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Pandora’s Box Opened: Netanyahu’s Double-Tap Fuck-You

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[NB: Note the byline. Portions of this post may be speculative. / ~Rayne]

I wrote a while back about Israel, discussing Israel’s repeated intelligence “failures” as not mere fuck-ups but fuck-yous.

This week’s attacks by exploding electronic devices intended for Hezbollah — attributed to Israel without any denial so far — are yet more fuck-yous delivered using an indiscriminate approach and a double tap.

These fuck-yous blew open Pandora’s box — and then some.

~ ~ ~

On Tuesday nearly 3000 pagers blew up in Lebanon. These one-way pagers are believed to have been distributed to Hezbollah members as a means to bypass Israel’s surveillance of cell phone communications. More than 30 people were killed including children.

On Wednesday during funeral services for persons who died the previous day, walkie-talkies or handheld radios were detonated in Lebanon. 12 more people died and approximately 3000 were injured.

The exploding walkie-talkie attack was the double tap: when persons who escaped a targeted attack gather during a response afterward, a second attack is launched retargeting those same persons. We’ve seen this technique employed by Russia in Ukraine, using secondary attacks to take out first responders aiding the injured and dying in a first attack, or at funeral services for the dead.

It’s a questionable practice; former President Obama had been criticized for its use with drone attacks as double taps may violate the Geneva Conventions and U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996.

But both Tuesday and Wednesday’s attacks may have violated the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons regardless of the double tap on Wednesday, as the armed devices constituted booby traps which are prohibited.

These attacks are yet more proof that Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership has gone rogue having repeatedly refused to comply with multiple treaties including the Geneva Conventions.

~ ~ ~

This time, though, Israel doesn’t have the excuse that IDF may have made a mistake.

These attacks were premeditated, planned out and executed over months if not years. Front companies were used to obtain components and distribute assembled devices; in the case of the pagers, it’s believed a Hungarian registered firm BAC Consulting may have been a key intermediary between a Taiwanese manufacturer and the ultimate distribution of the devices.

Nonprofit OSINT investigator Bellingcat followed evidence between the pagers and Taiwan electronics firm Gold Apollo, noting that BAC Consulting listed as an employee a “ghost”; this person can’t be traced to any real  human, suggesting strongly BAC is an intelligence front.

The operation’s timeline needs to be fleshed out more fully; it’s not clear whether some actions believed to be related to the operation behind this week’s attacks are intended solely for plausible deniability.

02-MAY-2020 — BAC Consulting appears in Hungarian business records but appears now to have been shuttered the same year.

21-MAY-2022 — BAC Consulting registered as a new company in Hungary, according to Hungarian Justice Ministry records. It was listed as a retailer of telecommunications products, management consulting, jewelry making, and fruit cultivator — a rather odd assortment of goods and services.

The business was not engaged in manufacturing according to a spokesperson for Hungary’s prime minister; they also said “the referenced devices have never been in Hungary,” suggesting BAC acted as a broker or trade intermediary.

XXX-2022 to AUG 2024 — Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Gold Apollo exported exported approximately 260,000 pagers over a two-year timeframe. The majority shipped to the EU and US with no records of pagers shipped to Lebanon during that same timeframe. The company received no reports of Gold Apollo pagers exploding.

SUMMER 2022 — Modified pagers containing PETN-adulterated batteries for which BAC was an intermediary began shipping into Lebanon.

APR-MAY 2024 — A Lebanese security source said the pagers had been imported to Lebanon five months ago.

The pagers may have been imported into Lebanon months ago, but they must have been planned out well before that given the prevailing description of the handheld improvised exploding devices (IEDs).

Acceptance of the pagers must have been worked out far earlier — which brand would the users be willing to use, how would they be distributed without raising questions, what could go wrong tipping off the plot between the time the first pagers were fitted up with explosive PETN and detonators, where could the IEDs be assembled without intelligence leaks, so on.

Which brings us to leaks by a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group Handala whose attacks on websites were first noted by computer security expert Kevin Beaumont back in May this year.

After the pager IED explosions on Tuesday, Handala published information about the pagers’ production claiming they had exfiltrated data from Israeli sources Vidisco and Israeli Industrial Batteries Ltd. (IIB).

Vidisco is an Israeli-based developer and manufacturer of X-ray inspection systems; IIB is a manufacturer of batteries which is 51% owned by Sunlight Group as of February 2023. Both appear to be contractors to Israel’s military. Breachsense indicates both firms were hacked and credentials of employees at both firms were leaked though no customer credentials have been.

Handala’s brief about the data it hacked published Wednesday explained the operation:

The operation of the last two days was a series of joint actions of the Mossad and Unit 8200 and a number of shell companies of the Zionist regime! Handala’s hackers, during extensive hacking in recent hours, were able to obtain very secret and confidential information from the operations of the past days, and all the documents will be published in the coming hours!

The summary of the operation is as follows:

* This supply chain attack has taken place by contaminating the batteries of Pagers devices with a special type of heat-sensitive explosive material in the country of origin of the producer!

* Batteries have been contaminated with these explosives by IIB (Israeli Industrial Batteries) company in Nahariya!

* Mossad was responsible for transporting contaminated batteries to the country of origin of the producer!

* Due to the sensitivity of explosives detection devices to these batteries and the need to move them in several countries, Mossad, in cooperation with vidisco shell company, has moved the mentioned shipments!

*Vidisco company is an affiliated company of 8200 unit and today more than 84% of airports and seaports in the world use X-rays produced by this company in their security unit, which actually has a dedicated backdoor of 8200 unit and the Zionist regime it can exclude any shipment it considers in the countries using these devices and prevent the detection of sabotage! ( The complete source code of this project will be published in the next few hours! )

* Contaminated shipments have reached Lebanon through the use of Vidisco backdoor and after traveling through several countries!

* All the factors involved in this operation have been identified by Handala and soon all the data will be published!

* Handala has succeeded in hacking Vidisco and IIB and their 14TB data will be leaked!

More details will be published in the coming hours

(Unit 8200: Israeli Intelligence Corps group)

Beaumont published a short write-up about Handala’s information dump to date, noting the likelihood that Handala is connected to Iran through IP addresses, their talking points, and the targets of their efforts.

Beaumont also asks:

Are the claims credible?

Handala has not yet provided proof of data exfiltration of these organisations. On reaching out, one company above said they are suffering from “IT issues”.

In prior claims by Handala, they have been credible around victim names.

If the battery claims are credible; it is not possible to assess as no evidence has been provided to date.

I’ll note that Handala’s English is very good, though in the age of ChatGPT it may be generated for clarity to English-speaking audiences.

There was no mention of specifics related to handheld radios by Handala in these early releases and if they were likewise products produced by the same after-market suppliers, specialized modifiers, and distribution network.

Reports indicate some of the radios were made by Japanese manufacturer ICOM though ICOM said the model IC-V82 identified was discontinued a decade ago. As damage to recovered radios displayed blast damage in the battery area, it’s possible the radios were retrofitted with explosives or replacement batteries were manufactured with explosives. Because radios and their batteries are larger than pagers, this would explain the larger blasts associated with the radios.

~ ~ ~

Do read the essay by American researcher and hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang at the link embedded at the phrase “Pandora’s box” above. Huang is deeply concerned about these attacks relying on handheld electronics:

Not all things that could exist should exist, and some ideas are better left unimplemented. Technology alone has no ethics: the difference between a patch and an exploit is the method in which a technology is disclosed. Exploding batteries have probably been conceived of and tested by spy agencies around the world, but never deployed en masse because while it may achieve a tactical win, it is too easy for weaker adversaries to copy the idea and justify its re-deployment in an asymmetric and devastating retaliation.

…

I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home.

I share this concern,  one I’ve had for over a decade beginning with reports in 2009-2010 of Chinese-made counterfeit electronics ending up in the U.S. military’s supply chain, compounded by reports in 2018 of unauthorized chips added to server motherboards.

Oversight and investigation into these problems were thwarted by geopolitical, intelligence, and corporate interests.

Huang included a nifty visual representation of an electronics supply chain with his essay:

Every point along the supply chain can be breached, whether the items are new or used or refurbished. Huang’s 2019 presentation at BlueHat in Israel on supply chain security looks in detail at the likely points in chip and board production for unauthorized modifications; he doesn’t look far outside manufacturing, though.

What terrifies me is that Israel’s operation revealed far more than supply chains are now threatened. They’ve shown every hostile entity in the world how to wreak massive chaos in ways we haven’t fully imagined.

~ ~ ~

The IEDs have and will continue to attract attention. This week’s double tap attacks made it clear that the proliferation of small electronic devices on which we rely so heavily are the means to destroy both individuals and groups of people.

The information leaked by Handala makes it easy for hostile entities to attempt the same for their own aims.

The attacks have already spurred renewed discussion about onshoring more of our supply chain.

But what concerns me the most is what we’ve learned about the application of X-ray devices in our supply chain and elsewhere.

If Handala could obtain information about this operation — assuming everything revealed so far is truthful and in no way distorted — what other entities may have preceded Handala in breaching Vidisco’s data? How much lead time do they already have toward something similar to this week’s double tap attacks?

If the public and leaked information about Vidisco is accurate, just how badly are U.S. scanning systems compromised? Have we already been allowing Israel  (or other opportunists using Israel’s methods and means) to distribute IEDs inside the U.S.? Have our U.S. tax dollars doled out as aid to Israel paid for both the violation of Geneva Conventions, the War Crimes Act, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, and now the wholesale compromise of our own national security?

If hostile entities have obtained this same information about Vidisco’s X-ray systems, how badly have our import scanning capabilities been compromised?

If the public and leaked information about Vidisco is accurate and 84% of the world’s airports use its scanning equipment, how badly are our screening systems at U.S. airports compromised?

Imagine for a moment phones and radios on planes containing PETN-adulterated batteries triggered with a single call.

Imagine laptops and tablets triggered with a single remote prompt over onboard WiFi or wireless networks.

~ ~ ~

In June 2017 amid the WannaCry and modified Petya attacks, the Department of Homeland Security and the Travel Safety Administration rolled out heightened security measures including increased scanning of electronic devices.

By the end of July 2017, handling of smaller electronics changed:

… The TSA will now require “all electronics larger than a cell phone” to be removed from carry-on bags and placed in their own separate bin for X-ray screening with nothing on top or below, similar to how laptops have been screened for years. …

At the time the measures appeared to be related to potential threats related to cyber attacks.

Now one might wonder if the changes were intended to increase the use of X-ray screening related specifically to explosives and not just cyber attacks.

We aren’t likely to receive any answers to inquiries about the triggers for these changes.

What we should understand now, though, is that much of this could be performative. The X-ray scanning systems, if tampered with the way they were to admit pagers and radio IEDs into Lebanon, could be absolutely useless for detecting rigged devices.

~ ~ ~

It’s clear we are going to have to rethink our entire screening system at all ports after Netanyahu’s latest fuck-you.

He surely must have known he was opening Pandora’s box when he authorized the detonation of pagers and handheld radios.

I must admit the first thought I had after the initial shock upon hearing about the attacks was this: if Netanyahu had this capability to take out a group of targets this neatly, why didn’t he try this approach with Hamas?

If Netanyahu felt he could expend political capital on violations of international law, why instead is he systematically overseeing the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, humanitarian aid systems, women and children instead of having neatly excised Hamas in Gaza using these handheld IEDs?

Why? Because fuck you is a likely answer.

Gaza: Unending Cannon Fire and Steel Helmets

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Before Congress’s Easter week break earlier this year, there had been negotiations to allow Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress. He was not granted that opportunity though reports indicated vacillating opinion in the House and Senate.

It would be a grave mistake to allow Netanyahu such a platform; it would confer legitimacy to his policy toward Gaza.

That policy includes genocide. The U.S. may support the right to self defense of nation-states, but it cannot ever support genocide – not even the appearance of doing so by allow a mass murderer a platform.

Gaza’s history, the complexity of geopolitics involved, along with Netanyahu’s narcissistic intransigence and stifling U.S. policy prevent the Biden administration from openly calling Netanyahu’s actions genocide.

But the genocide of Gazans isn’t something new. It’s part of decades of increasing repression. One only needs to look at a map and the numbers — hell, even satellite photos taken over time — to know this situation didn’t develop in the last handful of months.

It continues with the repeated attacks on and murder of humanitarian aid workers who have been trying to fend off famine.

We’ll need far more than maps and numbers to stop this mass murder.

The Congressional GOP caucus allowing Netanyahu to address Congress next month does absolutely nothing to discourage his policy of genocide – rather, it encourages it.

OVERVIEW

In a nutshell, Gaza is a population the size of Houston crammed into an area the size of Las Vegas — more than 2 million people crammed into 141 square miles. There are only three crossings in and out, two guarded by Israel and one by Egypt, with the perimeter surrounded by a double fence line on three sides and the ocean on the fourth.

Gaza has been under blockade since 2005 following the second Intifada, though Israel has closed the region off and on since 1991.

Israel tightened the blockade after Hamas was elected to power (2006); this change in power was a response to the blockade and the ineffectiveness of the Palestinian Authority to address Gazans’ needs.

After nearly twenty years of Israel’s tightening stranglehold punctuated with fuel restrictions (2007), closed crossings thereby blocking food (2008), and an ongoing need for humanitarian aid (2010-on), it can hardly be surprising a rebellion by Hamas occurred.

Americans have been looking away for years, avoiding the obvious build up to October 7, 2023. We can’t look away any more.

Look at this rather dispassionate map of Gaza before October 7, prepared by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. These were the facts on the ground before October 7 with which the U.N. and other aid organizations had to work to address Gaza’s needs not met by occupier Israel.

(source: UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – occupied Palestinian territory, via Wikimedia)

Could Americans live with this, in this? Could they raise children under these conditions, essentially inside a large double fenced cage from which land and housing has been stolen?

Can we begin to understand why there are tunnels in and out of Gaza?

What are we defending by looking away?

AMERICANS’ PERCEPTION

The politics of the past which have long shaped and conditioned global public opinion are being used as a means to prevent us from seeing more clearly what’s going on in Gaza and across the Middle East.

At least a couple of commenters at this site have mentioned the 1960 movie Exodus, a fictionalized account of Israel’s founding as a nation-state. This film has colored Americans’ perception of Israel for 63 years, in concert with a lack of education about the entire Middle East.

Americans don’t even learn about their own internal conflicts like the Tulsa race massacre or the cause and effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act. They learn little about the history of conflicts abroad, and about the history of Arab and Persian worlds, they learn even less.

What Americans have learned in K-12 public education is that Nazi Germany and its totalitarian dictator were evil and responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews in the Holocaust – a wholly accurate depiction. Children are exposed to the primary text Anne Frank’s diary and fictional texts like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Students are conditioned to see Israel’s creation and statehood as a positive, constructive response to the persecution and genocide of Europe’s Jews in 1930-1940s.

This is the lens through which Americans view the film Exodus.

The American public has been further conditioned by foreign terror attacks of 1990s and 2001, shaping and shaped by government response. As events unfolded, U.S. media coverage rarely ever examined the events from a decolonizing perspective.

All of this material has conditioned much of the U.S. to afford wide latitude to Israel.

U.S. foreign policy which supports democracies and affirms independent sovereign nation-states’ right to self defense reinforces that latitude.

Looking the other away has been cultivated for a lifetime, further reinforced by a fear of being called anti-Semitic if Israel’s policies and actions are called into question.

Jews are not Israel. Israel is not Benjamin Netanyahu, just as Gaza is not Hamas.

And yet all of Gaza is suffering for Netanyahu’s fuck-up, while Jews abroad and a majority of Israelis at home are confronted with the fallout.

By fuck-up I mean one massive intelligence failure followed by many others.

INTELLIGENCE FAILURES

After looking at recent history of Gaza and the conditions in which Gazans live, the October 7 attack isn’t much of a surprise.

What was a surprise: Israel’s intelligence failures the October 7 attack exposed.

Israel has a history of using targeted intelligence to eliminate potential threats, including extrajudicial execution. Why Israel did not act effectively to prevent October 7 looks as stunningly bad as George W. Bush’s failure to respond pre-emptively to al Qaeda’s threat against the U.S. in August 2001.

Israel’s leadership and military knew there was a threat. Netanyahu failed to ensure Israel was protected.

New York Times report says Israel knew about Hamas attack over a year in advance

Netanyahu failed to do his job for an entire year – but his follow-up to his massive fuck-up is obliterating the population of Gaza.

The attack on October 7 wasn’t the only problematic intelligence failure.

Israel has been less than forthcoming about its operations; though its intelligence knew of the existence of tunnels, it can’t explain how it missed a tunnel as large as the one near the Erez crossing at the border with Egypt.

Israel finds large tunnel adjacent to Gaza border, raising new questions about prewar intelligence

Nor can Israel explain deadly attacks on facilities which were alleged to be supported by intelligence but violate international law. Too many of the attacks have been proven unjustified by follow-up reporting, the most common of which is the excuse Hamas has used tunnels beneath buildings which later prove to be false.

Also poorly rationalized is the use of artificial intelligence to target Hamas, again leading to destruction of civilian infrastructure and civilian deaths. This is a form of human experimentation in addition to yet more war crimes.

The January 24 attack on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) sheltering thousands of Gazans was beyond the pale:

A United Nations building sheltering displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza was hit by Israeli tank fire Wednesday, killing at least nine people and injuring 75 others, according to the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza.

Israel’s military said it “currently” ruled out that an Israeli aerial or artillery strike hit the UNRWA Khan Younis Training Center. The IDF also said a “thorough review of the operations of the forces in the vicinity is underway.”

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said on X that the entire center, one of the largest UNRWA facilities in Gaza, was sheltering 30,000 people, and is clearly marked as a UN site.

The White House said it is “gravely concerned” by the strike.

(source: CNN, January 25, 2024)

The attack followed months of strikes on other UN and humanitarian aid facilities. The UNRWA attack also suggests a possible fuck-you to the U.S. as there was no apparent advance notice to the Biden administration let alone the UN.

Israel initially denied responsibility for the attack on the UN refugee compound. It later claimed UN personnel were aiding Hamas as a rationalization for the attack.

You’ll note Biden got the CIA involved in negotiations after the IDF attacked UNRWA:

Biden to deploy CIA director to help broker major Gaza deal

That CIA director William Burns has been called upon to perform a diplomatic mission is an indication something bad happened with the January bombing of UNRWA, beyond the obvious human rights violation such an attack on a humanitarian mission represents.

Something deeply wrong occurred requiring a person at the highest levels of security clearance to be involved. I can’t help but think the IDF killed a CIA agent or an important asset, perhaps as a fuck-you, perhaps as a means to disrupt US intelligence, or both.

The UNRWA assault was followed by the bombing of Rafah during the Super Bowl when Americans would be distracted — Rafah, where Palestinian civilians had been told to go to avoid IDF bombing.

Israeli strikes hit Rafah after Biden warns Netanyahu to have ‘credible’ plan to protect civilians

95 civilians including 42 children were killed during this attack on Rafah. This was hardly a surgical effort intended to take out Hamas alone.

The attack on Rafah looked like yet another fuck-you to the Biden administration even after months of repeated embarrassing appeals to Netanyahu to protect civilians and allow humanitarian aid, of which one of the earliest came a couple weeks after the October 7 attack:

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. spoke this afternoon with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. The President welcomed the release of two additional hostages from Gaza earlier today, and reaffirmed his commitment to ongoing efforts to secure the release of all the remaining hostages taken by Hamas – including Americans – and to provide for safe passage for U.S. citizens and other civilians in Gaza.  The President also underscored the need to sustain a continuous flow of urgently needed humanitarian assistance into Gaza.  The President updated the Prime Minister on U.S. support for Israel and ongoing efforts at regional deterrence, to include new U.S. military deployments.  They  agreed to speak again in the coming days.

(emphasis mine; source: The White House, October 23, 2023)

The deaths of more than 100 Gazans attempting to receive food aid in March was yet another likely fuck-you. Israel was supposed to have arranged for the aid delivery which should have included security. Instead there have been claims IDF fired on Palestinians causing a stampede toward the aid trucks.

Mark Regev, the Israeli prime minister’s special adviser, initially told CNN that Israeli forces had not been involved. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) spokesman, said soon after that soldiers had not fired directly on Palestinians seeking aid, but rather fired “warning shots” in the air.

On March 8, after an internal investigation, the IDF released a timeline suggesting that the aid convoy began to cross into northern Gaza accompanied by its tanks at 4:29 a.m. A minute later, at 4:30 a.m., the IDF said its troops fired “warning shots” toward the east to disperse crowds before firing at “suspects” who they claimed posed a threat. At 4:45 a.m., the military said it fired more warning shots.

But CNN’s analysis of dozens of videos from the night and testimonies from eyewitnesses’ casts doubt on Israel’s version of events. The evidence, reviewed by forensic and ballistic experts, indicated that automatic gunfire began before the IDF said the convoy had started crossing through the checkpoint and that shots were fired within close range of crowds that had gathered for food.

(source: CNN, April 10, 2024)

Israel claims the deaths were cause by trucks running into Palestinians; they’ve resisted calls for full, unedited video of the mass shooting, which does nothing to bolster their claims that the IDF did not fire on the swarm of desperate Palestinians.

The airstrike on World Central Kitchen aid workers in clearly marked vehicles is a massive fuck-you which has been blamed on intelligence:

(source: Al Jazeera, April 2, 2024)

IDF missed the center of the logo identifying the World Country Kitchen aid vehicle by centimeters. Accident, my ass; if they targeted a driver in a left-hand drive car the IDF nailed them.

None of this makes sense, this absolute refusal by Netanyahu to be reasonable and rational let alone moral and ethical if Netanyahu is truly focused on eliminating Hamas and only Hamas. Instead these attacks on civilians look organized and systemic – as if the cruelty was the point.

REGIONAL EFFECTS

Saudi Arabia’s absence in news coverage related to negotiations is also troubling; is it because the U.S. media is blind or is it because there’s little to report? Netanyahu trashed Qatar for its efforts, further heightening regional tensions; Egypt and Lebanon have been engaged in negotiations, with Lebanon being bombed on one occasion under the ruse that Hezbollah deserved it though the paramedic center it struck contained no Hezbollah, and in at least one other incident, children were killed.

Could this simply be part of the messy proxy war with Iran, which is more easily seen in the attacks by and on the Houthi in the Red Sea affecting private shipping and military targets.

Israel’s April 2 airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Syria offers a much more direct example of tensions between Israel and Iran; with this attack Israel exercised a total disregard for Syria’s sovereignty and international law.

It also showed Netanyahu cares not one whit whether his government widens the Israel-Hamas war, escalating regional tensions.

NETANYAHU’S BAD FAITH

The repeated intelligence and military failures and cack-handed political decisions can’t be explained away in relation to attempts to destroy Hamas or to recover hostages – not when Israel killed three of its own hostages.

Especially since Netanyahu supported Hamas for years to prevent a more legitimate Palestinian Authority from pursuing a two-state solution.

Nothing makes sense except that Netanyahu is ethnically cleansing Gaza. Calling the goal or operation “Absolute Victory” or “Total Victory” doesn’t imply a narrow targeted effort.

Is it possible he is doing so for his own corrupt criminal purposes while he is still free and not prosecuted and incarcerated for corruption, relying on national security, political, and religious rationales as cover?

By criminal purposes I mean Netanyahu is continuing the assault on Gaza as a means to delay his trial (imagine Trump using this excuse), and clearing Gaza for some benefit to the missing Saudis (possibly oil and gas development offshore).

Is Netanyahu not only using this genocide to delay his trial but as a means to earn a payout like the $2 billion Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner received, perhaps as a payout for assassinating Iran’s Major General Qasem Soleimani, damaging Iran’s missile program, and greenlighting the murder of a Saudi-born U.S. journalist?

Is Netanyahu clearing Gaza because he wants more Trump property development — and Kushner has already indicated interest in oceanfront property in Gaza?

Is Netanyahu blowing off Biden because this entire genocide is a form of election interference intended to drive down Biden’s polling numbers, because Netanyahu wants Trump in the White House who’ll condone his complete obliteration of Gaza? Is Netanyahu killing Gazans because he wants an equally corrupt leader who’ll ensure he gets all the support he needs, politically and personally?

Is this the point at which Arendt‘s thinking about statelessness matters (see Ed Walker’s essay here), because so long as Palestine is not a second state, its claims to its own natural resources can be blown off and its obstructive people blown away by profiteers?

Energy firms face legal threat over Israeli licences to drill for gas off Gaza (15-FEB-2024)

Offshore Gas Field Could Help Gaza Recovery (23-NOV-2023)

Saudi Arabia Can No Longer Raise Oil Output For Cash (21-FEB-2024)

Perhaps this is why Netanyahu appointed problematic officials ultra-nationalists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir whose interests in a peaceful accord with Palestinians in Gaza are likely nil.

Consider Ben Gvir’s 2007 conviction for incitement to racism and supporting terrorism. Why would such a person be appointed as National Security Minister if peace was the intention?

Ben-Gvir convicted of inciting to racism

Consider also Smotrich’s disregard for the Palestinian Authority circa 2015, bolstering Hamas:

Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.

According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

There had to be a point to all this deliberate fucking around with Hamas, something Netanyahu was willing to throw Israeli lives at, something for which Gazans were expendable.

U.S. POLICY CHALLENGES

Meanwhile, the politics of the past and Americans’ ill-formed perceptions have locked the US into a position where it can’t move against Netanyahu without criticism or worse for being anti-Israel, at a time when the US must also rely on intelligence from Israel and other Middle Eastern countries in order to protect oil and gas which are under attack by Iran-backed Houthi.

Except for a blip in January this year, note how there’s little media coverage about the response of oil markets and fossil fuel countries affected by the Houthis’ attacks. This absence combined with relatively stable oil market prices suggest the Biden administration has been told to put up and shut up to maintain the global economy – or the Biden administration’s investment in U.S. oil production has offset Middle East oil production burps.

(source: West Texas Intermediate/NYMEX price per barrel via Macrotrends)

It’s not clear how much the U.S.’s continued support of Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza are spurring Iranian support of the Houthis, but fighting off the attacks comes at the expense of U.S. defense spending in other areas of the world including Ukraine.

It also comes at the expense of resources necessary to stem nuclear proliferation in the region, which includes Iran. Iran has continued to rebuild its uranium refining since Stuxnet, and is now expanding capacity at two locations.

Normalization of Israel-Saudi Arabia relations has been an aim of U.S. policy, including a two-state solution.

The Abraham Accords and possible Israeli normalization with Saudi Arabia. The Biden Administration has followed agreements reached during the Trump Administration that normalized or improved relations between Israel and four Arab or Muslim-majority states—the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Biden Administration officials have said that any further U.S. efforts to assist Israeli normalization with Muslim-majority countries would seek to preserve the viability of a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ongoing efforts to deepen security and economic ties between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco could drive broader regional cooperation—including on various types of defense. After China helped broker diplomatic normalization between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Administration has declared that Israeli normalization with Saudi Arabia is a U.S. priority. Any negotiations toward that end would likely consider Saudi security and civilian nuclear demands, as well as a pathway toward a two-state solution. Congress has passed and proposed legislation encouraging expanded and deepened regional cooperation involving Israel.

(source: Israel: Major Issues and U.S. Relations, Congressional Research Service, September 27, 2023)

Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected the two-state solution, in spite of the fact his policies treat Gaza and Palestine as a separate state on which it can declare and go to war instead of conducting a police action within the same country. He wants it both ways — to conduct a war and treat the persons in that separate state as non-citizens, but failing to protect the civilian minority citizenry of that same state if it is part of Israel. Yet hanging onto this single state including occupied territory so tightly has not brought Israel any more security.

It’s as if it has never occurred to Netanyahu that Israel’s security might actually depend on ending occupation of Gaza and allowing its citizens to govern themselves.

Consider the aphorism that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This applies not only to Israel but to the U.S.; we cannot continue to support continued intransigence when it comes at a cost to our nation’s security. Is the bilateral aid in a 10-year memorandum of understanding which the U.S. negotiated with Israel worth more than the current and future cost of the unending Israel-Hamas war to our nation?

CONCLUSION

There is a limit the U.S. must find and define when it comes to support for Israel. We may believe in the right of sovereign independent nation-states to self defense, but we have failed as a nation when it comes to identifying and fighting just wars. The response to the terror attacks of 9/11 offers the best example of this failure; we spent roughly eight trillion dollars and nearly a million U.S., Iraqi, and Afghans’ lives on what should have been a measured police effort.

A substantive portion of that failure was in no small part based on hidden agendas including continued access to cheap oil.

We should have learned from our failures; other nations including Israel should have learned by observation.

We did not win hearts and minds though we had the sympathy of the world on 9/12, just as Israel did on October 8. Instead the U.S. used its hegemonic power to strive for more than a narrowly tailored effort to find and hold the terrorists accountable.

Look what it earned us more than two decades later, when combined with our handling of Netanyahu.

Israel should have learned already they are failing to win security and a durable peace, and in writing that I don’t mean Netanyahu because the man has proven repeatedly since October he is incapable of anything more that overreaching destruction. The Israeli people need to look long and hard at what has and has not worked for the last 60-70 years.

In a eulogy over a young kibbutz member killed by Palestinians in 1956, Israeli Commander-in-Chief of the Israel Defense Forces Moshe Dayan said,

… Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate. …

In essence Dayan’s eulogy exhorted Israelis not to let down their guard, to embrace the steel helmet and cannon to continue to settle the land, even as he acknowledged the theft of land by colonization and occupation.

Israel has its own lessons to learn, which is that of colonizer which must share a small patch of land at the risk of permanent conflict inside its own borders and beyond.

Under Netanyahu’s leadership, it has given no indication it is learning anything at all about its own history, its reputation and security with its neighbors and across the world, or how it will be seen as history is written.

___________

[Front page photo: satellite image by Maxar published in Business Insider showing Gazans fleeing to north Gaza after IDF told Gazans to leave southern Gaza ahead of bombing. Gazans had already fled to south Gaza 2-3 weeks earlier at IDF’s order.]

“People in the Gulf” Talking on Skype

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The NatSec twittersphere is abuzz about the fact that the CIA indirectly warned Hezbollah that some al Qaeda operatives were preparing an attack on a location in southern Lebanon.

I’m actually less interested that we felt the need to warn a political entity that we consider a terrorist organization than the other details of the story — and that it is a story Lebanese sources felt free to share with the press.

For example, the report says we intercepted calls between the al Qaeda operatives and “people in the Gulf.”

“They had transcripts of calls made from known al Qaida people in Lebanon to people in the Gulf that included detailed information about the attacks, including the amounts of explosives that had been smuggled into Lebanon,” said one Lebanese intelligence official who is barred from speaking openly to reporters.

McClatchy suggests these al Qaeda figures were calling other al Qaeda figures in this unnamed Gulf country. But why should we assume that? Qatar has been funding al Qaeda linked militants in Syria. Is it possible this story is public because the US wants it known that we’re so tired of Qatar’s support for terrorists we’ll even tip Hezbollah to plans Qatari backed terrorists have made?

Indeed, a comment from a Hezbollah member quoted in the story seems to suggest this warning (and, I would suggest, the publicity surrounding it) is an effort to put the genie we’ve created back in the bottle.

The Hezbollah commander said he thought the warning was more pragmatic.

“The Americans are starting to realize how bad their friends in Syria are, so they’re trying to get out of this mistake,” he said. “They also think that if a bomb goes off in Dahiya, we will blame America and target Americans in Lebanon. That will never happen, but they’re scared of this monster they created.”’

That monster was created with the funding of one of our close allies.

I’m also intrigued by the suggestion that the US managed to collect these calls whereas the Lebanese could not because it was VOIP.

A security contractor familiar with the capabilities of the Lebanese intelligence services said it was likely that the targets had used voice-over-Internet software that the Lebanese services lack the equipment and expertise to decrypt but that poses few problems for the Americans.

“Lebanon lacks the expertise and the technology for that,” said the contractor, who asked not to be further identified because of the sensitivity of his work. “But once the call left Lebanon for the Gulf, the NSA would have automatically been tracking it.”

We’ve just learned the extent to which Microsoft has helped the government access Skype. And the government claims such disclosures have led terrorists to stop using Skype.

Were these terrorists and their friends in the gulf?

Update: Via Twitter, McClatchy reporter and Middle East expert Jonathan Landay says I’m reading way too much into this, and that there is a backstory he cannot share.

So take these musings as off-base ones.

Our Detention Authority Branches Out beyond Al Qaeda

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It was pretty inconsiderate of Charlie Savage to break the news that the US had filed military commission charges against Ali Musa Daqduq the day after Jeh Johnson gave a speech emphasizing how our detention authority is restricted to those associated with al Qaeda.

But, the AUMF, the statutory authorization from 2001, is not open-ended.  It does not authorize military force against anyone the Executive labels a “terrorist.”  Rather, it encompasses only those groups or people with a link to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, or associated forces.

While Daqduq does, by all accounts, have ties to Hezbollah, there’s no allegation in the charges sheet that he had any ties to al Qaeda.

Now, I don’t dispute that Daqduq could be charged (or could have been, while we were still at war–oh wait, that Iraq AUMF will never be repealed!) for violating the laws of war. What I’m interested in is how the government implicated the various Shia groups with which Daqduq allegedly conspired.

Most of Daqduq’s charges–the murder, attempted murder, intentional bodily injury, and attempted kidnapping of some American soldiers–don’t mention any other people or organizations. Nor do the treachery and spying charges.

The charge of terrorism charges Daqduq alone–he’s a terrorist because he engaged in an act evincing wanton disregard for human life. Which is consistent with the way the Iraq AUMF defines terrorism, but not the way the GWOT one does.

The material support for terrorism charge does name others, though–the Shia group Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq, which broke off from the Mahdi army in 2004:

In that Ali Musa Daqduq al-Musawi, an alien unprivileged enemy belligerent subject to trial by military commission, did, between about May 2006 and about January 2007, at various locations in Iraq and Iran, in the context of and associated with hostilities, provide material support and resources to be used in preparation for and in carrying out an act of terrorism against U.S. forces in Iraq, knowing or intending that such material support and resources were to be used for that purpose, to wit: advice, training and planning to Qays al-Khazali, Layth al-Khazali, and other members of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq, known and unknown, for the purpose of killing or inflicting great bodily harm upon one or more protected persons in or near Karbala, Iraq, on or about 20 January 2007.

Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq is neither–and I don’t believe it was–on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorism Organization list nor sanctioned by Treasury. And last month it agreed to enter Iraq’s political process. Read more →

Treasury Accuses Iran of Hacking

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The Treasury Department just added the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) to the other Iranian entities listed as Specially Designated National (other entities already covered include Quds Force and the National Police and their leaders). It sanctioned MOIS for a laundry list of reasons generally categorized as support for Syria’s human rights abuses, Iran’s own human rights abuses, and support for terrorism. Under the latter section, Treasury lists the following:

  • MOIS provides financial, material, or technological support for, or financial or other services to Hizballah, a terrorist organization designated under E.O. 13224. MOIS has participated in multiple joint projects with Hizballah in computer hacking.
  • MOIS provides financial, material, or technological support for, or financial or other services to HAMAS, a terrorist group also designated under E.O. 13224.
  • MOIS has facilitated the movement of al Qa’ida operatives in Iran and provided them with documents, identification cards, and passports.
  • MOIS also provided money and weapons to al Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI), a terrorist group designated under E.O. 13224, and negotiated prisoner releases of AQI operatives.

It is the official position of our government that Iran has facilitated the travel of al Qaeda operatives (this accusation may, in fact, date to pre-9/11 transiting of Iran on the same terms as others). And, not surprising, the government says Iran helped Hamas and Al Qaeda in Iraq.

But it’s the Hezbollah claim I’m most intrigued by. Treasury says that Iran’s intelligence service “participated in multiple joint projects with Hizballah in computer hacking.”

Hacking? We’re declaring hacking a terrorist act now? Like the StuxNet project we engaged in with Israel.

And what, precisely, is Iran alleged to have hacked? Because the most public allegations pertain to … drones. You know, the drones violating Iran and Lebanon’s airspace?

We’ve made that a terrorist act now?

Scary Car Broker Plot and the Fifth Amendment

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I’ve always been skeptical of the Scary Car Broker Plot–the suit against a bunch of used car brokers and others based on the claim that the entire thing is a money laundering operation for Hezbollah. At the core of the complaint is the allegation that entities that weren’t listed on Treasury’s sanctions list until early last year transferred money between 2007 and early last year (that is, until they were listed) to purchase used cars in the US.

Between approximately January 2007 and early 2011, at least $329 million was transferred by wire from accounts held in Lebanon at LCB, Federal Bank of Lebanon (“Federal Bank”), Middle East and Africa Bank (“MEAB”), and BLOM Bank (“BLOM”) to the United States through their correspondent bank accounts with U.S. financial institutions located in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere for the purchase of used cars.

But one of the main targets of the complaint–one they don’t actually get to until page 46 of a 65-page complaint–are thirty seemingly Lebanese-American owned car brokers in the US.

In describing these brokers, the complaint seems to offer little perspective on how this business–a perfectly legitimate business designed to get clunkers into countries where they still have market value–normally operates.

The businesses of these Car Buyers typically have little or no property or assets other than bank accounts that are used to receive wires from overseas to buy cars, and to purchase used cars at auction. These cars are then transported to shipping ports, where they are shipped to West Africa. The Car Buyers typically do not have offices, car lots, or an inventory of used cars other than cars that are in transit to the ports. Some of the Car Buyers purchase cars for their own account, but others simply retain a fee of a few hundred dollars for each car that they buy.

That is, the complaint suggests that the marginal nature of these businesses, by itself, makes these businesses sketchy. But it offers no proof for that fact (and I believe that a lot of these businesses are sketchy by design–they’re the automotive equivalent of recyclers who pick through trash to try to find things with ongoing value).

In the section laying out the individual descriptions of the middle men who dealt with the car brokers, there are a lot of assertions of direct and more attenuated ties to Hezbollah with little or no proof.

Nevertheless, the goal of this complaint is to seize money from the auto brokers, about whom the complaint makes no claims of knowledge of ties to Hezbollah.

Since the complaint, I’ve just been assuming that maybe the government has better evidence to tie the American businesses they’re effectively shutting down to Hezbollah (nevermind that the ties have always been closer to Colombian drug cartels).

But yesterday, Al-Jazeera had a long article poking a bunch more holes in the case. Read more →

The Scary Used Car Broker Plot

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Consider these two data points. First, Jo Becker reports that the money laundering scheme run by the Canadian Lebanese Bank involved brokering used cars purchased in America.

In that inquiry, American Treasury officials said senior bank managers had assisted a handful of account holders in running a scheme to wash drug money by mixing it with the proceeds of used cars bought in the United States and sold in Africa. A cut of the profits, officials said, went to Hezbollah, a link the organization disputes.

[snip]

Eventually an American team dispatched to look into Mr. Joumaa’s activities uncovered the used-car operation. Cars bought in United States were sold in Africa, with cash proceeds flown into Beirut and deposited into three money-exchange houses, one owned by Mr. Joumaa’s family and another down the street from his hotel. The exchanges then deposited the money, the ostensible proceeds of a booming auto trade, into the Lebanese Canadian Bank, so named because it was once a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada Middle East.

But the numbers did not add up. The car lots in the United States, many owned by Lebanese émigrés and one linked to a separate Hezbollah weapons-smuggling scheme, were not moving nearly enough merchandise to account for all that cash, American officials said. What was really going on, they concluded, was that European drug proceeds were being intermingled with the car-sale cash to make it appear legitimate.

Hezbollah received its cut either from the exchange houses, or via the bank itself, according to the D.E.A. And the Treasury Department concluded that Iran also used the bank to avoid sanctions, with Hezbollah’s envoy to Tehran serving as go-between.

And we only indicted the guy running this plot, Ayman Joumaa, in November, 10 months after Treasury designated Ayman Joumaa as a Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers.

Of course, November 23 is roughly two months after Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian used car broker whose finances had a remarkable uptick in the last two years, during which period he largely left South Texas, was arrested.

And while all of the ties Treasury noted in January were to Colombian drug networks, November’s indictment rolled out this week includes a Los Zetas angle.

It was part of the conspiracy that the defendant and his co-conspirators coordinated the shipment of at least tens of thousands of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, through Central America and Mexico, to the United States, including but not limited to 85,000 kilograms ofcocaine shipped from Colombia for sale to Los Zetas drug cartel from in and around 2005 through in and around 2007.

I’ll come back to this later–I’m watching Robert Mueller repeat that it’s more important for FBI to entrap Muslim kids than to crack down on financial fraud at SJC.

But I’d suggest that the discovery of Scary Iran Plot as a side angle to Scary Used Auto Broker Plot would explain a lot of the problems with the case.

Update: One other thing: I’m curious why DOJ sealed the Joumaa indictment from November 23 to December 12. I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s worth noting that Hezbollah and Iran rolled up US and Israeli spy rings during that period.

 

What If We Scrubbed Wachovia Like We Did the Lebanese Canadian Bank?

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I’ll have several things to say about Jo Becker’s story on the big Hezbollah money laundering ring. For the moment, I’m most interested in how Treasury Department authorities uncovered the ring: by first declaring Lebanese Canadian Bank a money launderer, providing reason to break it up. When an affiliate of Société Générale agreed to buy the bank, they also agreed to scrub its money laundering accounts. To do so, it specifically had someone beyond the Big Four accounting firm that had “overlooked” the accounts in the past scrub the books, including bringing in John Ashcroft.

As part of its own agreement with Treasury officials, Lebanon’s Central Bank set up a process to scrub the books. But compliance officers at S.G.B.L.’s French partner, Société Générale, were skeptical of the Central Bank’s choice of investigators. One of them, the local affiliate of the international auditing firm Deloitte, had presumably missed the drug-related accounts the first time around, when it served as the Lebanese Canadian Bank’s outside auditor.

And, according to people knowledgeable about Lebanese banking, the central bank’s on-the-ground representative had been recommended to that post by Hezbollah.

As an extra step, to reassure wary international banks, the chairman of S.G.B.L.,  Antoun Sehnaoui, commissioned a parallel audit, with the help of Société Générale’s chief money-laundering compliance officer. And to make sure that his bank did not run afoul of Treasury officials by inadvertently taking on dirty assets, he also hired a consultant intimately familiar with the Patriot Act provision used to take the bank down: John Ashcroft, the former attorney general whose Justice Department wrote the law.

And then it investigated (presumably using pattern analysis) each and every account at the bank.

Initially, the auditors looked only at records for the past year. As they began combing through thousands of accounts, they looked for customers with known links to Hezbollah. They also looked for telltale patterns: repeated deposits of vast amounts of cash, huge wire transfers broken into smaller transactions and transfers between companies in such wildly incongruous lines of business that they made sense only as fronts to camouflage the true origin of the funds.

Each type of red flag was assigned a point value. An account with 1 or 2 points on a scale to 10 was likely to survive. One with 8 or 9 cried out for further scrutiny. Ultimately, the auditors were left with nearly 200 accounts that appeared to add up to a giant money-laundering operation, with Hezbollah smack in the middle, according to American officials. Complex webs of transactions featured the same companies over and over again, most of them owned by Shiite businessmen, many known Hezbollah supporters. Some have since been identified as Hezbollah fronts.

So effectively, they took a bank known to ignore money laundering controls and took it apart, piece by piece, to see all the money laundering it had sheltered.

Compare how the US dealt with Wachovia, which was involved in laundering a far greater chunk of money for drug cartels: $363 billion.

US authorities partly became aware Wachovia was helping cartels launder money when they captured a plane in 2006. In addition, the DEA first noted their role in launder Casas de Cambio money in 2005, and a British whistleblower had identified signs that same year.

But it’s clear that by 2007 officials from top regulators were aware of the problems.

Late in 2007, Woods attended a function at Scotland Yard where colleagues from the US were being entertained. There, he sought out a representative of the Drug Enforcement Administration and told him about the casas de cambio, the SARs and his employer’s reaction. The Federal Reserve and officials of the office of comptroller of currency in Washington DC then “spent a lot of time examining the SARs” that had been sent by Woods to Charlotte from London.

“They got back in touch with me a while afterwards and we began to put the pieces of the jigsaw together,” says Woods. What they found was – as Costa says – the tip of the iceberg of what was happening to drug money in the banking industry, but at least it was visible and it had a name: Wachovia.

But the prosecution of Wachovia wasn’t initiated until after Wells Fargo took it over in 2008. Which means Treasury could have insisted on the same process–an examination of a bank with known problems with money laundering to find all of its criminal clients.

It’s possible Treasury did–or is still doing that. Read more →