Category Archives: Cyber War

Did Obama Miss that Ayatollah Tweet to Barack?

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Iran’s supreme leader tweeted a graphic Saturday that appears to depict President Obama holding a gun to his head as Britain relaxed its travel advice to the nation, citing decreased hostility under the Iranian government.

“US president has said he could knock out Iran’s military. We welcome no war, nor do we initiate any war, but..” reads the caption above the tweet sent by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on @khamenei_ir, his English language account.

Khamenei’s account has not been verified by Twitter but is widely believed to be the supreme leader’s based on its content, which often rails against the United States and Israel. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani also has an unverified Twitter account, @HassanRouhani.

The latest tweet on Khamenei’s account mirrors a similar one sent July 17 that didn’t contain an image, but said: “US pres. said he could knock out Iran’s army. Of course we neither welcome, nor begin war, but in case of war, US will leave it disgraced.”

That tweet came just three days after the United States and other world powers reached a historic agreement with Iran that called for limits on Tehran’s nuclear program in return for lifting economic sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy.

Meanwhile, the British government eased its travel advice to Iran on Saturday, saying it no longer advises “against all but essential travel to the rest of Iran” and has “updated our advice to provide greater clarity on the risks that may affect British nationals traveling to Iran.”

The government still maintains its advice to avoid travel in some areas, particularly along Iran’s borders. “Our policy is to recommend against travel to an area when we judge that the risk is unacceptably high. We consider that continues to be the case for specific areas of Iran, notably along Iran’s borders with Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in a statement.

“But we believe that in other areas of Iran the risk to British nationals has changed, in part due to decreasing hostility under President Rouhani’s government,” he added.

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Congress Alarmed by Iran Pact’s Secret Understandings

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As the White House campaign to persuade Congress about the wisdom of its Iran nuclear deal moves into its second week, important components of the complex agreement are emerging that will be shrouded from the public and in some cases from the U.S. government itself.

The existence of these secret clauses and interpretations could undermine the public’s trust in the Barack Obama administration’s presentations about the nuclear pact. Already Republicans and other critics of the deal have seized on the side agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency as a weakness in the deal closed last week in Vienna.

The controversy began on Wednesday when Secretary of State John Kerry told House lawmakers behind closed doors that he neither possessed nor had read a copy of two secret side deals between the IAEA and Iran, according to Representative Mike Pompeo, a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee who was inside the session. Congress hasn’t seen those side agreements either.

“Kerry told me directly that he has not read the secret side deals,” Pompeo told us in an interview. “He told us the State Department does not have possession of these documents.”

In other cases, secret understandings were provided to legislators. Congress on Monday was given a set of non-public interpretations of the Iran deal, according to House and Senate staffers who have seen the documents. These were part of 18 documents the White House provided to Congress as required under legislation passed this spring that gives Congress 60 days to review the Iran deal.

Of the 18 documents, six are classified or confidential, the staffers told us. These include secret letters of understanding between the U.S. and France, Germany and the U.K. that spell out some of the more ambiguous parts of the agreement, and classified explanations of the Iran deal’s provisions that commit other countries to provide Iran with research and development assistance on its nuclear program. There is also a draft of the U.S. statement to be made public on the day the Iran agreement formally goes into effect.

Those are the secret understandings Congress and the administration have put on paper. But in the case of the side agreements with the IAEA, Congress and the executive branch may not have all the facts. In Wednesday’s closed session, Kerry sparred with Pompeo, who last weekend traveled with Republican Senator Tom Cotton to Vienna last weekend to meet with IAEA officials. Those agency representatives told the lawmakers the that two secret side deals covered how the IAEA would be able to inspect the Parchin military complex and how the IAEA and Iran would resolve concerns about the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program.

The briefing for lawmakers was classified, but the Kerry-Pompeo exchange was not. Pompeo pressed Kerry on the details of the side agreements between the IAEA and Iran. Kerry acknowledged he didn’t know all of the specifics.

A statement distributed by the State Department on Wednesday disputed the characterization that the agreements between Iran and the IAEA were “secret.” Instead, it described them as “technical arrangements” and said U.S. experts were “comfortable with the contents,” which the State Department would brief to Congress if asked.

“It is standard practice for the IAEA and member states to treat bilateral documents as ‘safeguards confidential,'” the State Department statement said. “This is a principal the United States has championed throughout the IAEA’s existence to protect both proprietary and proliferation sensitive information. We must be able to ensure that information given to the IAEA does not leak out and become a how to guide for producing nuclear materials that can be used in nuclear weapons, and that countries know their patented or proprietary information won’t be stolen because they are released in IAEA documents.”

But while these agreements may be standard operating procedure in the case of other IAEA nuclear inspections, with Iran it’s potentially more serious. On Thursday, during an open session before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Senator James Risch said his understanding was that one of the IAEA-Iran side agreements would allow Iran to take its own environmental samples at Parchin. Speaking around the specifics, Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the committee, compared this arrangement to the NFL allowing athletes suspected of taking steroids to mail in their own urine samples.

Kerry and others have told Congress that the agreement about Parchin and the understandings about IAEA inspections in general are largely technical and do not weaken a strong agreement. Needless to say, Pompeo disagrees. “Kerry gave no indications they are seeking these documents and there is no indication he is the least bit worried he doesn’t have access to this. The Ayatollah knows what’s in the deal but we don’t,” he told us, referring to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

For the Obama administration, not having copies of the side agreements between Iran and the IAEA is convenient. The law requires it to give Congress all the documents it possesses and only those documents. If the side agreements are outside the reach of Kerry, they are outside the reach of Congress and the American people.

On the other hand, that fact undermines Obama’s argument that the overall deal can be verified and is transparent. Already Iranian leaders have publicly spoken about the Iran deal in terms vastly different from their American counterparts. The existence of secret understandings of that deal will only exacerbate this tension over time.

 

Secret Service On the Anti-Govt Crowd on the Internet

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The Secret Agents Who Stake Out the Ugliest Corners of the Internet

From the Atlantic:

Josephine Wolff

 

A team tasked with protecting the president of the United States is constantly sifting through hateful online comments to find would-be assassins or terrorists.

When President Obama launched his Twitter account in May, people noticed his rapid accumulation of followers, a silly back-and-forth with President Clinton, but also something more serious: the number of hostile and threatening messages directed at the president.

Sifting through those messages to determine which, if any, need to be taken seriously is the responsibility of the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk, a group of agents tasked with identifying and assessing online threats to the president and his family. The first part of this mission—finding threats—is in many ways made easier by the Internet: all you have to do is search! Pulling up every tweet which uses the words “Obama” and “assassinate” takes mere seconds, and the Secret Service has tried to make it easier for people to draw threats to its attention by setting up its own Twitter handle, @secretservice, for users to report threatening messages to.

But if the Internet makes it easier to find threats directed at the president, it can also make it harder to figure out which ones should be taken seriously. The sheer volume of threatening messages online, the lack of context, and the ease with which users can shield their identities all contribute to the challenges of assessing online threats. One series of tweets addressed to @POTUS that caught the Secret Service’s attention—at least enough to warrant an in-person visit from an agent—came from a user with the handle @jeffgully49 and included a picture showing a doctored version of the president’s campaign posters with his head in a noose and the word “HOPE” changed to “ROPE.” The messages were apparently posted by Jeff Gullickson of Plymouth, Minnesota, who was later visited at his home by a Secret Service agent. “The agent from the secret service was cordial,” Gullickson wrote in an email to MPR News, adding that the agent just wanted to be sure his tweets were not serious threats.

Making sure that Gullickson was not a threat required more than just an analysis of his online comments—it called for offline contact, an in-person visit, an assessment of who he was and what he was like face-to-face, not just on the Internet. Context is crucial for evaluating the seriousness of threats—both digital and analog—but online threats offer a slightly different set of contextual clues than their offline counterparts. And while much of the hate-filled commentary on the Internet is routinely written off as hyperbole and ranting, threats directed at the president are not so easily dismissed. So, every day, the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk is faced with the unenviable task of taking seriously some of the most extreme online rhetoric and trying to identify potential assassins or terrorists in the deluge of venomous messages directed at the president and his family.

Though most of the public cases involving the Internet threat desk have to do with threats made via Twitter or Facebook, the desk actually predates both platforms. Founded in 2000, the desk was reportedly expanded in 2009 around the same time that threats against President Obama spiked in the early months of his first term. Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service, said that when he visited the Internet threat desk several years ago it was “just a small room with a few people,” but added, “I’m sure it’s much bigger now.” Secret Service spokesman Robert Hoback declined to comment.

Since the Internet threat desk’s founding, Kessler said, more of the threats the Secret Service assesses have originated online, but the overall number of threats directed at the first family that require investigation has stayed relatively steady at about 10 per day—except for the period when Obama was first elected, when the Secret Service had to follow up on roughly 50 threats per day. “That includes threats on Twitter,” Kessler said. “It makes no difference to [the Secret Service] how a threat is communicated,” he added. “They can’t take that chance of assuming that because it’s on Twitter it’s less serious.”

The Secret Service categorizes all threats, online and offline alike, into one of three categories, according to Kessler. Class 3 threats are considered the most serious, and require agents to interview the individual who issued the threat and any acquaintances to determine whether that person really has the capability to carry out the threat. Class 2 threats are considered to be serious but issued by people incapable of actually follow up on their intentions, either because they are in jail or located at a great distance from the president. And Class 1 threats are those that may seem serious at first, but are determined not to be.

Classifying threats into these categories is partly a matter of wording and specificity—whether the speaker has developed a detailed plan, whether they state that they will kill the president or just that someone should kill the president—but also depends largely on the background of the people who issue them. “The Secret Service looks at whether this person has expressed similar plans previously, whether this person has a criminal record, or is mentally ill,” Kessler said. Presumably, that’s why an agent showed up at Gullickson’s house—to assess the person who issued the Twitter threat, not just the threat itself.

At a 2011 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, then-Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan emphasized the importance of identifying the people who threaten the president for Secret Service investigations. “When I was a new agent, a lot of times if you got a threat, it would come in the mail, and if the person who was making the threat was very courteous, they would put their return address on there. You would know who to go out and talk to,” Sullivan said. “But regardless of whether it is by mail or over the internet, our people are extremely aggressive with [figuring out who issued threats] … when we do identify that individual who has made that threat or that inappropriate interest that they are displaying, whether it is 2 o’clock in the morning or 2 o’clock in the afternoon, our people are out there looking for that individual to interview them.”

But the Secret Service can’t very well interview everyone who directs hostile comments at the president online—there are just too many of them—especially as the government’s embrace of social media platforms creates an increasing number of channels for lashing out at the president. “What you’ve done with the POTUS Twitter account is created a one-stop shopping for people who don’t like the president to blow off steam and convey their view that they don’t like the president,” said University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron. “That could perfectly well be political protest: ‘I hate you and I want to throw you in the river’ could mean ‘I hate your ideas and want to throw them in the river,’ or it could mean ‘I’m a neo-Nazi and I want to kill you because you’re a black president.’ For the president, [the Secret Service] is going to err on the side of over-inclusion and more false positives.”

Paring down those false positives may be even more of a challenge online than off. The Internet threat desk “comb[s] the internet” and has people “working 24 hours a day just going through the Internet looking for any type of buzzwords or any type of threatening or inappropriate activity out there that we may see that involves any of our protectees,” Sullivan said at the 2011 hearing.

In other words, the Secret Service is actively seeking out threats made online, rather than waiting for others to report them, or for the people issuing threats to contact the White House directly. “Online threats are much more findable—I can set up some structured queries and find out who’s making threats in real time,” said Andy Sellars, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “You can essentially have a column on TweetDeck for every time someone says ‘president’ and ‘kill’ in the same tweet. A lot of tools being sold to law enforcement are basically just glorified versions of TweetDeck.”

Finding the threats is the easy part, though. “It’s a lot easier to figure out the context of speech in the physical world than in the online world,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “You need that context in order to see what that speech really means.”

The cases that the Secret Service has pursued in recent years offer some clues as to which types of threats they seem to take most seriously. Repeat offenders, unsurprisingly, seem to come in for particular attention. For instance, Jarvis Britton of Birmingham, Alabama, was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison in 2013 after posting a series of tweets over the course of several months. In a 2012 affidavit, Secret Service Special Agent Phillip Holly described the series of events that led up to Britton’s arrest, beginning with two tweets on June 28, 2012, that read: “Free speech? Really? Let’s test this! Let’s kill the president!” and “I’m going to finish this, if they get me, they get me! #ohwell. I think we could get the president with cyanide. #MakeItSlow.” The next day, Britton tweeted “Barack Obama, I wish you were DEAD!”

Following the June tweets, the Secret Service spoke with Britton and advised him of “the seriousness of the matter,” according to Holly, but “no further action was taken” until Britton resumed tweeting threats several months later. On September 14, 2012, he posted the message “Let’s kill the president. F.E.A.R.” After learning of the September threats from the Internet Threat Desk, Holly concludes: “Based upon the foregoing, I have probable cause to believe that Jarvis M. Britton did knowingly and willfully threaten to take the life of, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.”

Donte Jamar Sims of Charlotte, North Carolina, was also sentenced in 2013 to serve jail time for a series of threatening tweets directed at the president. Sims’ tweets, posted during the 2012 Democratic National Convention, included the messages: “Ima Assassinate president Obama this evening!” and “The Secret Service is gonna be defenseless once I aim the Assault Rifle at Barack’s Forehead.”

The Internet Threat Desk’s investigations are not limited to Twitter. One 2012 investigation centered on a Facebook photo of several young men from Arizona posing with guns and a T-shirt with the president’s face on it riddled with bullet holes. A 2008 case focused on a series of pseudonymous comments made by the user californiaradial on the Yahoo Finance website, including “Shoot the nig. Country fkd for another 4 years+, what nig has done ANYTHING right???? Long term???? Never in history, except sambos.” And “Fk the niggar, he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” In court documents, Special Agent Gregory Becker identified californiaradial as Walter Edward Bagdasarian after the Internet Threat Desk “obtained the IP address from which the messages had been sent, as well as the subscriber information for that account.”

When people who issue online threats are identified, they sometimes try to provide context for those threats that might excuse their behavior. Sims, for instance, claimed he was high on marijuana when he threatened the president. Britton’s lawyer similarly insisted his client had no intentions to actually harm the president. Other times, the real world context of online threats makes them seems more concerning—when the Secret Service searched Bagdasarian’s house, they found a .50 caliber rifle among his possessions, which appeared to lend credence to the prediction “he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.”

Ultimately, however, it is the content of the threat itself—not the context—that seems to matter most in court. Sims, Britton, and Bagdasarian all allegedly issued multiple violent threats at the president in online forums. But Sims and Britton were sent to jail, regardless of the claims both made about their respective mental states when they issued the threats—while Bagdasarian’s conviction was ultimately reversed by a federal appeals court in California because he had not specifically said that he himself would kill the president but, rather, suggested more generally that someone should do so.

Making these distinctions between the people who really intended harm—the people who, in legal language, issued threats that they should have reasonably foreseen would be interpreted as “serious expressions of intent to inflict bodily harm upon that person”—and the people who were merely venting political frustrations or indulging in some hyperbolic anger is a very murky area of law, particularly when it comes to online threats. “It is harder to separate the wheat from the chaff online,” said Fakhoury, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, of distinguishing “true threats” from speech that is protected by the First Amendment. “Part of that is the speed with which people can communicate online, part of it is that people are somewhat removed from what they say online, part of it is the breadth of the audience that exists online,” he explained.

The ease with which anyone can fire off a threat to the president’s Twitter account does not necessarily make such threats less concerning, Citron noted. “Sometimes people say online threats are never to be taken seriously because we’re behind a screen and we tend to just kind of mouth off without thinking, but on the other hand when someone writes something down then there’s the perception that its thoughtful—someone took the time to write this down,” she said.

“The anonymous part doesn’t make it less threatening, but it makes it harder for us to gauge whether it’s a joke or not.”

Many online threats are not even anonymous, Sellars pointed out. “People are making a shocking number of these threats posting on Facebook using their real names,” he said, calling to mind Sullivan’s comment about the letter writers who included their return addresses.

In a recent decision for the case Elonis v. United States, about a man accused of threatening his wife on Facebook, the Supreme Court avoided establishing any clear test for how to identify true threats online. Their decision to dodge the issue leaves not just the Secret Service but everyone who is the victim of online harassment to figure out how to draw the line between true threats and free speech on the Internet.

When it comes to protecting the president, however, that distinction may not be so vital, either online or offline. Kessler noted, “Actual assassinations are usually not preceded by threats.”

Iran Deal, Deviled Details White House is Avoiding

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Iran Inspections in 24 Days? Not Even Close

Hillel Fradkin & Lewis Libby

The Obama administration assures Americans that the Iran deal grants access within 24 days to undeclared but suspected Iranian nuclear sites. But that’s hardly how a recalcitrant Iran is likely to interpret the deal. A close examination of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action released by the Obama administration reveals that its terms permit Iran to hold inspectors at bay for months, likely three or more.

Paragraphs 74 to 78 govern the International Atomic Energy Agency’s access to suspect sites. First, the IAEA tells Iran “the basis” of its concerns about a particular location, requesting clarification. At this point Iran will know where the IAEA is headed. Iran then provides the IAEA with “explanations” to resolve IAEA concerns. This stage has no time limit.

Opportunities for delay abound. Iran will presumably want to know what prompted the IAEA’s concern. The suspect site identified by the IAEA is likely to be remote, and Iran will no doubt say that it must gather skilled people and equipment to responsibly allay IAEA concerns. Iran may offer explanations in stages, seeking IAEA clarifications before “completing” its response. That could take a while.

Only if Iran’s “explanations do not resolve the IAEA’s concerns” may the IAEA then “request access” to the suspect site. Oddly, the agreement doesn’t specify who judges whether the explanations resolve concerns. If Iran claims that it has a say in the matter, the process may stall here. Assuming Iran grants that the IAEA can be the judge, might Iran claim that the “great Satan” improperly influenced IAEA conclusions? Let’s assume that Tehran won’t do that.

Now the IAEA must provide written reasons for the request and “make available relevant information.” Let’s assume that even though the IAEA may resist revealing the secret sources or technical means that prompted its suspicions, Iran acknowledges that a proper request has been supplied.

Only then do the supposed 24 days begin to run. First, Iran may propose, and the IAEA must consider, alternative means of resolving concerns. This may take 14 days. Absent satisfactory “arrangements,” a new period begins.

During this period Iran, “in consultation with” the Joint Commission, will “resolve” the IAEA concerns “through necessary means agreed between Iran and the IAEA.” The Joint Commission includes China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K, the U.S., the European Union and, of course, Iran. Not exactly a wieldy bunch.

The Iranians will likely claim that “consultation” with the Joint Commission doesn’t bind Tehran, just as the U.S. president isn’t bound by consultations with Congress. The agreement says the consultation process will not exceed seven days, but Iran can point out that the nuclear deal doesn’t specify when Iran and the IAEA must reach agreement and “resolve” IAEA concerns.

In the absence of Iran-IAEA agreement, a majority of the Joint Commission has seven days to “advise” on the “necessary means” to resolve the matter. Iran may fairly argue that the commission’s right to “advise” is not the same as a right to “determine” the “necessary means.” Lastly, the agreement provides that “Iran would implement the necessary means within 3 additional days.” But what “necessary means” are these? As noted, the agreement refers to “necessary means agreed between Iran and the IAEA.” So these additional three days don’t even begin until an agreement is reached.

Now what? Well, the U.S. may take a “Dispute” to the Joint Commission, on which Iran sits, which has 15 days to resolve the issue. Parties may or may not invoke a similar 15 days for foreign ministers to act. Parties may also request a nonbinding opinion within 15 days from an advisory board consisting of three members, one appointed by Iran, one by the complaining country and “a third independent member.”

But Iran may argue that nothing in the nuclear deal specifies how quickly a country must appoint its advisory-board member or even how the “independent member” is selected. In short, this stage may take at least 30 days and possibly 45 of consideration at the different levels, but Iran may argue that the last 15 days don’t start until an advisory board has been duly formed. Then we get another five days of Joint Commission deliberation, before a disappointed U.S. or other commission member seeking IAEA inspections can hobble off to the United Nations seeking resolutions reimposing sanctions.

In short, as Iran is free to interpret the agreement, 63 or even 78 days may pass, plus three potentially lengthy periods that Iran can stretch out: One of “explanations” before the clock starts, one to agree on necessary means and “resolve concerns,” and one for advisory-board selection near the end.

So from the moment the IAEA first tips its hand about what it wants to inspect, likely three or more months may pass. All along, the Joint Commission is required to act in “good faith,” and to make only “minimum necessary” requests limited to verification, not “interference.” Tehran could also cite these terms to challenge particular requests.

The description of this process is based on the English-language text of the nuclear agreement. The text lacks a provision that it is the entire agreement, so Iran may claim support in supposed side agreements or statements during negotiations.

Announcing this “comprehensive, long-term” deal, President Obama quoted President Kennedy’s 1961 call for negotiations with the Soviets. Kennedy reached two notable nuclear agreements. Mr. Obama didn’t mention that within a decade of Kennedy’s 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, Soviet nuclear forces—once a fraction of America’s—were at parity or had surpassed ours.

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy reached secret agreements—undisclosed to Americans for decades—not to invade Cuba and to withdraw U.S. weapons from Turkey. By invoking Kennedy was President Obama signaling there is more to this “long-term” deal than we know?

He is a subtle man.

True to Form, Obama/Kerry Made a Side Deals with Iran

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Shocked?

The IAEA Board of Governors report on Iran and the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty information of May 2015

Text in part from Congressman Pompeo:

Two side deals made between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the IAEA as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) will remain secret and will not be shared with other nations, with Congress, or with the public. One agreement covers the inspection of the Parchin military complex, and the second details how the IAEA and Iran will resolve outstanding issues on possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran Truth: Congressmen Mike Pompeo of Kansas and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas issued a press release today in which they outlined aspects of the Iran deal which are being kept secret from the public and even the U.S. congress which will soon vote on whether or not to approve the deal.

Pompeo and Cotton met with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna on Friday. During this meeting, it was disclosed that two undisclosed side deals are part of the greater agreement between Iran and the IAEA.

The first regards inspections of Iran’s Parchin military complex. The second has to do with the military aspect of Iran’s nuclear program.

From the press release:

“According to the IAEA, the Iran agreement negotiators, including the Obama administration, agreed that the IAEA and Iran would forge separate arrangements to govern the inspection of the Parchin military complex – one of the most secretive military facilities in Iran – and how Iran would satisfy the IAEA’s outstanding questions regarding past weaponization work. Both arrangements will not be vetted by any organization other than Iran and the IAEA, and will not be released even to the nations that negotiated the JCPOA.  This means that the secret arrangements have not been released for public scrutiny and have not been submitted to Congress as part of its legislatively mandated review of the Iran deal.”

The American public has not been given all the facts on the Iran deal, nor has congress. This is not only distressing but a violation:

“Even under the woefully inadequate Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, the Obama administration is required to provide the U.S. Congress with all nuclear agreement documents, including all “annexes, appendices, codicils, side agreements, implementing materials, documents, and guidance, technical or other understandings and any related agreements, whether entered into or implemented prior to the agreement or to be entered into or implemented in the future.”

Both Pompeo and Cotton are U.S. military veterans.  Each of them included a personal statement in the press release:

Pompeo said: “This agreement is the worst of backroom deals. In addition to allowing Iran to keep its nuclear program, missile program, American hostages, and terrorist network, the Obama administration has failed to make public separate side deals that have been struck for the ‘inspection’ of one of the most important nuclear sites—the Parchin military complex. Not only does this violate the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, it is asking Congress to agree to a deal that it cannot review.

“The failure to disclose the content of these side agreements begs the question, ‘What is the Obama administration hiding?’ Even members of Congress who are sympathetic to this deal cannot and must not accept a deal we aren’t even aware of. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stand up and demand to see the complete deal.”

Cotton said: “In failing to secure the disclosure of these secret side deals, the Obama administration is asking Congress and the American people to trust, but not verify.  What we cannot do is trust the terror-sponsoring, anti-American, outlaw regime that governs Iran and that has been deceiving the world on its nuclear weapons work for years.  Congress’s evaluation of this deal must be based on hard facts and full information.  That we are only now discovering that parts of this dangerous agreement are being kept secret begs the question of what other elements may also be secret and entirely free from public scrutiny.”

ISIS IS a Functioning State, Admitted by New York Times

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NYT Istanbul:  The Islamic State uses terror to force obedience and frighten enemies. It has seized territory, destroyed antiquities, slaughtered minorities, forced women into sexual slavery and turned children into killers.

But its officials are apparently resistant to bribes, and in that way, at least, it has outdone the corrupt Syrian and Iraqi governments it routed, residents and experts say.

“You can travel from Raqqa to Mosul and no one will dare to stop you even if you carry $1 million,” said Bilal, who lives in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, and insisted out of fear on being identified only by his first name. “No one would dare to take even one dollar.”
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, initially functioned solely as a terrorist organization, if one more coldblooded even than Al Qaeda. Then it went on to seize land. But increasingly, as it holds that territory and builds capacity to govern, the group is transforming into a functioning state that uses extreme violence — terror — as a tool. That distinction is proving to be more than a matter of perspective for those who live under the Islamic State, which has provided relative stability in a region troubled by war and chaos while filling a vacuum left by failing and corrupt governments that also employed violence — arrest, torture and detention.

While no one is predicting that the Islamic State will become steward of an accountable, functioning state anytime soon, the group is putting in place the kinds of measures associated with governance: issuing identification cards for residents, promulgating fishing guidelines to preserve stocks, requiring that cars carry tool kits for emergencies.

That transition may demand that the West rethink its military-first approach to combating the group.

“I think that there is no question that the way to look at it is as a revolutionary state-building organization,” said Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is one of a small but growing group of experts who are challenging the conventional wisdom about the Islamic State: that its evil ensures its eventual destruction.

In a recent essay in Foreign Policy magazine — “What Should We Do If the Islamic State Wins?” — Mr. Walt argued that the Islamic State could indeed prevail in the face of a modest, American-led military campaign that has been going on for almost a year and still leaves the group in control of large areas of Syria and Iraq, including Mosul, its second-largest city.

He wrote, “An Islamic State victory would mean that the group retained power in the areas it now controls and successfully defied outside efforts to ‘degrade and destroy’ it.”

He added that now, after almost a year of American airstrikes on the group, it is becoming clear that “only a large-scale foreign intervention is likely to roll back and ultimately eliminate the Islamic State.”

Mr. Walt is not the only expert thinking along these lines. It is an argument buttressed by a widespread belief that a military strategy alone, without political reconciliation to offer alienated Sunnis an alternative authority, is not sufficient to defeat the Islamic State. More on the story here.

**** NATO via the Atlantic Council:

ISIS Takes on the Gulf States

Another suicide bombing has shaken the Gulf region, as young Saudi Abdallah Fahd Abdallah Rashid blew himself up at a checkpoint in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on July 16. Rashid conducted the bombing just after killing his uncle, a colonel with the Saudi Ministry of Interior. The Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) claimed responsibility for the dual operation. This attack comes only a week after authorities in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait arrested several Saudi nationals related to an of ISIS member in Syria. Police claimed that the men played a part in the attack on a Shia mosque in Kuwait city on June 26. The bombing in Kuwait took place only three days after the ISIS media company Al-Furqan released an audio recording by ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-‘Adnani in which he congratulated Muslims on the commencement of Ramadan and called upon Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, to join the jihad against Shia. The Saudi and Kuwait attacks fall within the broader ISIS strategy of stoking the Gulf Sunni-Shia sectarian divide. In the polarized regional context driven by the Saudi-Iranian rivalry, this sectarian game plan threatens to tear the fabric of Gulf society apart.


In the attack on June 26, a Saudi suicide bomber blew himself up in a Shia mosque during Friday prayers in Kuwait city, killing twenty-seven people and injuring another 200. On May 29, a car bomb exploded at the entrance to the al-Anoud mosque in Damam, Saudi Arabia, killing three. Exactly a week prior, twenty-one worshippers died and 120 injured when a bomb exploded inside a mosque in the eastern Saudi province. ISIS claimed responsibility for both attacks. Another attack last November 2014 on the al-Ahsa mosque in the Eastern Province also killed seven and injured dozens. An ISIS affiliate calling itself Wilayat Najd (Najd Province) claimed the attack. Each attack specifically targeted the Shia minority in the Gulf against the backdrop of growing enmity and sectarian tensions between the Saudi Arabia and Iran, which ISIS has used to justify its brutal confessional narrative.

These attacks are Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s legacy to ISIS. The Jordanian al-Qaeda leader believed that a religious war in Iraq would bring more Sunnis to his side and allow for the expansion of his organization. Shortly after Zarqawi sent a letter in 2004 to the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan on his intentions to attack Shia in Iraq to spark sectarian conflict, members of his organization killed at least 185 Shia celebrating the Ashura holiday in a series of coordinated attacks in Baghdad and Karbala. This began a long string of attacks targeting Shia under his leadership until he died in a US air strike in 2006.

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, like Zarqawi before him, sees a window of opportunity in the current upheaval shaking the region. The Arab Spring fractured countries from the Levant to North Africa, where civil war and resurgent authoritarianism has led to a crisis of legitimacy. The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia on issues such as Syria, Iraq, and Yemen only adds fuel to the sectarian fire. In countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, riots broke out in mainly Shia areas. Although Shia only make up a minority of Kuwaitis, they still account for an estimated 25 to 30 percent of the population. In Saudi Arabia, the Shia population, located mostly in the oil rich Eastern Province, amounts to about 15 percent of the total population.

Marginalized Shia communities, the rise of Salafi jihadist movement, and the ongoing war in Yemen—a conflict seen as the Sunni response to Iran’s expansion plan in the region—have left both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia vulnerable to the growing regional sectarian strife. Kuwait may have the most inclusive policies toward their Shia community among the Gulf countries (Shia representatives hold ten of the fifty seats in its parliament), the war in Yemen in particular has raised sectarian tensions. Kuwait’s Shia denounced the Saudi-led operation, resulting in a brawl inside parliament in May. Seven of the ten Shia parliamentarians also criticized the Kuwaiti Air Force’s participation.

Shia in Saudi Arabia enjoy far less influence and have begun to agitate in the oil-rich Eastern Province. Carnegie Senior Associate, Fred Wehrey, reported in a 2013 paper “an unending cycle of detentions, shootings, and demonstrations,” many linked to the marginalization of and discrimination against Shia in the kingdom. Gulf clerics have often resorted to hate propaganda against Shia and the Saudi campaign to oust the Houthi Zaydi Shia rebels from Sana’a has clearly taken on a sectarian dimension. Wealthy Saudi and Kuwaiti nationals have also reportedly contributed to funding ISIS and even joined the groups to fight the Assad regime in Syria. An estimated 5,500 Gulf nationals—4,000 of them coming from Saudi Arabia alone—currently fight with ISIS.

These factors make for an explosive cocktail, one that ISIS will utilize to instigate sectarian violence and destabilize the Gulf countries that host significant Shia populations. By targeting the minority community, ISIS hopes to provoke a Shia backlash, gambling on an aggressive Gulf response that would create further instability on which ISIS could capitalize. For the extremist group, the success or failure of a resulting crackdown provides a win-win situation: a successful crackdown would vindicate ISIS’s sectarian narrative; a failure would undermine faith in the Gulf authorities and expand support for the extremist group.

ISIS will likely widen its sectarian war into other parts of the Gulf, beyond Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Given its large Shia population (estimated at approximately 70 percent), Bahrain shares similar traits with Iraq over Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Bahrain’s Shia have faced a massive crackdown since it engaged in protests in 2011 demanding inclusive policies. Prominent ISIS members, such as Shaikh Turki Al Ban’ali who is believed to be serving as a religious leader in the organization, also hail from Bahrain. The United Arab Emirates—home to a Shia population of about 10 percent—might be less at risk than Bahrain, but remains vulnerable to possible lone wolf operations.

While the recent attacks in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait may have shaken these countries sense of security, Gulf governments still maintain a strong security apparatus with which ISIS must contend. Nonetheless, ISIS operations in these countries will create instability in the short term and exacerbate tensions between Sunnis and Shia. To prevent ISIS from establishing a more permanent presence in these countries, Gulf countries should complement counterterrorism campaigns with dialogue between citizens of different religious beliefs and promoting conciliatory measures toward Shia minorities. The ongoing rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the proxy competition in countries like Syria, Iraq, and Yemen will also continue to buttress ISIS’s regional ambitions. Until Iran and the Gulf countries reach an understanding on their own regional ambitions, their enmity will fuel ISIS’s sectarian narrative and support the destabilization of divided Muslim countries.