Syria, the Modern Day Holocaust the World Ignores

Posted on July 15, 2015July 15, 2015 by Denise Simon

The first week of July, Iran signed an agreement with Syria. What did Tehran already know before the JPOA was announced on July 14th? Apparently enough and with confidence. Bashir al Assad was so delighted with the Iran JPOA agreement, he was the first to call Tehran with congratulations.

Syrian President Bashar al Assad has signed an agreement with Iran for lines of credit amounting to US$1 billion. The agreement is between the commercial bank of Syria and the Iranian Export Development Bank. Syria signed a major agreement with Iran in 2013, and since then has signed agreements with countries such as Russia and Venezuela to limit the damage caused by economic sanctions imposed by western countries.

So what does this mean for Assad and Syria? It is important to look at the past to see the future. Sadly, the United Nations and the United States have overlooked the conditions on the ground in Syria. Here it is for you. Syria is a modern day holocaust for which several countries are guilty yet not one is working to stop the atrocities.

Documenting Death Inside Syria’s Secret Prisons

NPR

Images of dead bodies in Syrian prisons, taken by a Syrian government photographer, are displayed at the United Nations on March 10. The photographer, who goes by the pseudonym Caesar, took the pictures between 2011, when the Syrian uprising began, and 2013, when he fled the country. His photos will be on display at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

A Syrian forensic photographer, who now uses the pseudonym Caesar, documented the death of thousands of detainees in Syria’s brutal prison system. He made more than 55,000 high-resolution images before he fled the country, fearing for his safety, in 2013.

He spoke publicly for the first time in July 2014, when he appeared before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, wearing a blue jacket with a hood to protect his identity.

Dozens of Caesar’s photographs will be displayed again in the halls of Congress on Wednesday.

The exhibition is sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in cooperation with the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The graphic images show beaten and bruised bodies, many are skeletal, most with signs of torture. Now, Syrian families are searching the photos online after Syrian opposition groups posted more than 6,000 images in March.

NPR spoke to a member of the group that posted the pictures, as well as a friend who identified a victim, and a lawyer working on a war crimes case. Here are their stories:

Amer fled Damascus two days after his friend, Kutabia, a 40-year-old father of two, was seized by government agents from a bookstore in Damascus. The two friends demonstrated together through 2011. They took even larger risks together, smuggling money and medicine into restive neighborhoods besieged by the Syrian government.

“They invaded on New Year’s Eve at 6 p.m. I was at a café nearby. And when I finished I said, ‘Let’s go and say hi [to Kutaiba].’ I knocked and there’s no one. No lights inside. And I continued home and that’s when I heard that my friend was taken to the detention center or the torture center.

This is where the story begins. Once your friend is detained by the government, you try to figure out where he is.

His parents started to ask. They usually go to people in the intelligence service and the guy will say, ‘I can’t tell you, you have to give me money.’

For two and a half years his parents are paying money. Sometimes they take a couple of thousand dollars and [they] get back and say, ‘He’s alive and well, and says hi to his sons.'”

In March 2015, Syrian opposition groups published 6,000 of Caesar’s photos online. For the first time, Syrian friends and families could search the gruesome photo gallery and identify the victims. Kutaiba’s picture was among the dead, killed within a month of his arrest.

Rep. Ed Royce (center), R-Calif., speaks during a July 2014 hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, with “Caesar,” a Syrian army defector who wore a blue, hooded jacket to protect his identity. Caesar smuggled out of Syria more than 55,000 photographs that document the torture and killings in Syrian prisons. Alex Wong/Getty Images hide caption

“It was him. His eyes were closed. He had stitches on his forehead like the ones you see in horror movies. And I was shocked. I was in the middle of work. I don’t know what sort of people can do this harm and torture to another person.

I saw his color, and was like, ‘Thank God he wasn’t starved to death.’ He didn’t have his ears taken off or his nose. So, I thought he made them furious enough to kill him right away rather than being tortured on a daily basis. It’s always better to know, is he alive or is he dead.”

Dr. Mohammed Ayash works with the Syrian Association for Missing and Detainees of Conscience, based in Istanbul. In March, the group published some of the Caesar photos online and has organized private showings in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan and even in some rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus. Dr. Ayash is scanning all the images and documenting the dead. It is a grim task made harder still because Dr. Ayash has seen friends and neighbors among the dead.

“We have about 6,700 victims in this website. I am a doctor, I’m not a pathologist, but I describe what I see in every picture. We have children in these pictures. There are older men. There is one woman.

It comes to my dreams sometimes, because of the horrible methods. By torture, by starvation and eye gouging, and it’s very hard for me.

(The work) is very important because we need the families as witnesses in any court. We need families to say, ‘Yes, this is my father and my brother,’ and they were taken and killed by the Assad regime.”

Muna Jundi, an attorney in Flint, Mich., works with United for a Free Syria, a coalition of Syrian-American nonprofit organizations. She was part of a team of Syrians who got Caesar to testify to Congress last year and will be in Washington for the event on Wednesday. She took part in the decision to publish the photos online.

“It was systematic, the regime was using it as a way to quell the revolution.

There’s a lot of missing Syrian people and a lot of people don’t know the fate of their family members. They hear about it through rumors. They pay money to try and find information and really there’s nothing concrete. And unfortunately there’s nothing more concrete than pictures of dead bodies. So the idea was to open up to help people identify their own family members.

For an American audience, I think it was shocking. But the sheer … mass production of this, I think, is what overwhelms. They’ve documented it in such detail.

Syrians inside Syria that had any experience with intelligence [services] automatically knew why the documentation had to happen.

When there’s an order from above, they need evidence that those orders are being carried out. In a highly corrupt government, where you can pay people to release people, they need the evidence. They needed to keep the evidence to show that you told us this is what we need to do, and therefore, this is what we are doing.”

Iran JPOA Titled Executive Agreement Not Treaty

Posted on July 14, 2015July 14, 2015 by Denise Simon

Full text of the Iran deal is here.

Official the Joint Plan of Action with Iran is now complete with several items considered just housekeeping matters are still to be worked out. The Parchin plant MAY have allowed inspections while the other locations are off limits. The Fordo plant continues the enrichment work and Bashir al Assad is dancing at Disney. (sarcasm)

It is unclear if the UK Parliament or France votes on the JPOA but it is likely to occur. China and Russia stand with Iran especially on the arms embargo and sanction relief side.

Israel is sounding the alarms for security not only for Israel but for America and Europe.

Lifted sanctions include these individuals:

Embedded image permalink

For the full text of the JPOA, click here.

By Eli Lake at Bloomberg:

As the Senate wraps up debate this week on Iran legislation, expect to hear a lot about “hardliners.”

The Senate’s alleged hardliners have tried to add conditions to a nuclear deal the U.S. is currently negotiating with Iranian moderates, but there is little chance the senators will succeed. The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is expected to call for an end to debate on their meddling amendments.

According to a certain school of thought, all of this is a good thing. Our hardliners, say cheerleaders for the Iran negotiations, empower Iran’s hardliners, who are also wary of a deal.

President Obama views the politics of the Iran deal in these terms himself. Back in March when Senator Tom Cotton and 46 other Republicans sent a letter to Iran’s leaders, reminding them that any deal signed with Obama could be reversed by Congress or future presidents, the president played the hardliner card: “I think it’s somewhat ironic to see some members for Congress wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran.”

There is definitely a political logic to pinning this “hardliner” label on the senators. The White House can artfully shift the conversation away from the contents of the deal it is negotiating. Instead the debate is framed as the Americans and Iranians who seek peace (moderates) versus those in both nations who want war (hardliners).

It’s simple, but deceptive. This tactic understates the power of Iran’s hardliners and dramatically overstates the power of U.S. hardliners.

In Iran, the people inside the system who are negotiating a deal, such as Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, must take the agreement to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for approval. In Iran, the hardliner approves the deal.

In the U.S. system it’s the other way around. Senators like Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz support amendments that would set new conditions before lifting Congressional sanctions on Iran. But there are not enough votes in the Senate to overturn an Obama veto on the legislation if these amendments are attached. In other words, Obama frames the conversation in the U.S., because he has the power to ignore his hardliners whereas Zarif is obliged to placate his.

Then there is the substance of the amendments themselves. Democrats and Republicans have derided certain Republicans’ amendments to the bill as “poison pills,” aimed at making a deal with Iran impossible. But these amendments would require Iran to end its war against its neighbors, release U.S. citizens who have been jailed and recognize the right of the world’s only Jewish state to exist. Outside the context of Iran negotiations, these are hardly radical views. Obama has expressed support for these positions himself.

Compare those demands with those of the Iranian hardliners. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces on Sunday reiterated the red line that no military installations would be accessible for international inspections. This would pose a problem, given that the U.S. and other great powers have agreed to allow Iran to keep most of its nuclear infrastructure in exchange for tough inspections. The Iranian hardliners appear to be putting back in play something Obama’s team believed was already agreed.

The most important distinction between Iran’s hardliners and America’s hardliners however is their political legitimacy. Iran’s people have supported reform, but nonetheless the country’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and domestic spy agency have tightened the grip on power despite elections when reformers won the presidency.

Contrast their ascent with the plight of Iran’s moderates: In 1997, Iranians elected a reformer president, Mohammed Khatami, who promised to open up Iran’s political system. But throughout his presidency he was unable to stop the arrests of student activists or the shuttering of opposition newspapers. By the end of Khatami’s presidency, some of his closest advisers were tried in public for charges tantamount to treason. In 2013, Iranians elected Hassan Rouhani, who ran as a reformer even though under Khatami he had overseen crackdowns on reformers. Rouhani has not freed the leaders of the 2009 green movement from house arrest or most of the activists who protested elections in 2009.

When Obama talks about his Iran negotiations, he glosses over all of this. He emphasizes instead that Rouhani has a mandate to negotiate and that he is taking advantage of this diplomatic window.

Obama had threatened to veto legislation that would give Congress a chance to review, but not modify, any agreement the administration reaches with Iran and five other world powers. Now the president says he will sign the legislation, but only if it doesn’t include the kinds of amendments favored by the so-called hardliners. After all, those amendments are unacceptable to the hardliners who actually have sway — in Iran.

Pro-Kremlin Machine Right in Front of YOU

Posted on July 13, 2015July 13, 2015 by Denise Simon

Vladimir Putin has his propaganda machine working in full speed. We are being sucked into it and not recognizing the clues much less asking harder questions against his agenda.

There is a two part series on the Pro-Kremlin operation. Part 1 video is here. Part 2 video is here.

Now, the movement behind the machine is something called ‘The Agency’ which is a location in St. Petersberg, Russia called the Internet Research Agency.

Graph showing shared use of Google Analytics, server software and social media

From DenisonForum: The Agency’s origins can be traced to the 2011 anti-government protests, organized because of the growing evidence of fraud in the Parliamentary elections that year. The protests had been organized largely via Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal and the government wanted to ensure that similar protests were far more difficult to put together in the future. So the next year, Vyascheslav Volodin was named the new deputy head of Putin’s administration and given the task of gaining better control over the internet. In addition to starting the Agency, laws were passed that required bloggers to register with the state and the government was allowed to censor websites without a court order. Putin justified the new laws “by calling the Internet a ‘C.I.A. project,’ one that Russia needed to be protected from.”

The full background investigation on the Internet Research Agency, or rather the Kremlin troll factory is found here.

For the software and internet geeks out there, below is the proof of the machine where evidence was peeled back by using open source analytic tools.

From Global Voices Online: In April of this year, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Guardian reported on the website вштабе.рф, a large photo gallery of pro-Russian memes and “demotivator” graphics. Most of these crude caricatures ridicule US, Western, and Ukrainian leaders, whilst portraying Vladimir Putin as strong and heroic.

The site gives no credit or attribution for its design, and offers no indication as to who might be behind it. Intrigued by this anonymity, I used Maltego open-source intelligence software to gather any publicly-available information that might provide clues.

The Secrets of Google Analytics
My use of Maltego revealed that the site was running Google Analytics, a commonly used online analytics tool that allows a website owner to gather statistics on visitors, such as their country, browser, and operating system. For convenience, multiple sites can be managed under a single Google analytics account. This account has a unique identifying “UA” number, contained in the Analytics script embedded in the website’s code. Google provides a detailed guide to the system’s structure.

Whilst investigating the network of sites tied to account UA-53176102, I discovered that one, news-region.ru, had also been linked to a second Analytics account: UA-53159797 (archive).

This number, in turn, was associated with a further cluster of nineteen pro-Kremlin websites. Subsequent examinations of these webpages revealed three more Analytics accounts, with additional sites connected to them. Below is a network diagram of the relationships I have established to date.

Most notably, Podgorny is listed in the leaked employee list of St. Petersburg’s Internet Research Agency, the pro-Kremlin troll farm featured in numerous news reports and investigations, including RuNet Echo’s own reports.

Podgorny’s date of birth, given on his public VK profile, is an exact match for that shown in the leaked document.

Podgorny is also VK friends with Igor Osadchy, who is named as a fellow employee in the same list. Osadchy has denied working for the Internet Reseach Agency, calling the leaks an “unsuccessful provocation.”

*** This internet researcher will continue the investigation and report more. For expanded details on the first cut of the investigation, click here.

Cyberwar, Deeper Truth on China’s Unit 61398

Posted on July 13, 2015July 13, 2015 by Denise Simon

The NSA has been hacking China for years, so it is a cyberwar. What the United States cyber experts have known at least since 2009 spells out that there has been no strategy to combat cyber intrusions much less a declaration that these hacks are an act of war.

The NSA Has A Secret Group Called ‘TAO’ That’s Been Hacking China For 15 Years

China hacking charges: the Chinese army’s Unit 61398
Operating out of a tower block in Shanghai, Unit 61398 allegedly hacks Western companies in support of the Chinese government’s political and economic aims.

From DarkReading:

According to the DOJ indictment, Huang Zhenyu was hired between 2006 and 2009 or later to do programming work for one of the companies (referred to as “SOE-2” in the indictment). Huang was allegedly tasked with constructing a “secret” database to store intelligence about the iron and steel industry, as well as information about US companies.

“Chinese firms hired the same PLA Unit where the defendants worked to provide information technology services,” according to the indictment, which the US Department of Justice unsealed Monday. “For example, one SOE involved in trade litigation against some of the American victims herein hired the Unit, and one of the co-conspirators charged herein, to hold a ‘secret’ database to hold corporate ‘intelligence.'”

The for-hire database project sheds some light on the operations of China’s most prolific hacking unit, Unit 61398 of the Third Department of China’s People’s Liberation Army (also known as APT1), where the alleged hackers work. US Attorney General Eric Holder announced an unprecedented move Monday: The Justice Department had indicted the five men with the military unit for allegedly hacking and stealing trade secrets of major American steel, solar energy, and other manufacturing companies, including Alcoa, Allegheny Technologies Inc., SolarWorld AG, Westinghouse Electric, and US Steel, as well as the United Steel Workers Union.

It has never been a secret, it has only been a topic debated with no resolutions behind closed doors. China has a database on Americans and is filling it with higher details, growing their intelligence on everything America.

China has launched a strategic plan when one examines the order of hacks of American companies, the timing and the data. A full report was published on Unit 61398.

New York Times report

Hacked in the U.S.A.: China’s Not-So-Hidden Infiltration Op

From Bloomberg: The vast cyber-attack in Washington began with, of all things, travel reservations.

More than two years ago, troves of personal data were stolen from U.S. travel companies. Hackers subsequently made off with health records at big insurance companies and infiltrated federal computers where they stole personnel records on 21.5 million people — in what apparently is the largest such theft of U.S. government records in history.

Those individual attacks, once believed to be unconnected, now appear to be part of a coordinated campaign by Chinese hackers to collect sensitive details on key people that went on far longer — and burrowed far deeper — than initially thought.

But time and again, U.S. authorities missed clues connecting one incident to the next. Interviews with federal investigators and cybersecurity experts paint a troubling portrait of what many are calling a serious failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to spot the pattern or warn potential victims. Moreover, the problems in Washington add new urgency to calls for vigilance in the private sector.

In revealing the scope of stolen government data on Thursday, Obama administration officials declined to identify a perpetrator. Investigators say the Chinese government was almost certainly behind the effort, an allegation China has vehemently denied.

‘Facebook of Intelligence’

Some investigators suspect the attacks were part of a sweeping campaign to create a database on Americans that could be used to obtain commercial and government secrets.

“China is building the Facebook of human intelligence capabilities,” said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence for cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Inc. “This appears to be a real maturity in the way they are using cyber to enable broader intelligence goals.”

The most serious breach of records occurred at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, where records for every person given a government background check for the past 15 years may have been compromised. The head of the government personnel office, Katherine Archuleta, resigned Friday as lawmakers demanded to know what went wrong.

The campaign began in early 2013 with the travel records, said Laura Galante, manager of threat intelligence for FireEye Inc., a private security company that has been investigating the cyber-attacks.

Stockpiling Records

By mid-2014, it became clear that the hackers were stockpiling health records, Social Security numbers and other personal information on Americans -– a departure from the country’s traditional espionage operations focusing on the theft of military and civilian technology.

“There was a clear and apparent shift,” said Jordan Berry, an analyst at FireEye.

Recognition came too late for many of the victims. Vendors of security devices say health-care companies are spending tens of millions of dollars this year to upgrade their computer systems but much of the data is already gone.

U.S. intelligence agencies were collecting information on the theft of personal data but failed to understand the scope and potential damage from the aggressive Chinese operation, according to one person familiar with the government assessment of what went wrong.

In the last two years, much of the attention of U.S. national security agencies was focused on defending against cyber-attacks aimed at disrupting critical infrastructure like power grids.

Iran Deal, Deviled Details and $300 Billion

Posted on July 13, 2015July 13, 2015 by Denise Simon

Both sides are saying the others are throwing sand in the gears to publishing a final document of the Joint Plan of Action with Iran and the P5+1.

In part from FarsNews: “We have reached a stage now that the other side should decide if it is seeking an agreement or pressure; we have said many times that agreement and pressure cannot come together and one of them should be chosen,” Zarif told reporters in Vienna.

He reiterated that if the other side shows political will and inclination for a balanced and good deal it will be achievable.

Zarif, however, said that unfortunately the other side is showing change in stances and raising excessive demands which make the conditions difficult, adding, “We are doing our best as Supreme Leader (of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei) and other Iranian officials have said many times we are looking for a good deal and we will continue the negotiations; we have never left the negotiations and we will not in future.”

The Geneva interim deal envisaged the removal of all the UN and unilateral US and EU sanctions against Iran under a final comprehensive deal.

Also, in a framework agreement approved by the six powers and Iran in April known as the Lausanne Statement, the seven nations agreed that a final deal would include removal of all sanctions as well as a UN Security Council resolution which would call all the five UNSC sanctions resolutions imposed against Iran’s nuclear activities as “null and void”.

The first two UNSC resolutions boycotted export of military, specially missile, hardware and software to Iran, a sanction that – along with all the other embargoes imposed against Iran under the five UNSC resolutions – would be automatically removed under the new UNSC resolution that, according to the Lausanne framework agreement, should be issued on the same day that the final deal is endorsed.

Hence, the debate over the removal of the UN Security Council arms embargoes against Iran means US defiance of both agreements.

From the WSJ: If no deal is reached by Monday night, the two sides must again agree to extend the terms of their November 2013 interim nuclear deal or risk seeing two years of high-stakes diplomacy unravel. That accord offered modest sanctions relief for Iran in exchange for Tehran freezing parts of its nuclear program.

Among the final issues to be resolved are disagreements about the timing and sequencing of sanctions relief for Iran and the continuation of a ban on sales of arms and ballistic-missile parts to Iran. Officials have also been toiling over the text of a new U.N. Security Council resolution that would keep some restrictions on Iran and outline steps the country would take to detail its past nuclear activities.

One European official said Sunday there was “no way” negotiations could continue beyond Monday.

“Everything can fail still, but we are really near the end,” said a German official late Sunday. “With the willingness of Tehran to take the final steps, it could now go quickly. We are ready to negotiate all night.”

The matter of lifting sanctions, suspending other over 15 years funds future terrorism by infusing Iran with $300 billion.

From Foreign Policy Magazine: Barack Obama’s administration and the other parties to the interim nuclear deal with Iran now seem to be saying they are willing to release to Iran between a third and a half a trillion dollars over the next 15 years in order for Iran not to give up the program, but to freeze it. In other words, we are not restoring Iran’s assets and income sources in exchange for permanently and irreversibly accepting international standards; we are just renting the country’s restraint, offering it access to hundreds of billions of dollars to make any future nuclear program development the problem of the next U.S. president — or the one after that.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Iran’s nuclear program is not viewed by its neighbors as the main threat the country poses. A systematic, 35-year campaign of regional meddling, destabilization, and extension of Iranian influence is seen as a much bigger issue. And restoring cash flows and assets to Iran, as well as giving the country greater international standing, clearly exacerbates that threat. It gives Tehran the wherewithal to continue to underwrite terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas, prop up dictators like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and buy ever greater influence in places like Iraq and Yemen.

The consequences of Iran’s regional strategy were on display this week in Washington when Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi essentially read from Iranian talking points when addressing the conflict in Yemen. He took a stance against Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Houthis, suggested Iran’s role in Yemen was overstated, and even went so far as to suggest Obama had told him that he was not supportive of the Saudis. The White House immediately denied the last accusation but can’t have been too happy with the rest of the statement that came from the leader of a country the United States had spent hundreds of billions to “liberate.”