Tag Archives: DuQu

Obama’s “Zoo Animal” Broke Free and “Crossed the Rubicon”

By:  Friday June 1, 2012 12:02 pm

At the bottom of it all has been the Bomb. For the first time in our history, the President was given sole and unconstrained authority over all possible uses of the Bomb.

[snip]

Every executive encroachment or abuse was liable to justification from this one supreme power.

If the President has the sole authority to launch nation-destroying weapons, he has license to use every other power at his disposal that might safeguard that supreme necessity. If he says he needs other and lesser powers, how can Congress or the courts discern whether he needs them when they have no supervisory role over the basis of the claim he is making? To challenge his authority anywhere is to threaten the one great authority.

–Garry Wills, Bomb Power

I suppose I’ll eventually get around to discussing how the series of condoned leaks portraying President Obama as the Deciderer all rest on the pathetic but true fact that he is only borrowing George Bush’s claim to that title.

But for now, I want to focus on the one part of David Sanger’s mixed-metahpor saturated installment in the Deciderer 2.0 series that rings most true:

Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.

“We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a “grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.

With cyberwar, with drones, and (to a lesser extent) with the embrace of the terrorists’ transnational methods to fight terrorists, Obama has crossed into uncharted territory of the sort Wills explored in his book, Bomb Power. These changes are likely a step beyond the Bomb Power paradigm, whatever that entails.

Yet Obama has only barely begun to think through the ramifications of these tools. He has, instead, focused on the near and overblown threats of Iran and AQAP, not seeing both the strategic implications of even those choices, much less the implications of the sort Wills describes arose in the wake of our use of a nuclear bomb.

The President has embraced waging extralegal war using drones from the Oval Office. The President has embraced using easily manipulable code to wage physical war. What are the implications of these decisions?

Oh sure, Obama started paying attention after the fact. A year ago, he rolled out a “National Strategy for Cyberspace,” calling for international cooperation to enforce responsible behavior of the sort we have already violated.  Even more recently, DOD has been tinkering with our rules of engagement.

But there are signs it is already too late, the battle lines have been drawn. Continue reading →


Foreign Policy’s “False Flag”

By:  Friday January 13, 2012 1:15 pm

Wikipedia defines “false flag operations” as “covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities.” Unpacking such an operation would require explaining clearly the target audience(s) of the deception and the purpose of it.

But Mark Perry doesn’t describe that structure in his Foreign Policy story, titled “False Flag,” asserting that members of Jundallah were recruited by Mossad agents pretending to be CIA officers.

According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.

The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah — a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.

But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel’s Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel’s recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel’s ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials. [my emphasis]

Explaining that structure would seem all the more important in a story–apparently in the works for a year and a half–published at the precise moment the Americans are trying to deny any involvement in the ongoing assassinations of Iranian scientists.

The problem is all the more real given the ambiguity of Perry’s language. When he says the Israelis were “flush with American dollars,” does he mean they got the dollars from America, or only that they were–as dollars are in common usage–American? When he notes that the recruitment “occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers,” is that meant to suggest that it did so with their assent?

The ambiguity in Perry’s article is more significant given that, while he describes George Bush “going ballistic” when he was briefed on the op, Perry also provides evidence that at least some at the top officials in Bush’s Administration didn’t seem to care all that much.

A senior administration official vowed to “take the gloves off” with Israel, according to a U.S. intelligence officer. But the United States did nothing — a result that the officer attributed to “political and bureaucratic inertia.”

“In the end,” the officer noted, “it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat.” Even so, at least for a short time, this same officer noted, the Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate among Bush’s national security team, pitting those who wondered “just whose side these guys [in Israel] are on” against those who argued that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Furthermore, while Perry references earlier stories covering Jundallah, he doesn’t even consider the role of JSOC in this false flag operation, even though one of them–Sy Hersh’s–specifically describes the involvement of JSOC in such ops.

And as for the suggestion that since Obama took over, such cooperation between the US and Israel has been dramatically curtailed? The claim that the US and Israel have only been cooperating on operations that “are highly technical in nature and do not involve covert actions targeting Iran’s infrastructure or political or military leadership” would first of all seem to be a stretch given that StuxNet and Duqu are all about infrastructure. It would also seem to gloss the apparent role that drones have had in targeting these scientists (Iran has captured some Israeli drones, in addition to the American ones, but most of the airspace involved would require US acquiescence). Add in the recent border incident between Iran and Pakistan involving claimed Jundallah members (the border area isn’t exactly Israel’s backyard), it seems the Obama Administration is, at best, looking the other way.

Israelis and Americans have long hidden behind each other when working with Iranians, going back at least to the Iran-Contra ops that Dick Cheney had a fondness for. Hiding behind Israelis lets American officials pretend we’re not doing the taboo things we’re doing. Hiding behind Americans lets Iranian partners working with Israelis pretend they aren’t working with the Zionist enemy. That false flag business works in many different directions, after all.

Mind you, whatever the other purposes of this “false flag” story, its publication at this point in time just stripped Jundallah partners of the ability to deny they’re working with Israel, with all the probably dangerous consequences that will have.


Ahmed Warsame and StuxNet

By:  Monday December 19, 2011 8:43 am

Back in November, I suggested one intended purpose of the detainee provisions in the Defense Authorization is to require a paper trail that would make it a little harder for the Administration to disappear detainees on floating prisons. The bill:

  • Requires written procedures outlining how the Administration decides who counts as a terrorist
  • Requires regular briefings on which groups and individuals the Administration considers to be covered by the AUMF
  • Requires the Administration submit waivers whenever it deviates from presumptive military detention

These are imperfect controls, certainly. But they do seem like efforts to bureaucratize the existing, arbitrary, detention regime, in which the President just makes shit up and tells big parts of Congress–including the Armed Services Committees, who presumably have an interest in making sure the President doesn’t make the military break the law–after the fact.

I suggested this effort to impose bureaucratic controls was, in part, a reaction to the Ahmed Warsame treatment, in which it appears that the Armed Services Committees learned Obama had declared war against parts of al-Shabaab and used that declaration as justification to float Warsame around on a ship for two months. (It appears that the Intelligence Committees, but not the Armed Services Committees, got briefed in this case, though Admiral McRaven was testifying about floating prisons as it was happening). [Update: I may be mistaken about what Lindsey Graham's language about making sure the AUMF covered this action meant, so italicized language may be incorrect.]

This is not to say the ASCs are going to limit what the President does–just make sure they know about it and make sure the military has legal cover for what they’re doing.

With that in mind, take a look at Robert Chesney’s review of the new cyberwar authorization in the Defense Authorization, which reads:

SEC. 954. MILITARY ACTIVITIES IN CYBERSPACE.

Congress affirms that the Department of Defense has the capability, and upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests, subject to—

(1) the policy principles and legal regimes that the Department follows for kinetic capabilities, including the law of armed conflict; and

(2) the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1541 et seq.).

Chesney’s interpretation of this troubling language is that by requiring a Presidential statement in some cases, it will force interagency consultation before, say, DOD launches a cyberwar on Iran. (Oh wait, too late.)

Continue reading →