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.

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.”

General Dunford Said Russia is #1 Threat, Here is Why

Posted on July 9, 2015July 9, 2015 by Denise Simon

Anyone read the book ‘Disinformation’ by Ronald Rychlak and LtG. Ion Pacepa?

General Joseph Dunford is next in line to replace General Dempsey as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His assessment today about who represented the topic threat to America’s National Security shocked the lawmakers when his response was Russia.

Peeling back some layers, we will come to understand why the General’s alarming conclusions are exactly right. Russia is operating a stealth KGB operation and it has been effective.

Wikileaks Release Indicates Hacking Team Sold To FSB, Russia’s Secret Police

Hacking Team Galileo console

From Forbes:

Now that Wikileaks has released the emails included in the 415GB leaked by the hackers who breached Italian “lawful intercept” provider Hacking Team TISI NaN%, the world has easy access to a trove of information blowing open the inner workings of the private surveillance industry. Amongst the files seen by FORBES so far, emails detailing Hacking Team’s sales to Russia’s secret police, the FSB.

Previous analysis of the leaks had sold its Galileo Remote Control System (RCS) to KVANT, a Russian state-owned military technology company. This inspired questions from Dutch politician and European Member of Parliament Marietje Shaake about the potential breach of European Union sanctions about the sale of such goods to Russia, which has been put on blacklists for its operations in war-torn Ukraine. Selling to the FSB would likely concern onlookers more, given the agency’s widespread access to communications in Russia. Many more details here.

Going beyond the next layer

Cyber Caliphate Hackers Not Linked to Islamic State

State Department warns IS online threat ‘unmatched’

by: Bill Gertz, FreeBeacon

The hacker group Cyber Caliphate that was thought to be an online arm of the Islamic State has no ties to the terror group despite its cyber attacks in support of the ultra-violent al-Qaeda offshoot, according to a State Department security report.

“Although Cyber Caliphate declares to support ISIL, there are no indications—technical or otherwise—that the groups are tied,” the two-page report from the Overseas Security Advisory Council states. The Islamic State (IS) is also known by the acronyms ISIL or ISIS.

Instead, Russian hackers now appear to be linked to the Cyber Caliphate, a fact discovered by French government authorities after a cyber attack on TV5Monde television in France last April.

In addition to the announcing the lack of a connection between IS and the Cyber Caliphate, the State Department warned that the terrorist group nevertheless continues to have unprecedented online recruitment and propaganda capabilities.

“ISIL’s online presence for propaganda and recruitment purposes continues to be unmatched by other terrorist organizations,” the report said.

The Islamic State uses Internet sites and social media strategies to disseminate and control its Islamist message.

“ISIL’s use of Twitter has been deemed particularly effective; a Brookings study reported at least 46,000 Twitter accounts in use by ISIL supporters during the timeframe of September through December 2014,” the report said.

IS also deftly exploits modern technology and has mastered online propaganda in appealing to young and computer-savvy foreigners, including known hackers who support its ends.

“Although ISIL continues to demonstrate success in using online tools for propaganda, recruitment, and fundraising purposes, the suspected link of Russian hackers to the TV5Monde attack reinforces the assessment that ISIL still lacks the ability to carry out a technically sophisticated cyberattack,” the report concludes.

President Obama on Monday defended the administration strategy against ISIL—despite the group’s expansion from Iraq and Syria to other parts of the world.

Obama said ISIL is “particularly effective” in recruiting foreigners, including Americans, and is using online methods to spread its ideology.

The president said that to defeat ISIL and al Qaeda, “it is going to also require us to discredit their ideology.”

However, the president and his administration continue to play down the Islamist nature of the threat, preferring the non-religious term “violent extremism.”

“Ideologies are not defeated with guns. They’re defeated by better ideas, [a] more attractive and more compelling vision,” Obama said.

“So the United States will continue to do our part by working with partners to counter ISIL’s hateful propaganda, especially online.”

The State Department report, “Who Is Cyber Caliphate? Re-examining the Online ISIL Threat,” was produced by a unit of the Department’s Office of Diplomatic Security, which supports American businesses overseas. It describes Cyber Caliphate as a relatively unsophisticated group that has conducted cyber attacks against perceived enemies of the Islamic State.

“This included targeting various media outlets, issuing threats against U.S. military spouses, and the highly publicized hacking of U.S. Central Command’s Twitter account and YouTube channel,” the report said.

Most of the group’s technical activities involved website defacements and hacking of Twitter accounts. The cyber vandalism seems to have beeen intended to spread IS propaganda and to build notoriety for the group.

However, the TV5Monde cyber attack that disrupted live broadcasts, staff email accounts, and the station’s web page for some 20 hours demonstrated new capabilities, the report said.

“The methodology employed in the attack was atypical of previous Cyber Caliphate activity, and further investigation by French authorities and U.S. private cyber security companies instead pointed to nation-state actors,” the report said.

Among the information said to have been compromised during the TV5Monde attack were personal information about relatives of French soldiers fighting IS. France is among the coalition of nations engaged in military operations against IS.

According to the report, IP addresses traced to the TV5Monde attack were traced to the Russian hacker group known as APT28.

“The [APT28] hacking group was formerly observed targeting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, entities in Eastern Europe, security companies, and journalists,” the report said.

“APT28 is assessed to conduct operations to benefit the Russian government, and was not previously seen using hacktivists or terrorist organizations as cover.”

The origin of Cyber Caliphate and its members remains unclear. Initially, it was believed by security authorities that the group started by a British hacker, 20-year-old Junaid Hussain, who was linked to a hack against former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Hussain then was said to have moved from Britain to Syria where he sought to recruit hackers.

The Cyber Caliphate has not been officially endorsed by IS but it has gained from the free publicity its hacker attacks have generated.

The group’s attack on TV5Monde was described in the report as an anomaly for the hackers. Several theories are under consideration by experts regarding the nature of the group’s actions.

Some analysts believe the group was testing its cyber capabilities in preparation for expanded strikes on new targets.

Other analysts said the television station cyber attack was retaliation based on strained ties between Moscow and Paris.

Russia was angered by France’s recent decision to cancel a $1.3 billion deal for two Mistral-class helicopter carriers for the Russian Navy after Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine.

According to the report, the cyber security firm iSight Partners has assessed the Cyber Caliphate as a “false front for anti-western Russian actors.”

Another theory is that Cyber Caliphate is part of a Russian disinformation operation used by Moscow’s hackers as cover for their cyber attacks. The report noted “Russia’s long history of disinformation campaigns.”