Tracking Phone Calls Long Before the Patriot Act

Posted on April 7, 2015April 7, 2015 by Denise Simon

U.S. secretly tracked billions of phone calls for decades

Starting in 1992, the Justice Department amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries, a model for anti-terror surveillance after Sept. 11, 2001.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.

Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels’ distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.

The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to “designated foreign countries.” But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.

The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans’ calls, but the records — which numbers were dialed and when — allowed agents to map suspects’ communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts.

That data collection was “one of the most important and effective Federal drug law enforcement initiatives,” the Justice Department said in a 1998 letter to Sprint asking the telecom giant to turn over its call records. The previously undisclosed letter was signed by the head of the department’s Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Section, Mary Lee Warren, who wrote that the operation had “been approved at the highest levels of Federal law enforcement authority,” including then-Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.

The data collection began in 1992 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, nine years before his son, President George W. Bush, authorized the NSA to gather its own logs of Americans’ phone calls in 2001. It was approved by top Justice Department officials in four presidential administrations and detailed in occasional briefings to members of Congress but otherwise had little independent oversight, according to officials involved with running it.

The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing. Agents gathered the records without court approval, searched them more often in a day than the spy agency does in a year and automatically linked the numbers the agency gathered to large electronic collections of investigative reports, domestic call records accumulated by its agents and intelligence data from overseas, it even use 800 numbers for business too!

The result was “a treasure trove of very important information on trafficking,” former DEA administrator Thomas Constantine said in an interview.

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”

Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden’s revelations about other surveillance programs. In its place, current and former officials said the drug agency sends telecom companies daily subpoenas for international calling records involving only phone numbers that agents suspect are linked to the drug trade or other crimes — sometimes a thousand or more numbers a day.

Tuesday, Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said the DEA “is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers.” A DEA spokesman declined to comment.

HARVESTING DATA TO BATTLE CARTELS

The DEA began assembling a data-gathering program in the 1980s as the government searched for new ways to battle Colombian drug cartels. Neither informants nor undercover agents had been enough to crack the cartels’ infrastructure. So the agency’s intelligence arm turned its attention to the groups’ communication networks.

Calling records – often called “toll records” – offered one way to do that. Toll records are comparable to what appears on a phone bill – the numbers a person dialed, the date and time of the call, its duration and how it was paid for. By then, DEA agents had decades of experience gathering toll records of people they suspected were linked to drug trafficking, albeit one person at a time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, officials said the agency had little way to make sense of the data their agents accumulated and almost no ability to use them to ferret out new cartel connections. Some agents used legal pads.

“We were drowning in toll records,” a former intelligence official said.

The DEA asked the Pentagon for help. The military responded with a pair of supercomputers and intelligence analysts who had experience tracking the communication patterns of Soviet military units. “What they discovered was that the incident of a communication was perhaps as important as the content of a communication,” a former Justice Department official said.

The military installed the supercomputers on the fifth floor of the DEA’s headquarters, across from a shopping mall in Arlington, Va.

The system they built ultimately allowed the drug agency to stitch together huge collections of data to map trafficking and money laundering networks both overseas and within the USA. It allowed agents to link the call records its agents gathered domestically with calling data the DEA and intelligence agencies had acquired outside the USA. (In some cases, officials said the DEA paid employees of foreign telecom firms for copies of call logs and subscriber lists.) And it eventually allowed agents to cross-reference all of that against investigative reports from the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.

The result “produced major international investigations that allowed us to take some big people,” Constantine said, though he said he could not identify particular cases.

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush proposed in his first prime-time address using “sophisticated intelligence-gathering and Defense Department technology” to disrupt drug trafficking. Three years later, when violent crime rates were at record highs, the drug agency intensified its intelligence push, launching a “kingpin strategy” to attack drug cartels by going after their finances, leadership and communication.

THE START OF BULK COLLECTION

In 1992, in the last months of Bush’s administration, Attorney General William Barr and his chief criminal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, gave the DEA permission to collect a much larger set of phone data to feed into that intelligence operation.

Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said.

Barr and Mueller declined to comment, as did Barr’s deputy, George Terwilliger III, though Terwilliger said, “It has been apparent for a long time in both the law enforcement and intelligence worlds that there is a tremendous value and need to collect certain metadata to support legitimate investigations.”

The data collection was known within the agency as USTO (a play on the fact that it tracked calls from the U.S. to other countries).

The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records “relevant or material to” federal drug investigations. Officials acknowledged it was an expansive interpretation of that authority but one that was not likely to be challenged because unlike search warrants, DEA subpoenas do not require a judge’s approval. “We knew we were stretching the definition,” a former official involved in the process said.

Officials said a few telephone companies were reluctant to provide so much information, but none challenged the subpoenas in court. Those that hesitated received letters from the Justice Department urging them to comply.

After Sprint executives expressed reservations in 1998, for example, Warren, the head of the department’s drug section, responded with a letter telling the company that “the initiative has been determined to be legally appropriate” and that turning over the call data was “appropriate and required by law.” The letter said the data would be used by authorities “to focus scarce investigative resources by means of sophisticated pattern and link analysis.”

The letter did not name other telecom firms providing records to the DEA but did tell executives that “the arrangement with Sprint being sought by the DEA is by no means unique to Sprint” and that “major service providers have been eager to support and assist law enforcement within appropriate bounds.” Former officials said the operation included records from AT&T and other telecom companies.

A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment. Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh said only that “we do comply with all state and federal laws regarding law enforcement subpoenas.”

Agents said that when the data collection began, they sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA. They allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001. The DEA’s public disclosure of its program in January came in the case of a man charged with violating U.S. export restrictions by trying to send electrical equipment to Iran.

At first, officials said the DEA gathered records only of calls to a handful of countries, focusing on Colombian drug cartels and their supply lines. Its reach grew quickly, and by the late 1990s, the DEA was logging “a massive number of calls,” said a former intelligence official who supervised the program.

Former officials said they could not recall the complete list of countries included in USTO, and the coverage changed over time. The Justice Department and DEA added countries to the list if officials could establish that they were home to outfits that produced or trafficked drugs or were involved in money laundering or other drug-related crimes.

The Justice Department warned when it disclosed the program in January that the list of countries should remain secret “to protect against any disruption to prospective law enforcement cooperation.”

At its peak, the operation gathered data on calls to 116 countries, an official involved in reviewing the list said. Two other officials said they did not recall the precise number of countries, but it was more than 100. That gave the collection a considerable sweep; the U.S. government recognizes a total of 195 countries.

At one time or another, officials said, the data collection covered most of the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as others in western Africa, Europe and Asia. It included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Italy, Mexico and Canada.

The DEA often — though not always — notified foreign governments it was collecting call records, in part to make sure its agents would not be expelled if the program was discovered. In some cases, the DEA provided some of that information to foreign law enforcement agencies to help them build their own investigations, officials said.

The DEA did not have a real-time connection to phone companies’ data; instead, the companies regularly provided copies of their call logs, first on computer disks and later over a private network. Agents who used the system said the numbers they saw were seldom more than a few days old.

The database did not include callers’ names or other identifying data. Officials said agents often were able to identify individuals associated with telephone numbers flagged by the analysis, either by cross-referencing them against other databases or by sending follow-up requests to the phone companies.

To keep the program secret, the DEA sought not to use the information as evidence in criminal prosecutions or in its justification for warrants or other searches. Instead, its Special Operations Division passed the data to field agents as tips to help them find new targets or focus existing investigations, a process approved by Justice Department lawyers. Many of those tips were classified because the DEA phone searches drew on other intelligence data.

That practice sparked a furor when the Reuters news agency reported in 2013 that the DEA trained agents to conceal the sources of those tips from judges and defense lawyers. Reuters said the tips were based on wiretaps, foreign intelligence and a DEA database of telephone calls gathered through routine subpoenas and search warrants.

As a result, “the government short-circuited any debate about the legality and wisdom of putting the call records of millions of innocent people in the hands of the DEA,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Patrick Toomey said.

A BLUEPRINT FOR BROADER SURVEILLANCE

The NSA began collecting its own data on Americans’ phone calls within months of Sept. 11, 2001, as a way to identify potential terrorists within the USA. At first, it did so without court approval. In 2006, after The New York Times and USA TODAY began reporting on the surveillance program, President George W. Bush’s administration brought it under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to use secret court orders to get access to records relevant to national security investigations. Unlike the DEA, the NSA also gathered logs of calls within the USA.

The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

Both operations relied on an expansive interpretation of the word “relevant,” for example — one that allowed the government to collect vast amounts of information on the premise that some tiny fraction of it would be useful to investigators. Both used similar internal safeguards, requiring analysts to certify that they had “reasonable articulable suspicion” – a comparatively low legal threshold – that a phone number was linked to a drug or intelligence case before they could query the records.

“The foundation of the NSA program was a mirror image of what we were doing,” said a former Justice Department official who helped oversee the surveillance. That official said he and others briefed NSA lawyers several times on the particulars of their surveillance program. Two former DEA officials also said the NSA had been briefed on the operation. The NSA declined to comment.

There were also significant differences.

For one thing, DEA analysts queried their data collection far more often. The NSA said analysts searched its telephone database only about 300 times in 2012; DEA analysts routinely performed that many searches in a day, former officials said. Beyond that, NSA analysts must have approval from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court each time they want to search their own collection of phone metadata, and they do not automatically cross-reference it with other intelligence files.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, complained last year to Holder that the DEA had been gathering phone data “in bulk” without judicial oversight. Officials said the DEA’s database was disclosed to judges only occasionally, in classified hearings.

For two decades, it was never reviewed by the Justice Department’s own inspector general, which told Congress it is now looking into the DEA’s bulk data collections.

A SMALLER SCALE COLLECTION

Holder pulled the plug on the phone data collection in September 2013.

That summer, Snowden leaked a remarkable series of classified documents detailing some of the government’s most prized surveillance secrets, including the NSA’s logging of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic. Reuters and The New York Times raised questions about the drug agency’s own access to phone records.

Officials said the Justice Department told the DEA that it had determined it could not continue both surveillance programs, particularly because part of its justification for sweeping NSA surveillance was that it served national security interests, not ordinary policing. Eight months after USTO was halted, for example, department lawyers defended the spy agency’s phone dragnet in court partly on the grounds that it “serves special governmental needs above and beyond normal law enforcement.”

Three months after USTO was shut down, a review panel commissioned by President Obama urged Congress to bar the NSA from gathering telephone data on Americans in bulk. Not long after that, Obama instructed the NSA to get permission from the surveillance court before querying its phone data collection, a step the drug agency never was required to take.

The DEA stopped searching USTO in September 2013. Not long after that, it purged the database.

“It was made abundantly clear that they couldn’t defend both programs,” a former Justice Department official said. Others said Holder’s message was more direct. “He said he didn’t think we should have that information,” a former DEA official said.

By then, agents said USTO was suffering from diminishing returns. More criminals — especially the sophisticated cartel operatives the agency targeted — were communicating on Internet messaging systems that are harder for law enforcement to track.

Still, the shutdown took a toll, officials said. “It has had a major impact on investigations,” one former DEA official said.

The DEA asked the Justice Department to restart the surveillance program in December 2013. It withdrew that request when agents came up with a new solution. Every day, the agency assembles a list of the telephone numbers its agents suspect may be tied to drug trafficking. Each day, it sends electronic subpoenas — sometimes listing more than a thousand numbers — to telephone companies seeking logs of international telephone calls linked to those numbers, two official familiar with the program said.

The data collection that results is more targeted but slower and more expensive. Agents said it takes a day or more to pull together communication profiles that used to take minutes.

The White House proposed a similar approach for the NSA’s telephone surveillance program, which is set to expire June 1. That approach would halt the NSA’s bulk data collection but would give the spy agency the power to force companies to turn over records linked to particular telephone numbers, subject to a court order.

The UK Just Went Stupid with MEND

Posted on April 4, 2015April 7, 2015 by Denise Simon

To read the Manifesto, click here. Of particular note is page 25, spelling out how the UK is and has been in debt to Qatar, which has bought and paid for epic influence in England’s politics.

Zahir Mahmood is another Islamist preacher on the circuit of MEND, the Islamist political agitation group. Like Yasir Qadhi and Abu Eesa Niamatullah, Mahmood is an excellent match for MEND.

Consider Mahmood’s enthusiastic backing for Hamas. He was a leader of Viva Palestina, George Galloway’s Hamas support operation. Here he is, very excited, at a Viva Palestina rally.

And the other thing is that we cannot allow the perverted narrative to remain the norm. Hamas are not terrorists. They’re freedom fighters, they’re defending their country.
…
Alhamdulillah, Ismail Haniyeh [the Hamas leader in Gaza], the prime minister of Palestine, has given all those who went on the convoy Palestinian passports. We are Palestinian nationals! [the audience applauds].

Muslim group with links to extremists boasts of influencing election

A group suspected of being a front for Islamic extremists claims it can control as many as 30 seats in the general election and boasts of acting a “kingmaker”

A front group for Muslim extremists which wants to let British Muslims fight in Syria has boasted that it is “negotiating with the Tory and Labour leadership” to secure some of its demands.

Muslim Engagement and Development (Mend) has built links with both parties – and been chosen as an “official partner” by the Electoral Commission for May’s poll – after claiming to promote “democratic engagement” by Muslims. However, it is actually a facade to win political access and influence for individuals holding extreme, bigoted and anti-democratic views.

Labour’s shadow equalities minister and vice-chair of its national policy forum, Kate Green, spoke at a Mend event last Friday addressed by a man, Abu Eesa Niamatullah, who has called British people “animals,” demanded that women should not work, attacked democracy and said that “the Creator is the one who should decide what the laws should be.”

Baroness Warsi, the former Tory chairman, also spoke at the event.

In new recordings heard by this newspaper, Sufyan Ismail, Mend’s chief executive, describes the group’s strategy to act as “kingmaker” in next month’s election and claims it can control as many as 30 seats.

One Tory candidate in a winnable seat was repeatedly approached by a well-known Muslim figure offering large sums of money for his campaign if he signed up to Mend’s “Muslim manifesto.” The manifesto was launched last month at an event in Parliament attended by at least ten Labour and Conservative MPs, though there is no evidence any of them were paid by Mend. Lynton Crosby, the Conservative campaign director, has attended Mend events.

Mend’s director of engagement, Azad Ali, is an extremist who has supported the killing of British troops, praised the al-Qaeda ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki and said that “democracy, if it means at the expense of not implementing the Sharia, of course no-one agrees with that.”

Mend is holding a series of events this weekend with other extremist, anti-democratic speakers and has close links to the pro-terrorist lobby group Cage.

In a talk seen by the Telegraph at the Zakariyya Central Mosque in Bolton, Mr Ismail said a strong performance by the group’s chosen candidates could make it easier for British citizens to fight in Syria.

“David Cameron recently said that British Jews fighting for the IDF [Israeli army] will not be prosecuted,” Mr Ismail said.

“But British Muslims going to Syria fighting against Assad… will definitely face interrogation. Now do you think that if we landed those 20 seats or 30 seats, he [Cameron] would have the audacity to say that to the Muslim community? Not a chance!”

Mr Ismail also claimed that British society “hates us” and that British law specifically allowed violence against Muslims while protecting other groups.

“It’s not a crime to use violent or threatening words or behaviour [against Muslims],” he said.

“It’s perfectly OK under UK law to hate Islam and Muslims, it’s not a problem…if you’re Muslim, [the law says] you can take liberties big time, that’s why women are getting their hijabs ripped off.”

In fact, there were 550 prosecutions for religiously-aggravated hate crime – most of it anti-Muslim – last year and hundreds more for anti-Muslim crimes under the standard laws against assault and vandalism.

Mr Ismail claimed that a 2013 arson attack which destroyed a Muslim community centre in Muswell Hill had been condoned by the rest of society, saying: “Did you hear one politician condemn it? Even one politician? When was the last time you saw a church burnt to the ground – I bet you can’t think of one.”

The attack was widely condemned by politicians of all parties, including the London mayor, Boris Johnson, who described it as “cowardly” and “pathetic,” the Northern Ireland secretary and local MP, Theresa Villiers, who called it “despicable” and “an attack on all of us” and the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, who said it was a “hate crime.”

At least a dozen churches or church buildings have been burnt to the ground in arson attacks in recent years, and many others seriously damaged.

Mr Ismail also claimed that there were “500 physical attacks” on Muslims, “mainly women,” in London in 2013.

This was the total number of alleged Islamophobic crimes reported to police that year, the vast majority of which were not physical attacks on people.

He cited cases up to eight years old as showing that there was a wave of serious violence happening against Muslims “now” and stated that anti-Muslim hate crime had risen by “more than just about any other hate crime you can imagine.”

In fact, it has risen by less than many other forms of hate crime, including anti-Semitic and homophobic crime, both of which are also far greater per head of population.

The demand to legalise Syria fighters does not appear in Mend’s “Muslim manifesto.”

But the manifesto does demand that Whitehall builds links, cut under the coalition government, with non-violent Islamists.

It also says that “insulting” Islam should be made a criminal offence.

Mend strongly supports Cage and has held joint meetings with it, including in Manchester on November 28 last year. In another talk, at a mosque in Cheadle, Cheshire, Mr Ismail said Cage and another group linked to Syrian jihadis, IERA, “do a really good job.”

As well as Mr Niamatullah, the group also promotes Haitham al-Haddad, a hate preacher who describes democracy as “filthy” and says that “all the kuffar [an insulting term for non-Muslims] will go to hellfire.”

Haddad adds, however, that Muslims are “allowed to vote for a kafir [infidel] system in order to avoid a bigger kafir system taking power.”

Mr Ismail, a tax avoidance millionaire worth a reported £65 million, told the Bolton meeting how the group had organised to “batter the Israeli lobby” in the Commons.

Referring to the election, he said: “Right now, we are negotiating with the Labour leadership, we are negotiating with the Tory leadership and insh’allah [God willing] will start with the Lib Dem leadership as well, where we have a list of manifesto pledges.

“The Muslim vote is worth ten ordinary votes because… we are heavily concentrated in a few areas,” he said.

“Anybody who can give any one party 10, 20, 30 seats, like we can, they have to listen to you.”

Tory sources said Mr Crosby wanted nothing further to do with Mend and did not know why the group was approved to hold a fringe meeting.

However, the party did not respond to questions about Mend’s claim to be in “negotiations” with its leadership.

A Labour spokesman denied any negotiation, saying: “We receive submissions and requests from hundreds of organisations, but it is completely wrong to suggest Mend has any influence over Labour’s manifesto process.”

Obama Defers to Ban Ki MoonBat

Posted on April 4, 2015April 4, 2015 by Denise Simon

Gigantic global policy decisions are always deferred to the United Nations. Only recently did residents of Detroit appeal to the United Nations in the case of water. Countless residents in Detroit were not paying for water and it was shut-off so an appeal was made to the UNI declaring water is a right and no one needs to pay.

The U.N. has become dangerous. It has failed to disarm terrorist states like Iran, Iraq and the Sudan, and it has failed to halt nuclear proliferation in outlaw nations like North Korea, China and Iran. If the U.N. did not pose a danger to the future of America, we could just be amused by its failures and move on. But what’s amazing is how the U.N. has continued to exist as the defeats accumulate.
This is no small matter. This body is supposed to enforce world order, but it aids and abets mass murderers and genocide. It places some of the most despicable governments you can think of — Libya, Cuba, Sudan, China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe — on its Human Rights Council, which is supposed to uphold the highest standards in human rights protection. Yet the council is controlled by African and Middle Eastern countries, which vote in blocs and protect one another from criticism over their own human rights violations.

During the process of the P5+1 discussions with Iran on their nuclear program, Barack Obama has telegraphed that he is going to bypass Congress and take the framework/agreement to the United Nations for ratification. The scandals at the hands of the United Nations are historic and countless including the Oil for Food Program. The United States provides 22% of the United Nations budget and more than 27% of the UN Peacekeeping operations.

So it screams credulity on the causes of why all deference is delivered to the United Nations. Let’s go deeper.

Ban Ki Moon, age 70 is the Secretary General of the United Nations. The short bio on Ban Ki Moon reads as follows:

Ban Ki-moon is the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations. His priorities have been to mobilize world leaders around a set of new global challenges, from climate change and economic upheaval to pandemics and increasing pressures involving food, energy and water. He has sought to be a bridge-builder, to give voice to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, and to strengthen the Organization itself.

“I grew up in war”, the Secretary-General has said, “and saw the United Nations help my country to recover and rebuild. That experience was a big part of what led me to pursue a career in public service. As Secretary-General, I am determined to see this Organization deliver tangible, meaningful results that advance peace, development and human rights.”

Beyond the historic tragedy in human history, the Holocaust, there is yet another tragedy that is all but forgotten in history and Ban Ki Moon was derelict in his duty, the Khmer Rouge.

Justice Squandered: Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge Tribunal

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen was preparing to fight a civil war in 1997 when a senior United Nations official stopped by to ask if he’d like help putting the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge on trial. With a figurative wave of the hand, Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander himself, said in effect: Sure, go ahead. At that moment, his mind was obviously elsewhere.

Eventually, he and his co–prime minister, Norodom Ranariddh—the opposition in this little internal war—separately signed an agreement asking the UN for help staging a trial. But then, after Hun Sen defeated Ranariddh and became the nation’s sole leader, he probably looked back and realized that agreeing to a trial was one of the greatest mistakes he had ever made. After all, he and most of his colleagues in government were former Khmer Rouge officers themselves.

So, Hun Sen set out to sabotage the idea he had agreed to. And now, ten years after the court opened for business, he has largely succeeded.

Today, the court is saddled with charges of rampant corruption and malign Cambodian government interference in its operations. Several judges and staff members have quit in disgust. Its reputation is now so bad that donors have largely stopped giving money, so the court is broke. And the trials have dragged on for so long that defendants are growing ill and dying.

Theary Seng, who was left an orphan after the Khmer Rouge killed her parents, became the court’s first “civil party” victims’ representative. She withdrew from the proceedings in 2011, saying the trial had become “an irredeemable political farce.”

The problems began cropping up just as soon as the UN and the Cambodian government began negotiating the trial’s terms in the months following that initial agreement in 1997. Hun Sen and his aides threw up one objection after another. They professed concern about national stability. They complained about infringement upon Cambodian sovereignty. They insisted that any trial take place in home courts—even though Hun Sen knew full well that his court system was thoroughly corrupt. In fact, reforming the courts had been on his own campaign agenda during the most recent election. Today, that has still not been done.

“If foreigners have the right to lack confidence in Cambodian courts,” Hun Sen said defiantly, “we have the right to lack confidence in an international court.” But the UN continued to object to the government’s obstructive pronouncements and refused to use judges handpicked by, and utterly beholden to, Hun Sen and his aides.

“It became such a difficult, convoluted, lengthy, very, very difficult process,” said Kent Wiedemann, the US ambassador to Cambodia at that time, largely because “as far as the UN was concerned, there was no Cambodian qualified to participate in the tribunal in any meaningful way. The secretary general wanted to appoint judges with eminent standing in the international community.”

Finally, Kofi Annan, then secretary general of the UN, threw up his hands and said he’d had enough. Hun Sen must “change his position and attitude,” he declared, and “send a clear message that he is interested in a credible court, a credible tribunal which meets international standards.” Until that day came, Annan announced, the United Nations was backing out of the discussions.

Ten months later, however, the UN General Assembly stepped into the debate and rescinded Kofi Annan’s previous order. It passed a resolution directing “the secretary general to resume negotiations without delay, to conclude an agreement with the Government of Cambodia, based on previous negotiations, to try those suspected of being responsible for the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.”

So it was that the UN and Cambodia commenced negotiations over how the court would be structured, and eventually they agreed to establish a hybrid court with both Cambodian and international judges and prosecutors. They called it the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (widely known as the ECCC) to differentiate it from Cambodia’s debased domestic court system.

David Scheffer, who was the US ambassador at large for war crimes issues, visited Cambodia and came up with the compromise that made the negotiations succeed. Under Scheffer’s plan, a majority of the trial judges could be Cambodian. But no decision could be reached unless at least one international judge agreed as well. That formula settled six years of tortured, acrimonious debate. Finally, the court opened for business in 2003.

Two years later, David Tolbert, a United Nations lawyer working at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, got a call. Could he please go to Cambodia and try to straighten out the war crimes courtroom there? Nothing was moving. The court was stuck.

Tolbert, a tall, garrulous North Carolinian with a world-weary manner, was to bring his experiences in the heart of the world’s worst recent genocidal moments to Cambodia, where a past genocide was being litigated. The problems he found there were altogether different from the ones he had been dealing with. The court had been trying to organize itself for several years, but Tolbert says that when he arrived, “it had no administrative leadership, particularly with respect to court management, including translation and interpretation and the witness-protection program.”

The international side had essentially given over judicial management to the Cambodian side. But, Tolbert says, “there was really very little judicial management in place. The Cambodian staff in charge had virtually no knowledge or experience, as most had no judicial background. And yet there were a large number of them,” hundreds in fact. What’s more, Cambodian human rights groups alleged that each of the Cambodian judges had paid a large bribe to get his seat on the court’s bench, which would not be at all unusual in that state.

Tolbert concluded that there was no way a trial could proceed at that point. He spent a few weeks drawing up a series of recommendations to get the process moving. Then he returned to Yugoslavia.

In 2008, when the new UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, asked Tolbert to step back into the Khmer Rouge trial, he quickly found that five years after the agreement to set up the court, “very little progress had been made. I proposed reducing the budget by 35 percent. The staff was bloated. They had 15 gardeners, which looked like a job-creation program to me.” He also quickly found that Cambodia’s endemic corruption had reared its head in the courthouse, where Cambodian employees were required to turn over a portion of their paychecks to their supervisors.

All during Hun Sen’s battle with the United Nations about the trial, he had been trying to ensure that the UN did not set up an autonomous body inside his country that he could not manipulate to protect himself and his fellow former Khmer Rouge friends. But as he and the rest of the world soon discovered, the Khmer Rouge trial presented a new and different liability. It exposed Cambodia’s way of doing business—incompetent, indolent, rapacious, corrupt—for everyone in the world to see, like a dollhouse with no back wall.

Despite all of that, the court proceeded with the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, widely known as “Duch”—the commander of S-21, the prison and interrogation and torture center in Phnom Penh, where fifteen thousand people died. On July 26, 2010, the court convicted Duch of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to thirty-five years in prison—by almost every reaction, an exceedingly light sentence for a man who oversaw the torture and deaths of so many thousands of innocent civilians. Even with that, he won’t serve the full thirty-five years. After subtracting his time already spent in jail, more for cooperation and good behavior, and still more for a period of illegal detention in a military jail, the court left him with nineteen years to serve. On the day the judge sentenced Duch, he was sixty-seven years old, meaning he could conceivably walk out of prison a free man one day.

After that, the court took up what it called Case 002, four senior Khmer Rouge leaders who were to be tried together. At the same time, more than a dozen legal investigators, foreigners on the UN payroll, were researching new suspects. And in the fall of 2009, the court announced that it intended to charge roughly half a dozen additional suspects. These were labeled cases 003 and 004.

But Hun Sen, implacably opposed, almost instantly went on the offensive. The prime minister was already well known for his “colorful” quips. For example, he had labeled anyone criticizing the trial’s Cambodian judges as “not human; they are animals,” who “even want to seduce their own parents.” Now, referring to the additional defendants, he insisted, “This will not happen on my watch. The UN and the countries that supported Pol Pot to occupy Cambodia’s seat at the UN from 1979 to 1991 should be tried first. They should be sentenced more heavily than Pol Pot.”

Then later that year, undeterred by its illogic, he took up a new line of argument. “If you want a tribunal, but you don’t want to consider peace and reconciliation, and war breaks out again, killing two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand people, who will be responsible?” he asked. “Finally, I have got peace in this country, so I will not let someone destroy it. The people and the nation will not be destroyed by someone trying to lead the country into instability.”

No one bothered to point out that during the Duch trial, there was no unrest, no protest, no sign of any trouble at all. In fact, the vast majority of Cambodians were largely unaware that the trial was under way. Eighty percent of the people live in the countryside, most of them with no modern conveniences such as radio or television. They’re uniformly preoccupied with finding enough food to feed their families each day. The trial was on during the day, when they were at work in the rice paddies. The few who did have car battery–powered televisions, if they had time to watch them, most likely just wanted to be entertained.

Some of the handful who did watch, largely in urban areas, were outraged by the treatment the defendants were getting—three meals a day, hand-delivered; living in air-conditioned cells; sleeping on actual beds with mattresses, a luxury in Cambodia. Bou Meng, a Khmer Rouge survivor, remarked: “I am extremely envious of Duch and the treatment he receives. I don’t understand why the court treats him so well, much better than me.” But most preferred to ignore the trial.

One reason was that many older Cambodians were beset with traumatic mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, still lingering after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge years. (In one clinical study of Cambodian refugees who came to the United States in the early 1980s and now live in Long Beach, California, sixty-two percent were diagnosed with PTSD—twenty-five years after their trauma.) The last thing most people in Cambodia wanted to do was watch someone on TV describing their years of horror.

Hun Sen blocked several past and present Cambodian officials from testifying, despite subpoenas from the court. And a Cambodian judge he appointed to the ECCC had a documented history of accepting bribes in exchange for verdicts while he presided over a Cambodian court.

But while Hun Sen’s frontal attacks may have been little noticed by most Cambodians, they had a strong effect in the courtroom. One international judge resigned, blaming government interference in the proceedings, as did half of one defendant’s defense team. A reserve justice, Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, who is Swiss, was promoted to fill the empty judge’s chair, per ECCC protocol. Kasper-Ansermet then tweeted that he looked forward to hearing cases 003 and 004. That was enough to do him in.

On obvious orders from the prime minister’s office, his domestic co-judge refused to work with Kasper-Ansermet. He was denied use of court cars and drivers. He was not given access to the official stamps used to validate affidavits and other court records. And the Cambodian government’s Supreme Council of Magistracy refused to approve his appointment—even though this domestic body answerable to Hun Sen had no authority to involve itself in the appointment of international judges.

After less than six months, Kasper-Ansermet resigned because, as he said, he was unable to work with rampant Cambodian obstructionism. Nearly all of the international investigators quit, too.

For many legal experts today, the ECCC remains an embarrassment to the international legal system. Since its inception in 2003, the court has tried only one individual for the horrific genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge: Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch, giving him a sentence so light that many Cambodians were appalled. Just one conviction and the court reports that it has already spent $208.7 million over the last ten years. Last year it asked for another $92 million from international donors to fund operations going forward.

But by all accounts donor fatigue has set in alongside disillusionment with Cambodian corruption and obstructionism, and very little money has been raised. In fact, this spring the court’s Cambodian staff went on strike because they had not been paid since last November. Without staff, including court reporters, transcribers, and translators, the court could not function. It shut down. Finally the court management promised to pay them—“sometime soon.” The staff went back to work but vowed to quit for good if the promise was not kept. Still, as international court officials repeatedly pointed out, the Cambodian government was responsible for paying these people. Apparently it was not unhappy to see the court shut down.

That was hardly the only problem. The four former Khmer Rouge leaders in case 002—Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea, Ieng Thirith, and —looked likely to be the final defendants. But all of them were already so old that they were making the case moot.

Last September, Ieng Thirith, minister of social action in the Pol Pot regime, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, so severe that she could not function in the courtroom. She was released. Then in March 2013, Ieng Sary, her husband and former minster of foreign affairs, died. He was eighty-seven years old.

That left only eighty-six-year-old Nuon Chea, who was known as “Brother No. 2” after Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, eighty-one, former president of the so-called Democratic State of Kampuchea. Both are frail and sickly.

The court has said it will need another year to complete these trials. Whether there will ever be a verdict, and if there is, whether the remaining defendants will live to see it, are questions on everyone’s mind. Also, we can’t know what deleterious acts Hun Sen may still have planned.

As the Cambodian government’s Office of the Royal Prosecutor recently put it: The prime minister “has an obligation to ensure political stability and the well being of the Kingdom of Cambodia,” suggesting that Hun Sen can do whatever he wants about the trial and say his actions are intended to assure “stability.”

But Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, is pessimistic—like so many Cambodians. “This really is a case of now or never,” he said. “Both the ECCC’s reputation and justice for victims of the Khmer Rouge are in the last-chance saloon.”

One last question: Where was Jane Fonda on the Khmer Rouge?

Iran Parameter Framework by the Numbers

Posted on April 3, 2015April 3, 2015 by Denise Simon

To see the Iran parameters framework by the numbers and with charts, click here.

In what represents the worst aspect of this flawed deal, Obama has placed responsibility for verification of the agreement back on the United Nations. This is a hazardous repeat of the flawed UN response to Iraq’s proliferation after the Gulf War. Simply put, the UN Security Council will have veto powers over anything Iranian and nuclear when it comes to verification. This gives Beijing, and even more Moscow, a critical lever over the process.

We’ve seen this movie before, with Iraq in the 1990s. Charles Duelfer, who led the UN’s nuclear inspection regime in Iraq from 1993 to 2000, has termed this the “fatal flaw” of Obama’s deal, and that may be charitable. Yeltsin’s Russia was not very cooperative about Baghdad’s nuclear game-playing, and we should expect Putin’s Kremlin, which is engaged in Cold War 2.0 against the West, to be anything but helpful.

While Tehran and Moscow have no love for each other, between mutual fear and loathing, they both hate the West more, and any deal that puts Putin’s Kremlin in a verification role over Iran’s nuclear program is a farce, not to mention a strategic delusion. At worst, this may give a strategic partnership between Russia and Iran, which has been growing slowly, a new life, with an explicitly anti-Western focus. None of this can be mistaken for good news for the West.

After years of painstaking effort, the Obama administration has managed to craft a framework agreement with Iran. In the next three months, this structure is meant to be filled out with details regarding the scale of Iran’s enrichment capacity and the stages of sanctions relief. If the devil is in the detail, much mischief may await us.

However, even before all this happens, the Iranian nuclear drama is proving to be one of the most curious arms control episodes in history. As the scale of American concessions becomes evident, the White House and its defenders seldom justify the emerging accord strictly on terms of the proliferation threat that remains. Their response is often limited to claiming that an admittedly imperfect agreement is still preferable to the alternatives. And the alternatives are usually painted in hysterical terms with Iran surging toward the bomb, the sanctions regime collapsing and an isolated United States helplessly watching all this unfold. Not for the first time, the Obama administration is demonstrating a poor understanding of Iran’s strategies, the resilience of the sanctions regime and the nature of the international system.

By this time the essential contours of the agreement are all obvious. The accord will leave Iran with a sizeable enrichment capacity and none of its facilities will be shuttered as was once contemplated. The agreement’s most important sunset clause will be 10 years upon whose expiration, all essential restriction on Iran’s enrichment infrastructure will collapse. In essence, Iran can then move toward an industrial-size nuclear program similar to that of Japan. This means that the Islamic Republic will be in a position to manufacture numerous bombs on short order. The ballistic missiles, which are an essential part of any nuclear weapons program, will be excluded from the deal. And previous Iranian experiments with the military dimension of nuclear energy are postponed from scrutiny. Thus, any verification regime will not be informed by the history of Iran’s clandestine program.

The proponents of this deal have to account for why they are not bothered by such a large residual enrichment capacity. Why do they think a sunset clause is a wise idea? Why do they believe ballistic missiles should be ignored and how can once craft an intrusive verification system that has no historical memory? An arms control agreement has to be justified first and foremost on technical grounds and whether it meets the essential non-proliferation standards.

The path that the proponents of this accord have chosen is to avoid such questions and take refuge in the world of ominous alternatives. One of their favorite talking points is to suggest that coercion has not forestalled Iran’s nuclear path and that since 2003 as sanctions were imposed Iran has gone from 200 to 19,000 centrifuges. They neglect to mention that only approximately 9,500 of those machines are operational. Thus, during this period Iran increased its capacity by an average of 800 centrifuges a year. Although this is hardly ideal it is not an unmanageable situation. The notion that without this agreement Iran would immediately surge to a bomb is belied by the evidence that the proponents of this accord present.

Beyond that what is often missed is that Iran’s ingenious strategy is to advance its program incrementally and not provocatively. Iran has always been cautious to step and not leap forward. This way as Iran’s program inches forward, the international community routinely accedes to its new gains. In absence of an agreement, Iran will certainly take measures to advance its program, but those moves are likely to be cautious and incremental so to avoid a military reaction.

It is often suggested that should there be breakdown in the talks, the sanctions regime will collapse. The European states and Asian powers will rush back into Iran in defiance of American prohibitions. This notion ignores the fact that U.S. sanctions are secondary in nature, meaning that if there is European bank or an Asian firm that wishes to invest in Iran then it will lose its access to the U.S. market. There is no way that such firms will risk losing access to a U.S. economy estimated at $16.8 trillion dollars for sake of an Iranian economy of $368 billion. To be frank, the U.S. sanctions can success even if there is a perception that they are unfair. That is one of the advantages of being a superpower with the largest economy in the world.

None of this means the Iran deal is beyond repair. In the next three months, Secretary of State John Kerry has an opportunity to craft an agreement that addresses some of the deficiencies of the framework accord. He may wish to reconsider the wisdom of such a shortened sunset clause. The need for Iran to come clean on all its previous attempts at nuclear weaponization is critical if the agreement is to have a reliable inspection regime. And the ballistic missiles that are already part of UN resolutions should be addressed as part of this agreement and not separately. Finally, there has to be a mechanism in place for how to deal with Iranian violations. The history of arms control suggests that violations are rarely prosecuted and reversed in a timely manner.

Should he do so, he would have forged a deal that reliably restrains Iran’s nuclear appetite, enjoys bipartisan support at home and is embraced by our allies in the region. And that agreement would be worthy of the appellation historic.

Who is that Woman Standing Next to You?

Posted on April 3, 2015April 3, 2015 by Denise Simon

How One Philadelphia Woman Tweeted Her Way to Federal Terrorism-Related Charges

April 3, 2015 In the case of one Philadelphia woman with aspirations to join the Islamic State, retweets do equal endorsements.

The Justice Department charged Keonna Thomas, 30, on Friday with “knowingly attempting to provide material support and resources, including herself as personnel, to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” the Islamic State. Starting about two years ago, Thomas—who also went by two aliases, Fatayat Al Khilafah and YoungLioness—allegedly began communicating with known jihadi fighters online and using social media to advocate on the terrorist organization’s behalf.

If convicted, Thomas faces 15 years in prison.

Thomas is the third American woman in two days to be charged with a crime related to terrorism. But whereas the two New York City women charged Thursday were operating in real life, it seems Thomas’s activity online tipped off investigators.

Much of the criminal complaint against Thomas focuses on her Twitter habits, detailing several incriminating tweets and retweets. (All claims are alleged until proven in court.) Here’s a sampling from the indictment:

• On December 17, 2013, Thomas retweeted a message by another user that read ” ‘Happiness is the day of my martyrdom’ – Sheikh Khalid al Husainan.’ ” On January 4, 2014, she tweeted, “Only thing I’m jealous of is when I see the smiles of shuhadda,” which refers to martyrs.

• On January 30, 2014, Thomas retweeted a photograph of an individual carrying an AK-47, with an accompanying message that read: “Sponsor a Mujahid,” a jihadi fighter.

• On April 4, 2014, she posted images of a gun, skull, and flames on Twitter, along with a message: “I need a permanent vacation that can only mean one thing.”

• On June 23, 2014, she tweeted: “When you’re a mujahid, your death becomes a wedding.”

• By December 2014, Thomas’s Twitter rhetoric had escalated, and she had begun to email with a known Islamic State fighter overseas. On December 2, Thomas wrote a message that read: “If we truly knew the realities … we all would be rushing to join our brothers in the front lines pray ALLAH accept us as shuhada,” or martyrs. Four days after, she reposted a photo of a young boy armed with an AK-47. The image was accompanied by a message that read: “And if I were in Shaam,” referring to Syria, “I wouldn’t be pleased till I became soldier of the Islamic State.”

• In February of this year, Thomas applied for a U.S. passport. The same month, she emailed the Islamic State fighter to say that she had deactivated her Twitter account in preparation for her travel to Syria. “[D]on’t want to draw attention of the kuffar [non-believers] and it mess my plans and they take my pass port and i get stuck here.”

In March, Thomas purchased an electronic visa to Turkey, a common transit point for people trying to reach Syria from Europe, but she never made it to either country. She had broken the most important rule of the 21st century. No, not the rule against trying to join an overseas terrorist group that has repeatedly threatened your country and its allies (although that’s really bad). Thomas broke the first tenet of the Internet: Don’t tweet something you wouldn’t want on the front page of The New York Times.