Category Archives: #StopIran

Hillary Asks, ‘Will the Libya War Interrupt my Vacay’?

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It must be noted that daily, when Hillary was at home at White Haven, her private residence that she DOES not share with Bill, a State Department driver would show up daily to deliver a package. Inside contents were usually her copy of the Presidential Daily Briefing, call sheets and other diplomatic operational actions, all in printed form. Note…PRINTED FORM. That is NOT protected material, just ask General Petraeus.

There are clear violations in the law in these emails with regard to her shadow intelligence point person, Sidney Blumenthal, known as the Logan Act, however, no one ever seems to be prosecuted under this law. The email exchanges also demonstrate that Syria was actually aiding Libya, an agreement Qaddafi made decades ago with Bashir al Assad’s father. Hummm.

Is there a shredder somewhere in this mess? Heh…read on. Did files and records get buried with Tyler Drumheller? Oh, has anyone interviewed Samantha Power, the current UN Ambassador? Well she was part of the Libya mess too.

Hillary’s team was particularly interested in a documentary:

 “The Oath of Tobruk,” Bernard-Henri Levy details how a self-promoting leftist intellectual persuaded a conservative French president to back the Libyan revolt.

Hillary Clinton Forwarded Huma Abedin Classified Info. for Printing

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released nearly 70 pages of State Department records that show that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides, Deputy Chiefs of Staff Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, received and sent classified information on their non-state.gov email accounts.  The documents, also available on the State Department website, were obtained in response to a court order from a May 5, 2015, lawsuit filed against the State Department (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)) after it failed to respond to a March 18 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking:

  • All emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-“state.gov” email address.

The new documents show that Hillary Clinton used the clintonemail.com system to ask Huma Abedin (also on a non-state.gov email account) to print two March 2011 emails, which were sent from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (using the moniker “aclb”) to Jake Sullivan on Sullivan’s non-state.gov email account.  The Obama State Department redacted the Blair emails under Exemption (b)(1) which allows the withholding of classified material.  The material is marked as being classified as “Foreign government information” and “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources.”

Another email shows that Clinton wanted to know how meetings in Washington, including a four-hour meeting concerning America’s war on Libya, would impact her Hampton vacation.  Responding to an email that details the sensitive meetings in DC, Clinton emails Abedin on August 26, 2011, “Ok. What time would I get back to Hamptons?”  Again, this email discussion takes place on non-state.gov email accounts.

The documents also include advice to Clinton on Libya from Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton Foundation employee who, according to a Judicial Watch investigative report, also had business interests in Libya.  Clinton wanted Blumenthal’s March 9, 2011, Libya memo to be printed “without any identifiers.”

The newly released Abedin emails include a lengthy exchange giving precise details of Clinton’s schedule using unsecured government emails. The email from Lona J. Valmoro, former Special Assistant to Secretary of State Clinton, to Abedin and Clinton reveals exact times (including driving times) and locations of all appointments throughout the day. Another itinerary email provides details about a meeting at the United Nations in New York at 3:00 on Tuesday, January 31, 2012, with the precise disclosure, “that would mean wheels up from Andrews at approximately 12:00pm/12:15pm.”

“These emails show that Hillary Clinton isn’t the only Obama official who should be worried about being prosecuted for mishandling classified information.  Her former top State aides (and current campaign advisers) Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan should be in the dock, as well,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  “The Obama State Department has now confirmed that Clinton, Abedin, and Sullivan used unsecured, non-government email accounts to communicate information that should now be withheld from the American people ‘in the interest of national defense or foreign policy, and properly classified.’ When can we expect the indictments?”

For Islamic State, Damascus is the Crown Jewel

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The city of Homs is over, the next threat is Aleppo. Aleppo is already surrounded and refugees have been fleeing due to Russian backed assaults. Russia is getting help from Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.

But as published in the most recent issue of Dabiq, the Islamic State magazine, the true apocalyptic mission is to take Damascus. The aim for Islamic State is to take Damascus in 2016.

NYT: GAZIANTEP, Turkey — A car bomb tore up a vegetable market and a police officers’ club in Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Tuesday, according to a witness and to regional news reports, striking an area that had been quiet for about two years under a local agreement between the Syrian government and insurgents.

The Islamic State, using its official media channels, claimed responsibility for the blast, which the witness said had wounded dozens in Masaken Barzeh, a neighborhood on the northern edge of the city. It was the first attack in Damascus itself to be claimed by the Islamic State, although the group said it was behind an assault last month on the Sayeda Zeinab shrine, on the outskirts of the capital, that left dozens dead.

The blast on Tuesday came amid government advances against insurgents in northern Syria, a signal that even as the leadership goes on the offensive in some parts of the country, government-controlled areas, including those believed to be secure, remain vulnerable.

According to the witness, a large explosion hit the officers’ club, which was frequented by government troops as well as by allied fighters from the Lebanese group Hezbollah. The witness also said the blast had blown out the windows of his home, 100 yards away.

The Islamic State said in a statement that the police officers’ club had been the target of the bombing. But the club is inside a market, adding to the likelihood that civilians could be killed or wounded.

No official death toll was immediately available, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain that has extensive contacts inside Syria, said that eight police officers had been killed and about 20 had been wounded.

The blast was believed to be the most violent episode in the area since insurgents under the banner of the Free Syrian Army reached a truce there.

Under the deal, the insurgents maintain security in the neighborhood and they have, at times, set up checkpoints at the entrance to the district, next to ones controlled by security forces.

Unlike other local deals, which have been more lopsided — akin to surrenders after long sieges — the insurgents in Barzeh had real leverage. They were not besieged and were controlling a route that government forces needed to reach a military hospital. But the Islamic State is not a party to such deals, and it considers both the national government and the Free Syrian Army to be enemies.

The witness said he had seen dozens of security officers aiding the victims, some of whom were taken away in private cars.

Obama’s Final Cyber Offense, Einstein?

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Sheesh, just the name points to a misguided failure since 2008. Einstein has a price tag, $ 5 billion. There are other questions to be asked like what does the NSA have to offer or the countless cyber security professionals in the private sector?

From the White House, there has been a 12 point plan and it has not advanced at all.

In May 2009, the President accepted the recommendations of the resulting Cyberspace Policy Review, including the selection of an Executive Branch Cybersecurity Coordinator who will have regular access to the President.

Meanwhile, hacks are real, dangerous and coming at mach speed. Using old software language such as COBOL speaks volumes as to how antiquated protections are and how dysfunctional all agencies are in maintaining crack-proof.

The Department of Homeland Security appears to be the lead agency for Einstein compliance, what could go wrong and has? The fact sheet from DHS is here.

Obama makes final push to cement cyber legacy

TheHill: President Obama on Tuesday made what is likely his last major push to bolster the government’s digital defenses before leaving office.

As part of the annual White House budget proposal, the Obama administration rolled out a sweeping plan to inject billions of extra dollars into federal cybersecurity funding, establish a new senior federal cyber official and create a presidential commission on cyber that will establish a long-term road map.

The move is likely to complete Obama’s cyber legacy, which will include an historic attention to digital security, unprecedented executive orders on the topic, and shepherding through Congress the largest-ever cyber bill, as well as numerous bruising hacks at federal agencies and allegations that government networks were woefully outdated.

In a release, the White House called the plan “the capstone of more than seven years of determined effort.”

“[Obama] is the first president that is making a big cybersecurity push and I think that’s tremendously important,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), one of Congress’s most prominent cyber voices, told The Hill.

The proposal aims to inject more than $5 billion in new funding across the government to strengthen network defenses that have been repeatedly infiltrated by suspected foreign government spies.

The ask is a 35-percent increase over last year’s allotment of $14 billion, and would put overall federal cyber spending at over $19 billion.

The budget request earmarks $3.1 billion for an “Information Technology Modernization Fund” that the White House described as a “down payment on the comprehensive overhaul” of federal IT systems.

Lieu said this fund could help solve one of the inherent budgeting problems when it comes to defending interconnected networks from hackers.

“What’s important about [the fund] is it can go across agencies and upgrade systems that touch more than one agency,” said Lieu, who sits on both the House Budget and Oversight committees.

Currently, each agency has its own individual cybersecurity budget that can be spent on its network, but that cannot necessarily be expended on portions of the agency’s IT infrastructure at other agencies.

Hackers have exploited this balkanized budgeting process.

Over the summer, suspected Chinese cyber spies cracked into the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), pilfering over 22 million people’s personal information in two separate hacks. The initial intrusion — which exposed roughly 4.2 federal workers’ personnel files — occurred at an OPM database that was housed at the Interior Department.

The OPM hacks also exposed the antiquated legacy systems the government relied on to run its networks.

Congress bashed OPM officials for not fully encrypting all their sensitive data. But the agency’s systems were simply too old to even accept modern encryption, they repeatedly explained.

The network also relied on the dated COBOL programming language, which initially became popular in the 1960s and is now eschewed by younger programmers.

A new federal official will oversee much of these update efforts.

As part of its proposal, the White House is establishing a federal chief information security officer, or CISO. The official will be housed within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and report to federal chief information officer, Tony Scott, who oversees government technology.

“This is the first time that there will be a dedicated senior official who is solely focused on developing, managing, and coordinating cybersecurity strategy, policy and operations across the entire federal domain,” the White House said.

Centralizing cybersecurity oversight is an attempt to help overcome the lack of agency-to-agency communication on the subject.

“For a while, I’ve seen the argument that there are too many lines of authority in the federal government on cybersecurity,” said Lieu. “Sometimes it’s not clear who is responsible for what.”

The CISO will also help monitor the government’s digital defense spending, which has been knocked as cost-ineffective.

Recently, a federal watchdog report concluded that the government’s main cyber defense system, known as “Einstein,” was largely ineffectual at thwarting sophisticated hackers. The report echoed long-standing criticism from security experts who say the program is a much-delayed boondoggle that is already obsolete.

Federal officials insist the system is in its final phase of implementation and will soon serve as a platform to add on leading cyber tools.

This budget infusion and new federal CISO will with these technology updates, the White House said.

The proposal also includes a robust research and public awareness component.

In a bid to build a bridge to the next administration, Obama is launching a “Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.”

The administration is directing a bipartisan group of lawmakers to appoint top industry representatives and leading technologists to the commission. The group will be tasked with taking the long view.

“The commission will make recommendations on actions that can be taken over the next decade to strengthen cybersecurity in both the public and private sectors while protecting privacy,” the White House said.

Security experts almost unanimously agree that one of these actions will be eliminating the traditional online password.

Since 2011, the White House has been trying to push people away from passwords. Tuesday’s plan includes a last bid to encourage stronger people to adopt stronger login practices.

The proposal creates a new public awareness campaign that includes leading tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

“By judiciously combining a strong password with additional factors, such as a fingerprint or a single-use code delivered in a text message, Americans can make their accounts even more secure,” the White House said.

The proposal is likely Obama’s concluding statement on cybersecurity.

During his presidency, cybersecurity has gone from a fringe issue to one that most leaders acknowledge is vital to national and economic security. The topic received an increasing amount of attention in all but Obama’s final State of the Union address.

In recent years, the U.S. has seen the dramatic rise of global cyber crime syndicates that have pillaged banks, department stores and hotels.

According to an October report from Hewlett Packard and the Ponemon Institute, cyber crime costs the average American firm $15.4 million annually, up 82 percent over the last six years. By 2019, it’s believed the cost of data breaches will reach $2.1 trillion globally.

Digital adversaries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have also swooped in unexpectedly, plundering health insurers, airlines, nuclear plants, government agencies and, most memorably, a major movie studio.

Even terrorist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are causing fears by hijacking high-profile twitter accounts and digitally defacing websites around the world.

These trends are bound to continue after Obama leaves the White House, but this ultimate cyber thrust could help cement his reputation as the first president to actively address the digital security challenge.

“If we can get this through, the funding, I think that would be very positive for his legacy,” Lieu said. “This is not just a federal government problem, it’s endemic in the private sector.”

N. Korea Launch Flew Over the Super Bowl

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TOKYO—Here’s a bit of Super Bowl trivia: North Korea’s newest satellite passed almost right over the stadium just an hour after it ended.

Whatever motives Pyongyang may have about using its rocket launches to develop nuclear-tipped long-range missiles, it now has two satellites circling the Earth, according to Norad, the North American Aerospace Command, which monitors all satellites in orbit.

Both of the Kwangmyongsong, or “Shining Star,” satellites complete their orbits in about 94 minutes and based on data released by international organizations tracking them, the new one passed almost right over Levi’s Stadium about an hour after the Super Bowl ended.

“It passed almost directly overhead Silicon Valley, which is where I am and where the stadium is,” tech watcher Martyn Williams said in an e-mail to the Associated Press. “The pass happened at 8:26 p.m., after the game. I would put it down to nothing more than a coincidence, but an interesting one.”

***

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon confirmed on Monday that it will start formal talks with South Korea on deploying an advanced missile defense system to South Korea to counter the growing threat of North Korea’s weapons capabilities after its rocket launch this weekend.

U.S. military officials have said the sophisticated system called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) was needed in South Korea. South Korea said on Sunday it and the United States would begin talks on the THAAD, after North Korea launched a long-range rocket earlier carrying what it has called a satellite.

Chang/DailyBeast: On Sunday, North Korea completed its second-in-a-row successful test of a three-stage launcher, showing the regime’s mastery of an especially complex technology.  

Pyongyang claims it put an earth observation satellite — the Kwangmyongsong-4 — in a polar orbit. More likely, the object now circling the earth is a decoy. In 2012, after the North’s last long-range test, it announced it had put a communications satellite in space. No signal, however, has ever been detected from the device.  

That “satellite,” and the one launched this week, are about the same weight as a nuclear warhead, and that was the point of these elaborate exercises.

North Korea has been putting dead objects in orbit so that it can test, in violation of four sets of UN Security Council resolutions, its ballistic missile technology under the guise of a civilian rocket program.  

The rocket the North Koreans call the Unha-3 was probably the most advanced version of their Taepodong missile. It appears, from the location of Sunday’s splashdown zones, that the launcher has a range of 10,000 kilometers, the same as that of the 2012 version.  

Some have taken comfort that the North Koreans have not improved the reach of their missile, but that would be a mistake. “This test launch took less time to set up and was conducted more covertly than any other launch in North Korean history,” notes North Korea analyst Bruce Bechtol, in comments circulated to The Daily Beast and others on Sunday.  

Up to now, the North’s longest-range missile was never much of a weapon. It required weeks to transport, assemble, fuel, and test before launch. The calculus was that the U.S., in a wartime setting, would have plenty of time to destroy the launcher on the ground.  

The North Koreans since 2012 have obviously been able to compress the cycle.  This time, Pyongyang moved up the launch window and sent the Unha-3 into space on the window’s first day, surprising just about every observer.  

That means, of course, the North Koreans are perfecting their launch skills, thereby decreasing on-the-ground vulnerability.  

The Taepodong is still an easy target before launch, but once it reaches the edge of space it becomes fearsome. It has the range to make a dent in more than half of the continental United States. If its warhead is nuclear and explodes high above the American homeland, an electromagnetic pulse could disable electronics across vast swatches of the country.  

The American intelligence community does not think the North Koreans have built a miniaturized nuclear warhead to go along with the Taepodong yet, but it’s clear they are on their way to developing such a device. The launch this week was one month and one day after their fourth nuclear detonation.

Pyongyang, for all the snickering and derision it attracts, is capable of sneaking up on us and becoming an existential threat.  

Why has the United States, the most powerful nation in history, not been able to stop destitute North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs? As Stapleton Roy, the former American diplomat told me in 2004, “No one has found a way to persuade North Korea to move in sensible directions.”  

Certainly not the Obama administration. A multi-faceted bargain in 2012, the so-called Leap Day deal, fell apart weeks after it was put in place, when Kim Jong-un, the ruler of the despotic state, launched what his regime called a rocket.  

Then a new approach, backed by existing sanctions, also failed to produce results. The White House during this phase essentially left North Korea alone, ignoring Kim with a policy now known as “strategic patience.” It has been more like “strategic paralysis,” as David Maxwell of Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies aptly termed it after the Sunday launch.  

The evident failure of the current administration follows failures of different kinds by its two immediate predecessors. These days, like in past ones, American officials tell us how the North’s actions are “unacceptable,”

the words of Secretary of State John Kerry, or “flagrant,” the term used by National Security Advisor Susan Rice, but the U.S. never seems to do anything effective.  

Similarly, an emergency session of the Security Council on Sunday “strongly condemned” the launch but did nothing else. The UN still has not imposed any sanctions for the Jan. 6 detonation of what North Korea claims is a “hydrogen” device. Veto-wielding Beijing has made it clear it will not support a fifth set of UN sanctions.  

Ultimately, the problem, as Maxwell notes, is that no country wants to pressure Kim so much that either he decides he has nothing to lose and go to war or his decrepit state falls apart, causing tragedy of a different sort. Yet as long as the Kim family regime stays in power, it will continue to build horrific weapons.  

“What North Korea wants most,” said Ashton Carter before he became secretary of defense “is oddly to be left alone, to run this rather odd country, a throwback to Stalinism.” If that were indeed true, President Obama’s strategic patience would have worked by now. Yet the North’s leaders are not content to misrule their 25 million subjects. They have institutionalized crisis.  

When we examine evidence of the most recent crisis — scraps of the missile that fell into the sea Sunday and flight data — we will probably learn the North Koreans in fact tested their new 80-ton booster, which they have been developing for at least two years. It is almost certain Iran has paid for its development.  

That’s why Bechtol, author of North Korea and Regional Security in the Kim Jong-un Era, thinks America in the months ahead should be looking for evidence of sales of the new missile to Iran. Larry Niksch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in July that North Korea earns “upwards of two to three billion dollars annually from Iran for the various forms of collaboration between them.”  

Even if one thinks Washington should not sanction North Korea to the brink of war or collapse, the U.S. at a minimum needs to stop sales of the launcher North Korea fired off this week. The Bush administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative, a comprehensive program to stop such transfers, has languished in Washington in recent years.  

At this point, American policymakers are not trying very hard to stop North Korea’s trade in dangerous weapons. That, to borrow a phrase, is unacceptable.

*** Why did North Korea launch this now? Rand Corporation explains.

 

 

No Authority to Engage the Taliban

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US to deploy hundreds of troops in Afghanistan to thwart Taliban

By month’s end, a force described as battalion-strength, consisting of mostly army soldiers, will arrive in Helmand province to bolster the local military

 

Guardian: Hundreds of additional US troops are slated to deploy to a volatile province in Afghanistan to bolster the local military against a resurgent Taliban, the Guardian has learned.

By month’s end, a force described as battalion-strength, consisting of mostly army soldiers, will arrive in Helmand province where US and UK forces have struggled in battles for over a decade to drive out the Taliban.

In keeping with Barack Obama’s formal declaration that the US is not engaged in combat, despite elite forces recently participating in an hours-long battle in Helmand, defense officials said the additional troops would not take part in combat. But they will help the existing Helmand force defend itself against Taliban attacks, officials said.

US military officials declined to offer many specifics about an upcoming reinforcement, but they described the mission as primarily aimed at bolstering the performance of the embattled 215th Corps of the Afghan military, through training.

The 215th Corps has recently had its commander replaced amid performance and corruption concerns, and has endured “unusually high operating tempo for long periods of time”, outgoing US commander General John Campbell testified to Congress last week. It is among four Afghan corps that still have US military advisers embedded within it, despite a recent pullback to advise at higher levels.

“Our mission remains the same,” said Colonel Michael Lawhorn, a spokesman for the US command in Kabul, “to train, advise, and assist our Afghan counterparts, and not to participate in combat operations.”

The Guardian understands the additional forces in Helmand will not increase the current total troop numbers in Afghanistan, which currently stand at 9,800, but will instead be deployed from troops already in the country. Batallion strengths vary, but can constitute a force of up to 800 troops.

While new advisers make up a significant component of the additional forces, Lawhorn said that another mission of the reinforcement will be to “bolster force protection for the current staff of advisers”, suggesting a concern for the safety of the existing Helmand force amid major recent Taliban gains.

The US military has sounded warnings of a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, in Helmand and beyond, that have prompted significant revisions in Obama’s war plans.

Already Obama has agreed to leave 5,500 troops in Afghanistan past the end of his presidency, but his newly confirmed commander, General John “Mick” Nicholson, told a Senate panel recently that increased insurgent violence will prompt him to re-evaluate troop requests, and left the door open to bolstering a force Obama has sought to draw down.

In January, a US special forces soldier died and two others were wounded as they assisted the Afghan military in repelling a Taliban assault in the province that lasted hours.

While the Pentagon initially resisted categorizing the battle as “combat”, press secretary Peter Cook called it a “combat situation, but [US troops] are not in the lead intentionally”, illustrating how the difference between combat and advisory missions can blur in practice.

Opium-rich Helmand has emerged as a Taliban priority, as most of its 2015 attacks focused on the province. Unlike earlier eras of the war, the Taliban have declined to take a winter break and have fought in the province all year.

The Taliban have come close to overrunning a district center in Helmand, Sangin, where more than 100 UK troops died during a war that has entered its 15th year, despite US airstrikes in late December. Kabul is said to control only three of Helmand’s 14 districts, including the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah.

Outgoing commander Campbell, testifying to Congress last week, said that while current rules of engagement prevented US troops who are not engaged in counter-terrorism raids from initiating fights with the Taliban, “I have no restrictions on providing force protection” for troops that train Afghans.

Lawhorn described the reinforcement as a “planned deployment of additional personnel”, but at least one congressional official contacted by the Guardian was unaware of the plan.