SecDef Austin Fires all Advisory Board(s) Members

Posted on February 3, 2021February 3, 2021 by Denise Simon

Dismissed were hundreds of members of 42 Pentagon advisory boards. 42 separate advisory boards? Really?

Current members being told to step down are only those appointed by the Pentagon and not those appointed by the White House or Congress. For example four people appointed by the Pentagon to a congressionally mandated commission on stripping the names of Confederate generals from military bases will be removed but others on that panel appointed by Congress will remain.

A review of all the boards, and whether they are still needed, will now be the focus before new members are named.

The 42 advisory boards cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year and some of their work is believed to be potentially redundant, which added to the need for the review.

The action effectively removes, for now, several hundred people serving on boards who advise on everything from defense policy, science, innovation, health issues, coastal engineering, sexual misconduct and diversity and inclusion.

WASHINGTON—Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin dismissed every member of the Pentagon’s policy advisory boards Monday, ousting last-minute Trump administration nominees as well as officials appointed by previous administrations.

Lloyd Austin Confirmed As 1st Black Pentagon Chief In U.S. History : President Biden Takes Office : NPR

By removing every member, Mr. Austin avoided selectively firing those appointed by the Trump administration. The defense chief will name new members to each of the least a dozen boards in the coming weeks.

The move was foreshadowed last week when Mr. Austin suspended the onboarding process for Trump administration nominees to Pentagon advisory boards, effectively preventing them from being seated.

Mr. Austin’s directive last week applied to Trump nominees who were still in the security clearance process. Among those who were affected then were Corey Lewandowski, former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign manager, and David Bossie, a former Trump deputy campaign manager, both of whom had been named to the Defense Business Board, an unpaid group that advises the defense secretary and other leaders on business practices.

Because of their potential access to classified information, it can take months for someone to get through the security clearance process and formally join a board. Mr. Austin’s directive last week suspended that process.

In the last weeks of the Trump administration, then acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller named at least a dozen supporters of President Trump to various Pentagon advisory boards.

Those included retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, who weeks earlier had been rejected by the Senate for consideration as the Pentagon’s top policy official, even as he served in that position since June in an acting capacity. Senators and some retired generals expressed concern over inflammatory tweets he made years ago on Islam, President Barack Obama and Democratic lawmakers.

The advisory boards, some of which date back to at least the 1950s, were intended to be bipartisan and offer a diversity of opinion to Pentagon leaders on potential policies.

Among those removed from policy boards by Mr. Miller were former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) and former Rep. Jane Harman (D., Calif.), a onetime senior Democrat on the House Intelligence committee.

Biden Leaving Troops in Afghanistan Past the May Deadline

Posted on February 1, 2021February 1, 2021 by Denise Simon

For many many months, the Trump administration was negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban. Frankly, all that the Taliban has agreed to, they have violated. Trump also issued a schedule to lower troop levels in Afghanistan to only a small tight residual number in May of 2021 along with contractors. With the new possible threat(s) of the Taliban and their growing connection to al Qaeda, Biden has decided to leave troop levels in the region at the present level with an increase in Syria and possibly Iraq. All the while, Iran just hosted a Taliban leader for talks where the topic(s) are unknown. Further, Taliban officials have been meeting in Moscow with Russian officials. Those details are found here.

President Biden also has another immediate issue before him and that is the release of a U.S. contractor that went missing in Afghanistan about a year ago. Mark Frerichs, a navy veteran went missing about a year ago while he was working as a contractor on an engineering project. It is thought he is in the custody of the Haqqani network. The U.S. State Department is offering a $5 million reward that leads to Frerichs’ return.

So, it is rather fitting that just this week, a very old FOIA request for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld documents have been released. Frankly, the questions which were referred to at the Pentagon as ‘snowflakes’ reflects his frustration of the layers of bureaucracy within the Department of Defense and his anger at getting real answers and challenging the quality of intelligence reports. Sound familiar? It is clearly a problem that after 20+ years has not found a quality solution. Just read a few of his snowflakes and judge for your self.

*** Donald H. Rumsfeld - U.S. PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY

35 of the most notable items from the new collection is below from the National Archives.

A follow-on DNSA publication covering the rest of Rumsfeld’s tenure as secretary will appear through ProQuest later in 2021.

One such snowflake was written on March 3, 2003. At 8:16 AM, Rumsfeld wrote to Senior Military Assistant LTG Bantz J. Craddock and Department of Defense General Counsel William Haynes with the subject “KSM”. He wanted to know, “Do we know where the information to find Khalid Sheikh Mohammed came from? Was it from GTMO detainees?” There is no response from either Craddock or Haynes in the DOD release to the Archive, though Rumsfeld’s question is likely a push back to the false claims made by CIA Director George Tenet that the Agency’s resort to torture of Abu Zubaydah led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence torture report would later reveal that key intelligence on KSM as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks came from the FBI’s non-coercive, rapport-building interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.[1] This success was prior to the CIA’s contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, taking over the interrogation at the CIA “Detention Site Green” in Thailand, which was created to house Zubaydah in 2002. Their approach to Zubaydah would include 83 water board sessions yet fail to produce any valuable intelligence. CIA clandestine services chief Jose Rodriguez (and perhaps Gina Haspel, who would later become DCI, though CIA redactions of documents continue to obscure her role) ordered the destruction of the torture videotapes, commenting that “the heat from destoying [sic] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain.”

Later on March 3, under the subject “Contingencies”, Rumsfeld wrote to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, stating, “We need to plan what we will do if Saddam Hussein is captured. We need to plan what we will do if we catch an imposter.” There is no record of Feith’s answer in the DOD release to the Archive.

Throughout Rumsfeld’s tenure, his snowflakes circulated daily through the highest levels of the Pentagon. With scant limitations on their subject matter, the all-encompassing documents are sometimes an hourly paper trail inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense during six years of tremendous consequence for U.S. foreign policy. The declassified documents also provide an account that at times contradicts DOD public statements. For example, The Washington Post published a selection of the memos in the six part series “The Afghanistan Papers” in September 2019 revealing that officials misled the American public about the war in Afghanistan.

The entire corpus of snowflakes also details many aspects of the day-to-day operations of the Pentagon, the modernization of the U.S. armed forces, and Rumsfeld’s personal agenda against bureaucracy. “Bureaucracy is driving people nuts,” he wrote in an April 8, 2002, memo at 7:41AM. “If we can take two or three layers out of this place, we will be a lot better off.” In a separate April 8 letter, the secretary suggested cutting all major Pentagon programs by at least 20 percent. (The DOD budget increased by 37.54 percent between FY2001 and FY2006.) On March 11, 2002, Rumsfeld wrote to colleagues, “I am getting tired of seeing the word ‘joint’ everywhere.”

Rumsfeld, Snowflake by Snowflake - Open Source with ...

Cuba Re-designated as State Sponsor of Terror

Posted on January 12, 2021January 12, 2021 by Denise Simon

President Obama removed Cuba from the designation and it is expected early into the Biden administration, this action will again be reversed.

The United States has once again designated Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, accusing it of granting safe haven to terrorists and also providing support for acts of “international terrorism”. The move by the Trump administration comes days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, who would have liked to start where he and Obama left the US-Cuba relations in 2016. Former President Barack Obama had delisted Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 2015, seeking normalisation of ties with the Communist State.

Cuba’s continued support for terrorism in the Western Hemisphere must be stopped. Today the United States is returning Cuba to the State Sponsors of Terrorism list to hold the Castro regime accountable for its malign behavior.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) January 11, 2021

State Department officials say the decision is not politically motivated and argue Cuba has not met the standards to remain off the list during the Trump administration.

American Enterprise Institute research fellow Ryan Berg affirmed the basis of the Trump administration’s decision. Cuba sees Obama terror promise as healing of historic wound

“Cuba has provided unequivocal support to terrorist and insurgent groups throughout Latin America for many decades, such as Colombia’s ELN and the FARC, to name just a few,” Berg told the Washington Free Beacon. “Today, it also continues to support the consolidated dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, aiding and abetting what the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has declared to be ‘crimes against humanity.'”

Havana has also played a role in helping China expand its influence in the Caribbean. In November, Cuba followed the lead of China in echoing far-left talking points regarding race relations in America at the United Nations, and China covered for Cuba on its record of harboring terrorism. China, meanwhile, has reportedly expanded its surveillance capabilities in the Caribbean, using telecommunications networks to spy on American mobile phones in the region.

The move could affect President-elect Joe Biden’s approach to reengaging with the communist country, a policy out of the Obama administration’s playbook. Biden’s transition team for the Department of Defense included Frank Mora, an Obama administration holdover who advocated lifting sanctions on Havana.

Berg said the Cuba policy favored by Mora and Biden would probably require a reversal of the decision to return Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

“A diplomatic opening with a country designated as a ‘state sponsor of terror’ is a difficult lift,” Berg said. “Therefore, one of the first steps to any Cuba opening would likely require a reversal of this decision.” source

FBI is Investigating a Mysterious Postcard

Posted on January 12, 2021January 12, 2021 by Denise Simon

SolarWinds hackers also breached the US NNSA nuclear ... source

(Reuters) – The FBI is investigating a mysterious postcard sent to the home of cybersecurity firm FireEye’s chief executive days after it found initial evidence of a suspected Russian hacking operation on dozens of U.S. government agencies and private American companies.

U.S. officials familiar with the postcard are investigating whether it was sent by people associated with a Russian intelligence service due its timing and content, which suggests internal knowledge of last year’s hack well before it was publicly disclosed in December.

Moscow has denied involvement in the hack, which U.S. intelligence agencies publicly attributed here to Russian state actors.

The postcard carries FireEye’s logo, is addressed to CEO Kevin Mandia, and calls into question the ability of the Milpitas, California-based firm to accurately attribute cyber operations to the Russian government.

People familiar with Mandia’s postcard summarized its content to Reuters. It shows a cartoon with the text: “Hey look Russians” and “Putin did it!”

The opaque message itself did not help FireEye find the breach, but rather arrived in the early stages of its investigation. This has led people familiar with the matter to believe the sender was attempting to “troll” or push the company off the trail by intimidating a senior executive.

Reuters could not determine who sent the postcard. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies are spearheading the probe into its origin, the sources familiar said.

The FBI did not provide comment. A FireEye representative declined to discuss the postcard.

A disinformation researcher from the Rand Corporation, Todd Helmus, received a similar postcard in 2019, based on an image of it Helmus posted to Twitter. Helmus, who studies digital propaganda, said he received the postcard after testifying to Congress about Russian disinformation tactics.

FireEye discovered the Russian hacking campaign – now known as “Solorigate” for how it leveraged supply chain vulnerabilities in network management firm Solarwinds – because of an anomalous device login from within FireEye’s network. The odd login triggered a security alert and subsequent investigation, which led to the discovery of the operation.

FireEye worked closely with Microsoft to determine that the infiltration at FireEye in fact represented a hacking campaign that struck at least eight federal agencies including the Treasury, State and Commerce Departments.

When the postcard was sent, FireEye had not yet determined who was behind the cyberattack. A person familiar with the postcard investigation said “this is not typically the Russian SVR’s playbook” but “times are rapidly changing.” SVR is an acronym for the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia.

A former U.S. intelligence official said the postcard reminded him of a now public mission by U.S. Cyber Command where they sent private messages to Russian hackers ahead of the 2018 congressional elections in the United States.

“The message then from the U.S. was ‘watch your back, we see you’ similar to here,” the former official said.

The extent of the damages tied to the U.S. government hack remains unclear. Emails belonging to senior officials were stolen from an unclassified network at the Treasury and Commerce Departments. FBI says 'ongoing' SolarWinds hack was probably the work ...

Now known in the cyber world, the heck of Solarwinds continues to rock the nation.

Kaspersky reports finding code similarities between the Sunburst backdoor in SolarWinds’ Orion platform and a known backdoor, Kazuar, which Palo Alto Networks in 2017 associated with the Turla threat group. Kaspersky is cautious about attribution, and notes that there are several possibilities:

Sunburst and Kazuar are the work of the same threat group.
Sunburst’s developers borrowed from Kazuar.
Both backdoors derived from a common source.
Kazuar’s developers jumped ship to another threat group that produced Kazuar.
Whoever developed Sunburst deliberately introduced subtle false flag clues into their code.

Reuters points out that Estonian intelligence services have long attributed Turla activity to Russia’s FSB (which was unavailable to Reuters for comment).

In an updated Solorigate advisory, CISA released detection and mitigation advice for post-compromise activity in the Microsoft 365 (M365) and Azure environment.

The US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio has responded to Solorigate by requiring that court documents be filed on paper, the Columbus Dispatch reports.

***

Reuters: Investigators at Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said the “backdoor” used to compromise up to 18,000 customers of U.S. software maker SolarWinds closely resembled malware tied to a hacking group known as “Turla,” which Estonian authorities have said operates on behalf of Russia’s FSB security service.

The findings are the first publicly-available evidence to support assertions by the United States that Russia orchestrated the hack, which compromised a raft of sensitive federal agencies and is among the most ambitious cyber operations ever disclosed.

Moscow has repeatedly denied the allegations. The FSB did not respond to a request for comment.

Costin Raiu, head of global research and analysis at Kaspersky, said there were three distinct similarities between the SolarWinds backdoor and a hacking tool called “Kazuar” which is used by Turla.

The similarities included the way both pieces of malware attempted to obscure their functions from security analysts, how the hackers identified their victims, and the formula used to calculate periods when the viruses lay dormant in an effort to avoid detection.

“One such finding could be dismissed,” Raiu said. “Two things definitely make me raise an eyebrow. Three is more than a coincidence.”

Confidently attributing cyberattacks is extremely difficult and strewn with possible pitfalls. When Russian hackers disrupted the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in 2018, for example, they deliberately imitated a North Korean group to try and deflect the blame.

Raiu said the digital clues uncovered by his team did not directly implicate Turla in the SolarWinds compromise, but did show there was a yet-to-be determined connection between the two hacking tools.

It’s possible they were deployed by the same group, he said, but also that Kazuar inspired the SolarWinds hackers, both tools were purchased from the same spyware developer, or even that the attackers planted “false flags” to mislead investigators.

Security teams in the United States and other countries are still working to determine the full scope of the SolarWinds hack. Investigators have said it could take months to understand the extent of the compromise and even longer to evict the hackers from victim networks.

U.S. intelligence agencies have said the hackers were “likely Russian in origin” and targeted a small number of high-profile victims as part of an intelligence-gathering operation.

China’s Military Takes Charge of War Powers

Posted on January 7, 2021January 7, 2021 by Denise Simon

Primer:HONG KONG — Jailed Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong was arrested on a new charge under the national security law on Thursday while an American rights lawyer who was detained in a sweeping crackdown was granted bail. Friends and family of Wong, who is serving a 13 1/2-month prison sentence for organizing and participating in an unauthorized protest in 2019, were informed that he had been arrested on suspicion of violating the national security law and was taken away to give a statement on the new charge, according to a post on his Facebook page.

The post also stated that Wong’s lawyer was unable to meet with him, and that Wong had been transferred back to prison after giving the statement, which was not disclosed.

Separately, John Clancey, an American human rights lawyer who works at law firm Ho Tse Wai & Partners, was granted bail, his associate said. He was one of 53 activists arrested Wednesday under the national security law. He couldn’t be reached for comment.

At least some of the others were released on bail late Thursday from various police stations where they had been held. One, veteran activist and former lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung, unfurled a banner that blasted the national security law as he left.

China has expanded the power of its Central Military Commission

(There is hardly an expectation that the Biden administration will take any aggressive action against China or would maintain existing current China policy under the Trump/Pompeo architecture. At risk especially is Taiwan and Hong Kong.)

Read on as President Xi is asserting more power during the power transition underway in the United States.

source

(CMC) – headed by President Xi Jinping – to mobilise military and civilian resources in defence of the national interest, both at home and abroad.

Revisions to the National Defence Law, effective from January 1, weaken the role of the State Council – China’s cabinet – in formulating military policy, handing decision-making powers to the CMC.

For the first time, “disruption” and protection of “development interests” have been added to the legislation as grounds for the mobilisation and deployment of troops and reserve forces.The legislation also specifically stresses the need to build a nationwide coordination mechanism for the mobilisation of state-owned and private enterprises to take part in research into new defence technologies covering conventional weapons, as well as the non-traditional domains of cybersecurity, space and electromagnetics.

Military and political analysts said the amendments aimed to strengthen the country’s military leadership under Xi, providing it with the legal grounds to respond to the challenges of accelerating confrontations between China and the US.

Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor of the Communist Party publication Study Times,said the amendments aimed to legalise and formally apply the “special” nature of China’s political and defence system when dealing with situations that could harm the regime at home and abroad.“China’s political nature is very different from many countries … it’s not surprising for Beijing to enhance the leadership of the CMC when the PLA is going out to defend China’s national interests across the world,” said Deng, who is now an independent political commentator in the US.

China’s success at controlling the Covid-19 pandemic has been seen by Beijing as an endorsement of the Communist Party’s authoritarian rule, particularly as many Western countries are still struggling with rising numbers of infections.

Chen Daoyin, an independent political commentator and former professor at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said the changes showed the regime had gained the confidence to legitimise its long-standing principle that “the party commands the gun” and stamp its “absolute leadership over armed and reserved forces”.

“The move to include ‘development interests’ as a reason for armed mobilisation and war in the law would provide legal grounds for the country to launch war in the legitimate name of defending national development interests,” Chen said.

Zeng Zhiping, a military law expert at Soochow University, said one of the big changes of the law was the downgrading of the State Council’s role in formulating the principles of China’s national defence, and the right to direct and administer the mobilisation of its armed forces.

“The CMC is now formally in charge of making national defence policy and principles, while the State Council becomes a mere implementing agency to provide support to the military,” said Zeng, who is also a retired PLA lieutenant colonel.

“It’s a big contrast when compared with developed countries like Israel, Germany and France, which prefer to put their armed forces under civilian leadership. Even in the US, the civilian-led defence ministry plays a more important role than their military top brass, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Taipei-based military expert Chi Le-yi said the amendments highlighting the use of armed forces to suppress national disruption would be used to target independence-leaning forces in Taiwan, which Beijing regards as part of its territory.

Chi said the ultimate goal of the amended defence law could be seen as Beijing’s latest response to the US policy of comprehensive strategic containment of a rising China.

“The Chinese Communist Party now has strong crisis awareness as it faces various new security challenges, pushing the PLA to come up with a new defence policy soon after completing the establishment of top-down commanding and coordinating systems under Xi’s leadership,” Chi said.

“The law revision is also a symbolic battle call by the party to warn all Chinese people to be combat-ready for a nationwide defence mobilisation, which the party has never done since [it came to power] in 1949.”

The amendments were passed by the National People’s Congress on December 26, after two years of deliberation. Three articles were removed, more than 50 were amended, while there were six additions. In a media conference earlier in December, a spokesperson for the CMC’s legislative affairs bureau said the changes gave the PLA a clear direction in its modernisation and development goals.