billion dollars is a lot of money, but as usual, Wall Street may be getting an even bigger piece of the pie. “If CEM’s calculations are applied uniformly, it could mean taxpayers and retirees may actually be paying double that $5.4 billion number — or more than $10 billion a year. Public officials are overseeing this massive payout to Wall Street at the very moment many of those same officials are demanding big cuts to retirees’ promised pension benefits. By comparison, the total budget of the Environmental Protection Agency is just over $8 billion.” RSN

In order to fully understand the scope of the costs these pension plans are paying to Wall Street, it may help to see how these huge fees are paid on the state level.

“California’s report said $440 million. New Jersey’s said $600 million. In Pennsylvania, the tally is $700 million. Those figures are public worker pension fees being paid annually by taxpayers to Wall Street firms, and they have kicked off an intensifying debate over whether such expenses are necessary.” RSN

When you consider that the CEM study figures that public pension plans are paying from $5.4 Billion to more than $10 Billion a year in fees, it is no wonder that so many politicians want to privatize Social Security and bring other public pensions into the Wall Street fold.  Using just the standard 2% fee noted above, just how many billions would Wall Street rake in if Social Security was privatized? How many billions more would Wall Street collect if the entire public pension asset pool was also “invested” with Wall Street?

At the least, shouldn’t these States insist on a full disclosure of the secret fees that the CEM study alleged?  And if the study is correct, shouldn’t Wall Street refund the secret fees back to the pension plans?  In one example, the State of Pennsylvania is balking at its high fees and the Governor and the Legislature are trying to find a way to make the cost of their underfunded pension plans more manageable. Both sides of the aisle differ in their approaches to solve the problem.

In New Jersey, the evidence is mounting that the Governor steered public pension money to political allies and donors.

“This week, after an International Business Times investigative series found that Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s officials were not disclosing all state pension fees paid, New Jersey pension trustees announced a formal investigation of the fee payments. Some of those fees have flowed to firms whose executives made big donations to political groups affiliated with Christie. In just the five years since Christie took office, New Jersey fees paid to financial firms have more than quadrupled. At the same time as fees spiked, Christie has said the pension funds do not have enough money to pay promised benefits to retirees.” RSN

Do you think Gov. Christie will ask his cronies for New Jersey’s money back?

In various states, one side of the discussion wants to use bonds to make the payments more palatable and the other side is pushing to put new hires into a 401(k) system where the employees do their own investing.  Of course, neither plan will quickly solve the problem of underfunded pension plans when state and municipalities have reduced or ignored payments to the pension plan for years and in some cases like in Illinois and other states, for decades.

And if the 401(k) plan that is being promulgated for Pennsylvania and other states is incorporated, who do these employees invest their retirement money with?  Wall Street, of course.

I believe that a reasonable taxpayer would think that at the least, the politicians should be able to agree on reducing the cost of the Wall Street investment fees and demand an accounting of all undisclosed fees and if possible, a refund of those undisclosed fees.   With both Democratic and Republican administrations involved in allowing or funneling public pension funds to supporters and donors,  politics and cronyism may get in the way of a real and equitable fix.  What do you think?

Islam, Killing it’s Way Across the Middle East

The Obama administration is pretending to be outraged at what Islamic State, the Houthis and AQAP is doing in the Middle East…killing countless Christians in what appears to be weeks at a time.

WASHINGTON –  President Obama defended his administration’s approach to the terror threat at a White House summit Wednesday, standing by claims that groups like the Islamic State do not represent Islam — as well as assertions that job creation could help combat extremism.

Obama, addressing the Washington audience on the second day of the summit, said the international community needs to address “grievances” that terrorists exploit, including economic and political issues.

He stressed that poverty alone doesn’t cause terrorism, but “resentments fester” and extremism grows when millions of people are impoverished.

“We do have to address the grievances that terrorists exploit including economic grievances,” he said.

He also said no single religion was responsible for violence and terrorism, adding he wants to lift up the voice of tolerance in the United States and beyond.

*** Then we have the State Department:

Marie Harf, the State Department spokesperson, was on Hardball, with Chris Matthews. On Monday’s edition of “Hardball” here on MSNBC, Harf talked with host Chris Matthews about ISIS and explained that the United States can’t “kill our way out” of the problem.
“We’re killing a lot of them, and we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians. So are the Jordanians. They’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need, in the longer term – medium and longer term – to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups. […]

“You’re right, there is no easy solution in the long term to preventing and combatting violent extremism, but if we can help countries work at the root causes of this – what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business? Maybe we can try to chip away at this problem, while at the same time going after the threat, taking on ISIL in Iraq, in Syria, and helping our partners around the world.”

***These terror groups not only know history, but they are studied other religions and know it better than you, the reader. They are killing their way across the Middle East. So what is the White House and National Security Council strategy to stop the genocide of Christianity? The short answer, there is no strategy.

Fair warning, at the 25 minute mark, the video becomes gruesome. The early portion of the video demonstrates Islamic State’s mission, knowledge and quest to destroy all religions but that of Islam.

ISIS Beheads Ethiopian Christians in Libya


The Islamic State has a released a new video purportedly showing the mass execution and beheading of Ethiopian Christians in Libya. The 29-minute video was released on Sunday, April 19, by ISIS’ Al-Furqan media arm and claims to show Islamic State affiliates in the eastern Libya province known as Barka Province and the southern Fazzan Province.

The video begins with a long introduction of a rant against Christendom, but the gore begins at around 25 minutes, when a pistol brandishing jihadist claims that Christians must convert to Islam or pay a special tax in the Quran known as Jizya.

First a line of alleged Ethiopian Christians are lined up and shot in the back of the head. After that, the scene cuts to a beach where another group of alleged Ethiopian Christians are beheaded in much a similar way to the February beheadings of the Coptic Christians.

Watch it above. Please remember it is uncensored, so viewer discretion is advised.

Islamic State Structure, Documents Reveal

The Terror Strategist: Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State

By Christoph Reuter

Aloof. Polite. Cajoling. Extremely attentive. Restrained. Dishonest. Inscrutable. Malicious. The rebels from northern Syria, remembering encounters with him months later, recall completely different facets of the man. But they agree on one thing: “We never knew exactly who we were sitting across from.”

In fact, not even those who shot and killed him after a brief firefight in the town of Tal Rifaat on a January morning in 2014 knew the true identity of the tall man in his late fifties. They were unaware that they had killed the strategic head of the group calling itself “Islamic State” (IS). The fact that this could have happened at all was the result of a rare but fatal miscalculation by the brilliant planner. The local rebels placed the body into a refrigerator, in which they intended to bury him. Only later, when they realized how important the man was, did they lift his body out again.

Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi was the real name of the Iraqi, whose bony features were softened by a white beard. But no one knew him by that name. Even his best-known pseudonym, Haji Bakr, wasn’t widely known. But that was precisely part of the plan. The former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defense force had been secretly pulling the strings at IS for years. Former members of the group had repeatedly mentioned him as one of its leading figures. Still, it was never clear what exactly his role was.

But when the architect of the Islamic State died, he left something behind that he had intended to keep strictly confidential: the blueprint for this state. It is a folder full of handwritten organizational charts, lists and schedules, which describe how a country can be gradually subjugated. SPIEGEL has gained exclusive access to the 31 pages, some consisting of several pages pasted together. They reveal a multilayered composition and directives for action, some already tested and others newly devised for the anarchical situation in Syria’s rebel-held territories. In a sense, the documents are the source code of the most successful terrorist army in recent history.

Until now, much of the information about IS has come from fighters who had defected and data sets from the IS internal administration seized in Baghdad. But none of this offered an explanation for the group’s meteoric rise to prominence, before air strikes in the late summer of 2014 put a stop to its triumphal march.

For the first time, the Haji Bakr documents now make it possible to reach conclusions on how the IS leadership is organized and what role former officials in the government of ex-dictator Saddam Hussein play in it. Above all, however, they show how the takeover in northern Syria was planned, making the group’s later advances into Iraq possible in the first place. In addition, months of research undertaken by SPIEGEL in Syria, as well as other newly discovered records, exclusive to SPIEGEL, show that Haji Bakr’s instructions were carried out meticulously.

Bakr’s documents were long hidden in a tiny addition to a house in embattled northern Syria. Reports of their existence were first made by an eyewitness who had seen them in Haji Bakr’s house shortly after his death. In April 2014, a single page from the file was smuggled to Turkey, where SPIEGEL was able to examine it for the first time. It only became possible to reach Tal Rifaat to evaluate the entire set of handwritten papers in November 2014.

This document is Haji Bakr's sketch for the possible structure of the Islamic State administration. Zoom

This document is Haji Bakr’s sketch for the possible structure of the Islamic State administration.

“Our greatest concern was that these plans could fall into the wrong hands and would never have become known,” said the man who has been storing Haji Bakr’s notes after pulling them out from under a tall stack of boxes and blankets. The man, fearing the IS death squads, wishes to remain anonymous.

The Master Plan

The story of this collection of documents begins at a time when few had yet heard of the “Islamic State.” When Iraqi national Haji Bakr traveled to Syria as part of a tiny advance party in late 2012, he had a seemingly absurd plan: IS would capture as much territory as possible in Syria. Then, using Syria as a beachhead, it would invade Iraq.

Bakr took up residence in an inconspicuous house in Tal Rifaat, north of Aleppo. The town was a good choice. In the 1980s, many of its residents had gone to work in the Gulf nations, especially Saudi Arabia. When they returned, some brought along radical convictions and contacts. In 2013, Tal Rifaat would become IS’ stronghold in Aleppo Province, with hundreds of fighters stationed there.

It was there that the “Lord of the Shadows,” as some called him, sketched out the structure of the Islamic State, all the way down to the local level, compiled lists relating to the gradual infiltration of villages and determined who would oversee whom. Using a ballpoint pen, he drew the chains of command in the security apparatus on stationery. Though presumably a coincidence, the stationery was from the Syrian Defense Ministry and bore the letterhead of the department in charge of accommodations and furniture.

What Bakr put on paper, page by page, with carefully outlined boxes for individual responsibilities, was nothing less than a blueprint for a takeover. It was not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an “Islamic Intelligence State” — a caliphate run by an organization that resembled East Germany’s notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency.

Graphic: A digital rendering of Haji Bakr's Islamic State organigram. Zoom

DER SPIEGEL

Graphic: A digital rendering of Haji Bakr’s Islamic State organigram.

This blueprint was implemented with astonishing accuracy in the ensuing months. The plan would always begin with the same detail: The group recruited followers under the pretense of opening a Dawah office, an Islamic missionary center. Of those who came to listen to lectures and attend courses on Islamic life, one or two men were selected and instructed to spy on their village and obtain a wide range of information. To that end, Haji Bakr compiled lists such as the following:

  • List the powerful families.
  • Name the powerful individuals in these families.
  • Find out their sources of income.
  • Name names and the sizes of (rebel) brigades in the village.
  • Find out the names of their leaders, who controls the brigades and their political orientation.
  • Find out their illegal activities (according to Sharia law), which could be used to blackmail them if necessary.

The spies were told to note such details as whether someone was a criminal or a homosexual, or was involved in a secret affair, so as to have ammunition for blackmailing later. “We will appoint the smartest ones as Sharia sheiks,” Bakr had noted. “We will train them for a while and then dispatch them.” As a postscript, he had added that several “brothers” would be selected in each town to marry the daughters of the most influential families, in order to “ensure penetration of these families without their knowledge.”

The spies were to find out as much as possible about the target towns: Who lived there, who was in charge, which families were religious, which Islamic school of religious jurisprudence they belonged to, how many mosques there were, who the imam was, how many wives and children he had and how old they were. Other details included what the imam’s sermons were like, whether he was more open to the Sufi, or mystical variant of Islam, whether he sided with the opposition or the regime, and what his position was on jihad. Bakr also wanted answers to questions like: Does the imam earn a salary? If so, who pays it? Who appoints him? Finally: How many people in the village are champions of democracy?

The agents were supposed to function as seismic signal waves, sent out to track down the tiniest cracks, as well as age-old faults within the deep layers of society — in short, any information that could be used to divide and subjugate the local population. The informants included former intelligence spies, but also regime opponents who had quarreled with one of the rebel groups. Some were also young men and adolescents who needed money or found the work exciting. Most of the men on Bakr’s list of informants, such as those from Tal Rifaat, were in their early twenties, but some were as young as 16 or 17.

The plans also include areas like finance, schools, daycare, the media and transportation. But there is a constantly recurring, core theme, which is meticulously addressed in organizational charts and lists of responsibilities and reporting requirements: surveillance, espionage, murder and kidnapping.

For each provincial council, Bakr had planned for an emir, or commander, to be in charge of murders, abductions, snipers, communication and encryption, as well as an emir to supervise the other emirs — “in case they don’t do their jobs well.” The nucleus of this godly state would be the demonic clockwork of a cell and commando structure designed to spread fear.

From the very beginning, the plan was to have the intelligence services operate in parallel, even at the provincial level. A general intelligence department reported to the “security emir” for a region, who was in charge of deputy-emirs for individual districts. A head of secret spy cells and an “intelligence service and information manager” for the district reported to each of these deputy-emirs. The spy cells at the local level reported to the district emir’s deputy. The goal was to have everyone keeping an eye on everyone else.

A handwritten chart shows Bakr's thoughts regarding the establishment of the Islamic State. Zoom

A handwritten chart shows Bakr’s thoughts regarding the establishment of the Islamic State.

Those in charge of training the “Sharia judges in intelligence gathering” also reported to the district emir, while a separate department of “security officers” was assigned to the regional emir.

Sharia, the courts, prescribed piety — all of this served a single goal: surveillance and control. Even the word that Bakr used for the conversion of true Muslims, takwin, is not a religious but a technical term that translates as “implementation,” a prosaic word otherwise used in geology or construction. Still, 1,200 years ago, the word followed a unique path to a brief moment of notoriety. Shiite alchemists used it to describe the creation of artificial life. In his ninth century “Book of Stones,” the Persian Jabir Ibn Hayyan wrote — using a secret script and codes — about the creation of a homunculus. “The goal is to deceive all, but those who love God.” That may also have been to the liking of Islamic State strategists, although the group views Shiites as apostates who shun true Islam. But for Haji Bakr, God and the 1,400-year-old faith in him was but one of many modules at his disposal to arrange as he liked for a higher purpose.

The Beginnings in Iraq

It seemed as if George Orwell had been the model for this spawn of paranoid surveillance. But it was much simpler than that. Bakr was merely modifying what he had learned in the past: Saddam Hussein’s omnipresent security apparatus, in which no one, not even generals in the intelligence service, could be certain they weren’t being spied on.

Expatriate Iraqi author Kanan Makiya described this “Republic of Fear” in a book as a country in which anyone could simply disappear and in which Saddam could seal his official inauguration in 1979 by exposing a bogus conspiracy.

There is a simple reason why there is no mention in Bakr’s writings of prophecies relating to the establishment of an Islamic State allegedly ordained by God: He believed that fanatical religious convictions alone were not enough to achieve victory. But he did believe that the faith of others could be exploited.

In 2010, Bakr and a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers made Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir and later “caliph,” the official leader of the Islamic State. They reasoned that Baghdadi, an educated cleric, would give the group a religious face.

Bakr was “a nationalist, not an Islamist,” says Iraqi journalist Hisham al-Hashimi, as he recalls the former career officer, who was stationed with Hashimi’s cousin at the Habbaniya Air Base. “Colonel Samir,” as Hashimi calls him, “was highly intelligent, firm and an excellent logistician.” But when Paul Bremer, then head of the US occupational authority in Baghdad, “dissolved the army by decree in May 2003, he was bitter and unemployed.”

Thousands of well-trained Sunni officers were robbed of their livelihood with the stroke of a pen. In doing so, America created its most bitter and intelligent enemies. Bakr went underground and met Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Anbar Province in western Iraq. Zarqawi, a Jordanian by birth, had previously run a training camp for international terrorist pilgrims in Afghanistan. Starting in 2003, he gained global notoriety as the mastermind of attacks against the United Nations, US troops and Shiite Muslims. He was even too radical for former Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi died in a US air strike in 2006.

Although Iraq’s dominant Baath Party was secular, the two systems ultimately shared a conviction that control over the masses should lie in the hands of a small elite that should not be answerable to anyone — because it ruled in the name of a grand plan, legitimized by either God or the glory of Arab history. The secret of IS’ success lies in the combination of opposites, the fanatical beliefs of one group and the strategic calculations of the other.

Bakr gradually became one of the military leaders in Iraq, and he was held from 2006 to 2008 in the US military’s Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib Prison. He survived the waves of arrests and killings by American and Iraqi special units, which threatened the very existence of the IS precursor organization in 2010, Islamic State in Iraq.

For Bakr and a number of former high-ranking officers, this presented an opportunity to seize power in a significantly smaller circle of jihadists. They utilized the time they shared in Camp Bucca to establish a large network of contacts. But the top leaders had already known each other for a long time. Haji Bakr and an additional officer were part of the tiny secret-service unit attached to the anti-aircraft division. Two other IS leaders were from a small community of Sunni Turkmen in the town of Tal Afar. One of them was a high-ranking intelligence officer as well.

In 2010, the idea of trying to defeat Iraqi government forces militarily seemed futile. But a powerful underground organization took shape through acts of terror and protection rackets. When the uprising against the dictatorship of the Assad clan erupted in neighboring Syria, the organization’s leaders sensed an opportunity. By late 2012, particularly in the north, the formerly omnipotent government forces had largely been defeated and expelled. Instead, there were now hundreds of local councils and rebel brigades, part of an anarchic mix that no one could keep track of. It was a state of vulnerability that the tightly organized group of ex-officers sought to exploit.

Attempts to explain IS and its rapid rise to power vary depending on who is doing the explaining. Terrorism experts view IS as an al-Qaida offshoot and attribute the absence of spectacular attacks to date to what they view as a lack of organizational capacity. Criminologists see IS as a mafia-like holding company out to maximize profit. Scholars in the humanities point to the apocalyptic statements by the IS media department, its glorification of death and the belief that Islamic State is involved in a holy mission.

But apocalyptic visions alone are not enough to capture cities and take over countries. Terrorists don’t establish countries. And a criminal cartel is unlikely to generate enthusiasm among supporters around the world, who are willing to give up their lives to travel to the “Caliphate” and potentially their deaths.

IS has little in common with predecessors like al-Qaida aside from its jihadist label. There is essentially nothing religious in its actions, its strategic planning, its unscrupulous changing of alliances and its precisely implemented propaganda narratives. Faith, even in its most extreme form, is just one of many means to an end. Islamic State’s only constant maxim is the expansion of power at any price.

The Implementation of the Plan

The expansion of IS began so inconspicuously that, a year later, many Syrians had to think for a moment about when the jihadists had appeared in their midst. The Dawah offices that were opened in many towns in northern Syria in the spring of 2013 were innocent-looking missionary offices, not unlike the ones that Islamic charities have opened worldwide.

When a Dawah office opened in Raqqa, “all they said was that they were ‘brothers,’ and they never said a word about the ‘Islamic State’,” reports a doctor who fled from the city. A Dawah office was also opened in Manbij, a liberal city in Aleppo Province, in the spring of 2013. “I didn’t even notice it at first,” recalls a young civil rights activist. “Anyone was allowed to open what he wished. We would never have suspected that someone other than the regime could threaten us. It was only when the fighting erupted in January that we learned that Da’ish,” the Arab acronym for IS, “had already rented several apartments where it could store weapons and hide its men.”

The situation was similar in the towns of al-Bab, Atarib and Azaz. Dawah offices were also opened in neighboring Idlib Province in early 2013, in the towns of Sermada, Atmeh, Kafr Takharim, al-Dana and Salqin. As soon as it had identified enough “students” who could be recruited as spies, IS expanded its presence. In al-Dana, additional buildings were rented, black flags raised and streets blocked off. In towns where there was too much resistance or it was unable to secure enough supporters, IS chose to withdraw temporarily. At the beginning, its modus operandi was to expand without risking open resistance, and abduct or kill “hostile individuals,” while denying any involvement in these nefarious activities.

The fighters themselves also remained inconspicuous at first. Bakr and the advance guard had not brought them along from Iraq, which would have made sense. In fact, they had explicitly prohibited their Iraqi fighters from going to Syria. They also chose not to recruit very many Syrians. The IS leaders opted for the most complicated option instead: They decided to gather together all the foreign radicals who had been coming to the region since the summer of 2012. Students from Saudi Arabia, office workers from Tunisia and school dropouts from Europe with no military experience were to form an army with battle-tested Chechens and Uzbeks. It would be located in Syria under Iraqi command.

Already by the end of 2012, military camps had been erected in several places. Initially, no one knew what groups they belonged to. The camps were strictly organized and the men there came from numerous countries — and didn’t speak to journalists. Very few of them were from Iraq. Newcomers received two months of training and were drilled to be unconditionally obedient to the central command. The set-up was inconspicuous and also had another advantage: though necessarily chaotic at the beginning, what emerged were absolutely loyal troops. The foreigners knew nobody outside of their comrades, had no reason to show mercy and could be quickly deployed to many different places. This was in stark contrast to the Syrian rebels, who were mostly focused on defending their hometowns and had to look after their families and help out with the harvest. In fall 2013, IS books listed 2,650 foreign fighters in the Province of Aleppo alone. Tunisians represented a third of the total, followed by Saudi Arabians, Turks, Egyptians and, in smaller numbers, Chechens, Europeans and Indonesians.

Later too, the jihadist cadres were hopelessly outnumbered by the Syrian rebels. Although the rebels distrusted the jihadists, they didn’t join forces to challenge IS because they didn’t want to risk opening up a second front. Islamic State, though, increased its clout with a simple trick: The men always appeared wearing black masks, which not only made them look terrifying, but also meant that no one could know how many of them there actually were. When groups of 200 fighters appeared in five different places one after the other, did it mean that IS had 1,000 people? Or 500? Or just a little more than 200? In addition, spies also ensured that IS leadership was constantly informed of where the population was weak or divided or where there were local conflict, allowing IS to offer itself as a protective power in order to gain a foothold.

The Capture of Raqqa

Raqqa, a once sleepy provincial city on the Euphrates River, was to become the prototype of the complete IS conquest. The operation began subtly, gradually became more brutal and, in the end, IS prevailed over larger opponents without much of a fight. “We were never very political,” explained one doctor who had fled Raqqa for Turkey. “We also weren’t religious and didn’t pray much.”

When Raqqa fell to the rebels in March 2013, a city council was rapidly elected. Lawyers, doctors and journalists organized themselves. Women’s groups were established. The Free Youth Assembly was founded, as was the movement “For Our Rights” and dozens of other initiatives. Anything seemed possible in Raqqa. But in the view of some who fled the city, it also marked the start of its downfall.

True to Haji Bakr’s plan, the phase of infiltration was followed by the elimination of every person who might have been a potential leader or opponent. The first person hit was the head of the city council, who was kidnapped in mid-May 2013 by masked men. The next person to disappear was the brother of a prominent novelist. Two days later, the man who had led the group that painted a revolutionary flag on the city walls vanished.

“We had an idea who kidnapped him,” one of his friends explains, “but no one dared any longer to do anything.” The system of fear began to take hold. Starting in July, first dozens and then hundreds of people disappeared. Sometimes their bodies were found, but they usually disappeared without a trace. In August, the IS military leadership dispatched several cars driven by suicide bombers to the headquarters of the FSA brigade, the “Grandsons of the Prophet,” killing dozens of fighters and leading the rest to flee. The other rebels merely looked on. IS leadership had spun a web of secret deals with the brigades so that each thought it was only the others who might be the targets of IS attacks.

On Oct. 17, 2013, Islamic State called all civic leaders, clerics and lawyers in the city to a meeting. At the time, some thought it might be a gesture of conciliation. Of the 300 people who attended the meeting, only two spoke out against the ongoing takeover, the kidnappings and the murders committed by IS.

One of the two was Muhannad Habayebna, a civil rights activist and journalist well known in the city. He was found five days later tied up and executed with a gunshot wound to his head. Friends received an anonymous email with a photo of his body. The message included only one sentence: “Are you sad about your friend now?” Within hours around 20 leading members of the opposition fled to Turkey. The revolution in Raqqa had come to an end.

A short time later, the 14 chiefs of the largest clans gave an oath of allegiance to Emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. There’s even a film of the ceremony. They were sheiks with the same clans that had sworn their steadfast loyalty to Syrian President Bashar Assad only two years earlier.

The Death of Haji Bakr

Until the end of 2013, everything was going according to Islamic State’s plan — or at least according to the plan of Haji Bakr. The caliphate was expanding village by village without being confronted by unified resistance from Syrian rebels. Indeed, the rebels seemed paralyzed in the face of IS’ sinister power.

But when IS henchmen brutally tortured a well-liked rebel leader and doctor to death in December 2013, something unexpected happened. Across the country, Syrian brigades — both secular and parts of the radical Nusra Front — joined together to do battle with Islamic State. By attacking IS everywhere at the same time, they were able to rob the Islamists of their tactical advantage — that of being able to rapidly move units to where they were most urgently needed.

Within weeks, IS was pushed out of large regions of northern Syria. Even Raqqa, the Islamic State capital, had almost fallen by the time 1,300 IS fighters arrived from Iraq. But they didn’t simply march into battle. Rather, they employed a trickier approach, recalls the doctor who fled. “In Raqqa, there were so many brigades on the move that nobody knew who exactly the others were. Suddenly, a group in rebel dress began to shoot at the other rebels. They all simply fled.”

A small, simple masquerade had helped IS fighters to victory: Just change out of black clothes into jeans and vests. They did the same thing in the border town of Jarablus. On several occasions, rebels in other locations took drivers from IS suicide vehicles into custody. The drivers asked in surprise: “You are Sunnis too? Our emir told me you were infidels from Assad’s army.”

Once complete, the picture begins to look absurd: God’s self-proclaimed enforcers on Earth head out to conquer a future worldly empire, but with what? With ninja outfits, cheap tricks and espionage cells camouflaged as missionary offices. But it worked. IS held on to Raqqa and was able to reconquer some of its lost territories. But it came too late for the great planner Haji Bakr.

Haji Bakr stayed behind in the small city of Tal Rifaat, where IS had long had the upper hand. But when rebels attacked at the end of January 2014, the city became divided within just a few hours. One half remained under IS control while the other was wrested away by one of the local brigades. Haji Bakr was stuck in the wrong half. Furthermore, in order to remain incognito he had refrained from moving into one of the heavily guarded IS military quarters. And so, the godfather of snitching was snitched on by a neighbor. “A Daish sheik lives next door!” the man called. A local commander named Abdelmalik Hadbe and his men drove over to Bakr’s house. A woman jerked open the door and said brusquely: “My husband isn’t here.”

But his car is parked out front, the rebels countered.

At that moment, Haji Bakr appeared at the door in his pajamas. Hadbe ordered him to come with them, whereupon Bakr protested that he wanted to get dressed. No, Hadbe repeated: “Come with us! Immediately!”

Surprisingly nimbly for his age, Bakr jumped back and kicked the door closed, according to two people who witnessed the scene. He then hid under the stairs and yelled: “I have a suicide belt! I’ll blow up all of us!” He then came out with a Kalashnikov and began shooting. Hadbe then fired his weapon and killed Bakr.

When the men later learned who they had killed, they searched the house, gathering up computers, passports, mobile phone SIM cards, a GPS device and, most importantly, papers. They didn’t find a Koran anywhere.

Haji Bakr was dead and the local rebels took his wife into custody. Later, the rebels exchanged her for Turkish IS hostages at the request of Ankara. Bakr’s valuable papers were initially hidden away in a chamber, where they spent several months.

A Second Cache of Documents

Haji Bakr’s state continued to work even without its creator. Just how precisely his plans were implemented — point by point — is confirmed by the discovery of another file. When IS was forced to rapidly abandon its headquarters in Aleppo in January 2014, they tried to burn their archive, but they ran into a problem similar to that confronted by the East German secret police 25 years earlier: They had too many files.

Some of them remained intact and ended up with the al-Tawhid Brigade, Aleppo’s largest rebel group at the time. After lengthy negotiations, the group agreed to make the papers available to SPIEGEL for exclusive publication rights — everything except a list of IS spies inside of al-Tawhid.

An examination of the hundreds of pages of documents reveals a highly complex system involving the infiltration and surveillance of all groups, including IS’ own people. The jihad archivists maintained long lists noting which informants they had installed in which rebel brigades and government militias. It was even noted who among the rebels was a spy for Assad’s intelligence service.

“They knew more than we did, much more,” said the documents’ custodian. Personnel files of the fighters were among them, including detailed letters of application from incoming foreigners, such as the Jordanian Nidal Abu Eysch. He sent along all of his terror references, including their telephone numbers, and the file number of a felony case against him. His hobbies were also listed: hunting, boxing, bomb building.

IS wanted to know everything, but at the same time, the group wanted to deceive everyone about its true aims. One multiple-page report, for example, carefully lists all of the pretexts IS could use to justify the seizure of the largest flour mill in northern Syria. It includes such excuses as alleged embezzlement as well as the ungodly behavior of the mill’s workers. The reality — that all strategically important facilities like industrial bakeries, grain silos and generators were to be seized and their equipment sent to the caliphate’s unofficial capital Raqqa — was to be kept under wraps.

Over and over again, the documents reveal corollaries with Haji Bakr’s plans for the establishment of IS — for example that marrying in to influential families should be pushed. The files from Aleppo also included a list of 34 fighters who wanted wives in addition to other domestic needs. Abu Luqman and Abu Yahya al-Tunis, for example, noted that they needed an apartment. Abu Suheib and Abu Ahmed Osama requested bedroom furniture. Abu al-Baraa al Dimaschqi asked for financial assistance in addition to a complete set of furniture, while Abu Azmi wanted a fully automatic washing machine.

Shifting Alliances

But in the first months of 2014, yet another legacy from Haji Bakr began playing a decisive role: His decade of contacts to Assad’s intelligence services.

In 2003, the Damascus regime was panicked that then-US President George W. Bush, after his victory over Saddam Hussein, would have his troops continue into Syria to topple Assad as well. Thus, in the ensuing years, Syrian intelligence officials organized the transfer of thousands of radicals from Libya, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia to al-Qaida in Iraq. Ninety percent of the suicide attackers entered Iraq via the Syrian route. A strange relationship developed between Syrian generals, international jihadists and former Iraqi officers who had been loyal to Saddam — a joint venture of deadly enemies, who met repeatedly to the west of Damascus.

At the time, the primary aim was to make the lives of the Americans in Iraq hell. Ten years later, Bashar Assad had a different motive to breathe new life into the alliance: He wanted to sell himself to the world as the lesser of several evils. Islamist terror, the more gruesome the better, was too important to leave it up to the terrorists. The regime’s relationship with Islamic State is — just as it was to its predecessor a decade prior — marked by a completely tactical pragmatism. Both sides are trying to use the other in the assumption that it will emerge as the stronger power, able to defeat the discrete collaborator of yesterday. Conversely, IS leaders had no problem receiving assistance from Assad’s air force, despite all of the group’s pledges to annihilate the apostate Shiites. Starting in January 2014, Syrian jets would regularly — and exclusively — bomb rebel positions and headquarters during battles between IS and rebel groups.

In battles between IS and rebels in January 2014, Assad’s jets regularly bombed only rebel positions, while the Islamic State emir ordered his fighters to refrain from shooting at the army. It was an arrangement that left many of the foreign fighters deeply disillusioned; they had imaged jihad differently.

IS threw its entire arsenal at the rebels, sending more suicide bombers into their ranks in just a few weeks than it deployed during the entire previous year against the Syrian army. Thanks in part to additional air strikes, IS was able to reconquer territory that it had briefly lost.

Nothing symbolizes the tactical shifting of alliances more than the fate of the Syrian army’s Division 17. The isolated base near Raqqa had been under rebel siege for more than a year. But then, IS units defeated the rebels there and Assad’s air force was once again able to use the base for supply flights without fear of attack.

But a half year later, after IS conquered Mosul and took control of a gigantic weapons depot there, the jihadists felt powerful enough to attack their erstwhile helpers. IS fighters overran Division 17 and slaughtered the soldiers, whom they had only recently protected.

What the Future May Hold

The setbacks suffered by IS in recent months — the defeat in the fight for Kurdish enclave Kobani and, more recently, the loss of the Iraqi city of Tikrit, have generated the impression that the end of Islamic State is nigh. As though it, in its megalomania, overreached itself, has lost its mystique, is in retreat and will soon disappear. But such forced optimism is likely premature. The IS may have lost many fighters, but it has continued expanding in Syria.

It is true that jihadist experiments in ruling a specific geographical area have failed in the past. Mostly, though, that was because of their lack of knowledge regarding how to administer a region, or even a state. That is exactly the weakness that IS strategists have long been aware of — and eliminated. Within the “Caliphate,” those in power have constructed a regime that is more stable and more flexible than it appears from the outside.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may be the officially named leader, but it remains unclear how much power he holds. In any case, when an emissary of al-Qaida head Ayman al-Zawahiri contacted the Islamic State, it was Haji Bakr and other intelligence officers, and not al-Baghdadi, whom he approached. Afterwards, the emissary bemoaned “these phony snakes who are betraying the real jihad.”

Within IS, there are state structures, bureaucracy and authorities. But there is also a parallel command structure: elite units next to normal troops; additional commanders alongside nominal military head Omar al-Shishani; power brokers who transfer or demote provincial and town emirs or even make them disappear at will. Furthermore, decisions are not, as a rule, made in Shura Councils, nominally the highest decision-making body. Instead, they are being made by the “people who loosen and bind” (ahl al-hall wa-l-aqd), a clandestine circle whose name is taken from the Islam of medieval times.

Islamic State is able to recognize all manner of internal revolts and stifle them. At the same time, the hermitic surveillance structure is also useful for the financial exploitation of its subjects.

The air strikes flown by the US-led coalition may have destroyed the oil wells and refineries. But nobody is preventing the Caliphate’s financial authorities from wringing money out of the millions of people who live in the regions under IS control — in the form of new taxes and fees, or simply by confiscating property. IS, after all, knows everything from its spies and from the data it plundered from banks, land-registry offices and money-changing offices. It knows who owns which homes and which fields; it knows who owns many sheep or has lots of money. The subjects may be unhappy, but there is minimal room for them to organize, arm themselves and rebel.

As the West’s attention is primarily focused on the possibility of terrorist attacks, a different scenario has been underestimated: the approaching intra-Muslim war between Shiites and Sunnis. Such a conflict would allow IS to graduate from being a hated terror organization to a central power.

Already today, the frontlines in Syria, Iraq and Yemen follow this confessional line, with Shiite Afghans fighting against Sunni Afghans in Syria and IS profiting in Iraq from the barbarism of brutal Shiite militias. Should this ancient Islam conflict continue to escalate, it could spill over into confessionally mixed states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Lebanon.

In such a case, IS propaganda about the approaching apocalypse could become a reality. In its slipstream, an absolutist dictatorship in the name of God could be established.

Iranian Hackers Eye U.S. Grid

iranhack4Cyber-savvy agents are stepping up their efforts to ID critical infrastructure that may compromise national security.

Iranian hackers are trying to identify computer systems that control infrastructure in the United States, such as the electrical grid, presumably with an eye towards damaging those systems, according to a new report from a cyber security firm and a think tank in Washington, D.C.

The researchers from Norse, a cyber security company, and the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that has been skeptical of the Iranian nuclear agreement, found that Iranian hacking against the U.S. is increasing and that the lifting of economic sanctions as part of an international agreement over Iran’s nuclear program “will dramatically increase the resources Iran can put toward expanding its cyberattack infrastructure.”

What’s more, the current sanctions regime, which has helped to depress Iran’s economy, has not blunted the expansion of its cyber spying and warfare capabilities, the researchers conclude.

The technical data underlying the report’s conclusions, while voluminous, aren’t definitive, and they don’t answer a central question of whether Iran intends to attack the U.S. Using data collected from a network of Norse “sensors” around the world made to look like vulnerable computers, the researchers tracked what they say is a dramatic escalation in spying and attacks on the U.S. from hackers in Iran, including within the Iranian military. The researchers also traced hacking back to a technical university in Iran, as well as other institutions either run or heavily influenced by the Iranian regime.

“Iran is emerging as a significant cyber threat to the U.S. and its allies,” the report’s authors say. “The size and sophistication of the nation’s hacking capabilities have grown markedly over the last few years, and Iran has already penetrated well-defended networks in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and seized and destroyed sensitive data.”

That assessment tracks with the view of U.S. intelligence officials, who’ve been alarmed by how quickly Iran has developed the capability to wreak havoc in cyberspace. In 2012, officials say that Iranian hackers were responsible for erasing information from 30,000 computers at Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil and gas production facility, as well as a denial-of-service attack that forced the websites of major U.S. banks to shut down under a deluge of electronic traffic. Earlier this year, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that Iran was responsible for an attack on the Sands casino company in 2014, in which intruders stole and destroyed data from the company’s computers.

The Norse and AEI researchers found that Iran’s cyber capabilities, which U.S. officials and experts say have been growing rapidly since around 2009, have accelerated in the past year. Attacks launched from Iranian Internet addresses rose 128 percent between January 2013 and mid-March 2015, the researchers found. And the number of individual Norse sensors “hit” by Iranian Internet addresses increased 229 percent. All told, the researchers conclude that hackers using Iranian Internet addresses have “expended their attack infrastructure more than fivefold over the course of just 13 months.”

There’s little debate about among U.S. officials and experts that Iran poses a credible and growing danger online. But the technical data underlying Norse and AEI’s conclusions came into question when the report was released on Thursday.

The researchers relied on “scans” of Norse sensors that may indicate some interest by an Iranian hacker, but don’t prove his intent or that he was planning to damage a particular computer.

 

“They talk about ‘attacks,’ but what they really mean are ‘scans,” which is more ambiguous, Robert M. Lee, a PhD candidate at King’s College London who is researching industrial control systems, told The Daily Beast. Industrial control systems are the computers that help run critical infrastructure.

Essentially, Iranian hackers are casing a neighborhood, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to rob houses. Lee, who is also an active duty Air Force cyber warfare operations officer, said he agreed with the report’s assessment that Iran is building up its cyber forces and poses a threat. But the underlying technical data in the report doesn’t directly support that claim, he said. “They reached the right conclusions but for the wrong reasons,” Lee said.

The researchers didn’t find that Iran had successfully penetrated any industrial control systems and caused machinery to break down.

While the report concludes that Iran will use the sanctions relief to fuel its growing cyber warfare program, other researchers have suggested that Iran is likely to back off its most aggressive operations—like those against the Saudi oil company and U.S. banks—and will instead focus on cyber espionage that doesn’t cause physical damage.

“They’ll be far more targeted and careful,” Stuart McClure, the CEO and president of cybersecurity company Cylance, told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. Since the U.S. and its international partners reached a tentative agreement with Iran on its nuclear program earlier this month, Cylance hasn’t tracked any attacks by an Iranian hacker group that it has been monitoring and documented in an earlier report (PDF).

But Norse’s conclusions are generally supported by Cylance’s research, which found that Iran had actually penetrated systems controlling a range of critical infrastructure in the U.S., including oil and gas, energy and utilities, transportation, airlines, airports, hospitals, telecommunications, and aerospace companies. The company’s report on those intrusions, which it said was based on two years of research, also didn’t attribute any failures of critical infrastructure to those Iranian intrusions.

“A lot of the work [the Iranians] were doing was quite sloppy, almost to the point that they wanted to get caught,” McClure said. He speculated that the Iranians may have been trying to send a signal to the U.S. and their partners in the nuclear negotiations that they were capable of inflicting harm if they didn’t get a favorable deal. “Coming to the table and knowing your adversary is in your house influences the negotiation.”

Iran still has a way to go to join the ranks of the cyber superpowers. Its “cyberwarfare capabilities do not yet seem to rival those of Russia in skill, or ofChina in scale,” the Norse and AEI report finds. There is still a relatively small community of high-end hackers in the country, and the regime hasn’t been able to build as robust a tech infrastructure for launching attacks as other nations whose capabilities are more advanced, the researchers found.

The report identifies the Iranian government as responsible for the malicious activity, concluding that the traffic originated from organizations “controlled or influenced by the government” or moved over equipment that is known to be monitored and manipulated by Iran’s security services.

That claim is also likely to raise objection from technical experts, who generally demand more precise evidence to attribute a cyber operation to a specific actor.

“We are emphatically not suggesting that all malicious traffic emanating from Iran is government initiated or government-approved,” the researchers said. However, they argue “that the typical standards of proof for attributing malicious traffic to a specific source are unnecessarily high” in this case, given that so much of the traffic they observed traversed systems either owned, controlled, or spied on by the Iranian government.

That’s ironic: Earlier this year, when Obama administration officials declared publicly that North Korea was responsible for hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norse was one of the most prominent skeptics, arguing that the government was relying on imprecise technical data and leaping to conclusions.

Norse said its own research suggested that a group of six individuals, including at least one disgruntled ex-Sony employee, was behind the assault, which humiliated Sony executives and led to threats of terrorist attacks over the release of The Interview.

But that theory was undermined in January when FBI Director James Comey took the unusual step of publicly declassifying information that, he said, definitively linked North Korea to the attack. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials also told The Daily Beast that they’d been tracking the hackers behind the Sony operation long before it was ever launched.

Fleecing of the Taxpayer, National Institutes of Health

Feds Spent $410,265 Studying ‘Satisfaction’ Levels of Young Gay Men’s First Time

Project examining the ‘meaning and function’ of first ‘penetrative same-sex sexual experiences’

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent over $400,000 studying the satisfaction levels of the first sexual experiences of young gay men.

The four-year study, being conducted by Johns Hopkins University, is examining the “meaning and function” of first “penetrative same-sex sexual experiences.”

“Prior work has demonstrated that same-sex relationship trajectories support the development of self-esteem in young gay and bisexual men, while opposite same-sex relationships may be associated with homonegativity,” a grant for the project, which began in 2012, states. “Little is known about the meaning and function of first same-sex experience in [African-American] AA adolescent men and whether satisfaction with first penetrative same-sex experience impacts sexual trajectories.”

“The goal of this project is to understand the meaning and function of first same-sex sexual experience and to prospectively be able to assess its impact on subsequent sexual experiences, young adult sexual health and health protective behaviors,” the grant said.

The project has cost taxpayers $410,265 so far, with funding not set to expire until May 2016.

The study is also examining the satisfaction levels of young gay men during their first time.

“The research phase of the award is to explore the reasons for and satisfaction with first and subsequent penetrative same-sex sexual experiences (PSSE) and to examine the role of first PSSE on second and subsequent PSSEs in AA men (Study 1) and how social context impacts sexual satisfaction with first PSSE,” the grant said.

The study will also look at the amount of time between the first and second partner, depending on the “sexual satisfaction” of the first “PSSE.”

Forty-five African American adolescent males are undergoing “in-depth” interviews for the study. The research will also create an Internet survey.

The NIH grant said that the study is necessary due to a lack of research focusing on young African-American males and will be beneficial to preventing HIV.

“The lack of representativeness of AA adolescent males in studies focused on early same-sex sexual relationships contrasted with high rates of HIV in AA adolescent MSM suggests that this project fulfills a need to understand whether these early same-sex sexual experiences impact risk for HIV,” the grant said.

“AA [men who have sex with men] MSM struggle with a sexual identity that is stigmatized in their communities, along with discrimination, and racism,” the grant continued. “As a result, first romantic and sexual experiences are likely to differ from other adolescent groups in ways that make them particularly vulnerable to HIV.”

The study is meant to help the lead researcher, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Dr. Renata Arrington-Sanders, to become a “successful independent minority investigator” and a “rigorous behavioral scientist.”

Arrington-Sanders research focuses on “improving the sexual health of African American adolescent men who have sex with men and also HIV prevention community-based efforts and linking HIV-infected adolescents to care.”

Arrington-Sanders previously studied why some young African-American gay men seek out older partners, finding that older partners had “emotional maturity,” could expose them to “more life experiences,” and helped young men “sort through sexual position and how to perform in relationships.”