https://firstlook.org

  • State Department Resumes Arms Sales to Bahrain
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/29/u-s-will-resume-sending-weapons-bahrain-despite-ongoing-repression

    The State Department announced it will lift its freeze on arms sales to the repressive government of Bahrain on Monday, despite the country’s myriad human rights abuses in recent years, including arbitrary detention of children, torture, restrictions for journalists and a brutal government crackdown on peaceful protestors in 2011.

    “The Administration has decided to lift the holds on security assistance to the Bahrain Defense Force and National Guard that were implemented following Bahrain’s crackdown on demonstrations in 2011,” wrote John Kirby, a State Department spokesperson, in a press release on Monday.

  • How Saudi Arabia Bombs Yemen and Your 401(k) Profits
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/24/pension-perfect-situations-maximum-blast-explosion-required

    Des actionnaires insoupçonn-és-ables.

    An exclusive investigation by reported.ly has traced the manufacture and shipping of bomb components from the European Union to the United Arab Emirates, and also discovered the use of bombs made by the European manufacturer in attacks by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, where potentially unlawful civilian deaths have been documented. The Germany-based manufacturer of the bomb components, Rheinmetall AG, is a publicly traded company whose major shareholders have included a host of US financial firms, as well as the New York state pension fund, Virginia’s 529 college savings program and the sovereign pension fund of Norway …

  • Refusal to Call Charleston Shootings “Terrorism” Again Shows It’s a Meaningless Propaganda Term - Glenn Greenwald
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/19/refusal-call-charleston-shootings-terrorism-shows-meaningless-propaganda-

    That is the crucial backdrop for yesterday’s debate over whether the term “terrorism” applies to the heinous shooting by a white nationalist of 9 African-Americans praying in a predominantly black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Almost immediately, news reports indicated there was “no sign of terrorism” – by which they meant: it does not appear that the shooter is Muslim.

    Yet other than the perpetrator’s non-Muslim identity, the Charleston attack from the start had the indicia of what is commonly understood to be “terrorism.” Specifically, the suspected shooter was clearly a vehement racist who told witnesses at the church that he was acting out of racial hatred and a desire to force African-Americans “to go.” His violence was the by-product of and was intended to publicize and forward his warped political agenda, and was clearly designed to terrorize the community he hates.

    That’s why so many African-American and Muslim commentators and activists insisted that the term “terrorist” should be applied: because it looked, felt and smelled exactly like other acts that are instantly branded “terrorism” when the perpetrator is Muslim and the victims largely white. It was very hard – and still is – to escape the conclusion that the term “terrorism,” at least as it’s predominantly used in the post-9/11 west, is about the identity of those committing the violence and the identity of the targets. It manifestly has nothing to do with some neutral, objective assessment of the acts being labelled.

    The point here is not, as some very confused commentators suggested, to seek an expansion of the term “terrorism” beyond its current application. As someone who has spent the last decade more or less exclusively devoted to documenting the abuses and manipulations that term enables, the last thing I want is an expansion of its application.

    But what I also don’t want is for non-Muslims to rest in their privileged nest, satisfied that the term and its accompanying abuses is only for that marginalized group. And what I especially don’t want is to have this glaring, damaging mythology persist that the term “terrorism” is some sort of objectively discernible, consistently applied designation of a particularly hideous kind of violence. I’m eager to have the term recognized for what it is: a completely malleable, manipulated, vapid term of propaganda that has no consistent application whatsoever. Recognition of that reality is vital to draining the term of its potency.

  • Sunday Times #snowden Story is Journalism at its Worst
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/14/sunday-times-report-snowden-files-journalism-worst-also-filled-falsehoods

    « Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it’s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, then uncritically accept those anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But they’ve learned no such lesson. That tactic continues to be the staple of how major U.S. and British media outlets “report,” especially in the national security area. And journalists who read such reports continue to treat self-serving decrees by unnamed, unseen officials — laundered through their media — as gospel, no matter how dubious are the claims or factually false is the (...)

    #journalisme #médias #propagande

  • “Combat Proven”: The Booming Business of War in Israel
    By Alex Kane

    The featured arms companies, like the attendees interested in buying their products, came from around the world, but Israeli companies far outnumbered other nations. The fair is put on with the active help and cooperation of the Israeli government, and the ISDEF expo board of advisers is composed of elite former Israeli military officers. The U.S. Department of Commerce is the only foreign governmental body to co-sponsor the event.

    Israel has established itself as a leading hub for weapons makers, capitalizing on the constant state of conflict the country is in and the close coordination between the military and the weapons industry. At the ISDEF opening ceremony, Ziva Eger, the Israeli Ministry of Economy’s director of the division for foreign investment and industrial cooperation, boasted about how Israel takes “technology from the defense sector and just implements it to the civilian sector.”

    In Israel, nearly 6,800 individuals deal in weapons exports at over 1,000 companies, according to Defense Ministry data from 2013. The country’s weapons industry brought in about $5.6 billion last year, making Israel the eighth largest weapons exporter globally, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has said that 150,000 Israeli households rely on the weapons industry for income. While last year’s earnings were actually a drop from a high of $7.5 billion in revenue in 2012, a decrease attributed by Israel’s Defense Ministry to budget cuts in the U.S. and Europe, Israel is among the world’s top arms exporters per capita. In fact, the U.S. effectively provides a subsidy to the Israeli weapons business: While about 75 percent of the $3.1 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel must be spent on American weapons, 25 percent can be spent on domestic Israeli arms makers — a situation unique to Israel. Even when Israel buys U.S. arms, it sometimes requests that those weapons be built with Israeli components.

    The U.S. subsidy is helping to fuel the business of war in Israel. It’s a booming industry due in no small part to the ever-increasing frequency of the country’s battles with militant groups in neighboring Lebanon and Gaza, the coastal strip that Israel holds under a crippling air, land and sea blockade. In 2006, Israel went to war in Lebanon, killing at least 900 civilians. Two years later, Israel invaded Gaza in what a U.N. Human Rights report called “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” Operation Cast Lead, as the 2008 – 2009 attack was called, killed 1,400 people, more than half of them civilians. In 2012, Israel bombed Gaza for about a week before a U.S. and Egyptian-brokered ceasefire went into effect. But the most devastating Israeli attack on the strip occurred last summer, when Israel waged a 50-day battle against Hamas that killed 2,200 people, the majority of them civilians.

    The wars on Gaza have had a devastating impact on the population there, leaving half of Palestinian adolescents with symptoms of full or partial post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a study published in Arab Journal of Psychiatry. But in Israel, the wars are good for business.

    In 2013, Yotam Feldman, an Israeli journalist and filmmaker, released The Lab, a documentary positing that war is beneficial for the Israeli economy. Feldman’s film argues that the Palestinian territories are the “lab” where Israel uses its weaponry. Israeli companies profit from war because their products are “tested” on Palestinians, Feldman argued — particularly the residents of Gaza. “After every campaign of the kind that is now taking place in Gaza, we see an increase in the number of customers from abroad,” Eli Gold, CEO of Israeli arms company Meprolight, told the Israeli daily Haaretz last year.

    ....

    The September 11 attacks proved to be another crucial factor to the Israeli weapons industry’s success. The Israeli homeland security industry cashed in on an American market eager for tested solutions as the so-called “war on terror” began. For instance, Verint and Narus are two technology companies linked to the Israeli security community. Their technology swept up the phone communications of Americans who use Verizon and AT&T for the National Security Agency after September 11, according to sources who spoke to journalist James Bamford.

    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/05/war-israel-booming-business

  • Gaza, Drones and the Booming Business of War in Israel
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/05/war-israel-booming-business

    “The thing that I can say is our products are operational here in Israel since 2006. In the last conflict, last summer, our UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] performed over 700 operational sorties,” he said. “Today’s customers are looking for proven, mature systems — and that’s our systems. … Israeli companies are relying very much on the field experience of their customers, both in Israel and abroad.” The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declined to comment on whether that claim was true, but news outlets have reported that BlueBird drones were used in Gaza in the past.

    #Israël #Proche_Orient #armement

  • “Combat Proven”: The Booming Business of War in Israel

    The Israel Trade Fairs and Convention Center was bustling with military personnel. Tall, broad-shouldered soldiers donning masks and sunglasses had their guns at the ready, and a mini-drone built at Ariel University, an Israeli school located in the occupied West Bank, went up in the air, flying high as the press snapped photos.


    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/05/war-israel-booming-business
    #armement #Israël #Palestine

  • GCHQ’s Rainbow Lights: Exploiting Social Issues For Militarism And Imperialism
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/18/exploitation-social-issues-generate-support-militarism-imperialism

    Support for institutions of militarism and policies of imperialism is now manufactured by parading them under the emotionally manipulative banners of progressive social causes.

    [...]

    As a general matter, this tactic for Washington is far from new. The U.S. media has long hyped human rights and civil liberties abuses when perpetrated by governments disliked at the moment by the U.S. government, while ignoring far worse ones committed by subservient regimes. That’s why “Pussy Riot” has become a household name among Americans, and why the U.S. media developed an acute interest in the press freedom record of Ecuador as soon as it granted asylum to Julian Assange, but there is almost no interest in hearing about the systematic abuses of the Gulf tyrannies most commonly hailed by the U.S. media as “Our Friends and Partners in the Region.” This is human rights concerns as a cynical propaganda tactic, not anything remotely approaching an actual belief.

    But the exploitation of these specific progressive social issues — especially women’s and LGBT rights — is a relatively new modification of this long-standing tactic. It has found expression in the “#pink_washing” of Israeli aggression: all Good Progressives are supposed to side with Israel because they provide better treatment to LGBT citizens than Palestinians do. Anti-Muslim fanatics use this same tactic constantly (literally every day, I’m told I should never oppose persecution and imperialistic aggression against Muslims because of “their” anti-gay fanaticism: why are you defending “them” since “they” would throw you off a roof, etc.). Similarly, the (genuinely exciting) milestone of the first African-American president was effectively used to obscure what the CIA itself in 2008 regarded as Obama’s irreplaceable value in protecting status quo militarism, while the milestone of the first female president will be used to obscure Hillary Clinton’s similar role.

    #instrumentalisation #manipulation #militarisme #impérialisme

  • How To Keep NSA Computers From Turning Your Phone Conversations Into Searchable Text - The Intercept
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/08/keep-nsa-computers-turning-phone-conversations-searchable-text

    The solution , as it is to so many other outrageously invasive U.S. government tactics exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is, of course, Congressional legislation.

    I kid, I kid.

    No, the real solution is end-to-end encryption, preferably of the unbreakable kind.

    And as luck would have it, you can have exactly that on your mobile phone, for the price of zero dollars and zero cents.

    The Intercept’s Micah Lee wrote about this in March, in an article titled: “You Should Really Consider Installing Signal, an Encrypted Messaging App for iPhone.”

    (Signal is for iPhone and iPads, and encrypts both voice and texts; RedPhone is the Android version of the voice product; TextSecure is the Android version of the text product.)

    #surveillance #NSA

  • Le jour même où la planète entière reproche à Seymour Hersh d’utiliser des sources anonymes : CIA’s Jeffrey Sterling Sentenced to 42 Months for Leaking to New York Times Journalist
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/sterling-sentenced-for-cia-leak-to-nyt

    Alexandria, VA — Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent convicted of sharing classified information with a New York Times reporter, was sentenced today to three and a half years in prison, a significantly shorter term than had been expected.

    Sterling’s lawyers had asked the judge not to abide by sentencing guidelines calling for 19 to 24 years behind bars. They argued Sterling should be treated with the same leniency shown to former Gen. David Petraeus, who was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and avoid prison after admitting to leaking classified information to his biographer and then-girlfriend, Paula Broadwell. Sterling’s lawyers also pointed to the case of former CIA agent John Kiriakou, who was recently released from jail after a 30-month sentence for disclosing the name of a covert agent to a reporter, and to the 13-month-sentence handed down to Stephen Kim, who pleaded guilty to talking about a classified document with a Fox News reporter.

  • La France était jusqu’à maintenant le seul pays qui tentait de pénaliser le boycott d’israel judiciairement. C’est au tour du Canada de s’y mettre...

    Ottawa considering hate charges against those who boycott Israel
    http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-considering-hate-charges-against-those-who-boycott-israel-1.3067497

    Ottawa cites hate crime laws when asked about its ’zero tolerance’ for Israel boycotters
    http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-cites-hate-crime-laws-when-asked-about-its-zero-tolerance-for-israel-boyc

    #Palestine #Canada #BDS

  • Military #Contractors Behind New Pressure Group Targeting Presidential Candidates
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/09/military-contractors-form-group-pressure-2016-candidates-adopt-hawkish-po

    Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers has formed a new pressure group, now active in Iowa and New Hampshire, to serve as the “premiere national security and foreign policy organization during the 2016 debate” and to “help elect a president who supports American engagement and a strong foreign policy.”

  • Seymour M. Hersh : The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

    It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

    The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

    This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

    ‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.

    (pas encore lu)

    • Pakistanis Knew Where Bin Laden Was, Say U.S. Sources
      http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pakistanis-knew-where-bin-laden-was-say-us-sources-n357306

      Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a “walk in” asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding - and these two sources plus a third say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.

      The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking couriers to his walled complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

      The new revelations do not necessarily cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency’s operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission. The official story focused on a long hunt for bin Laden’s presumed courier, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

      While NBC News has long been pursuing leads about a “walk in” and about what Pakistani intelligence knew, both assertions were made public in a London Review of Books article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.

    • Author Reported Essentials of Hersh’s bin Laden Story in 2011 — With Seemingly Different Sources
      https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/former-professor-reported-basics-hershs-bin-laden-story-2011-seemingly-di

      R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh.

      Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about bin Laden’s location from tracking an al Qaeda courier, but from a member of the Pakistani intelligence service who wanted to collect the $25 million reward the U.S. had offered for bin Laden; (2) Saudi Arabia was paying Pakistan to keep bin Laden under the equivalent of house arrest; (3) Pakistan was pressured by the U.S. to stand down its military to allow the U.S. raid to proceed unhindered; and (4) the U.S. had planned to claim that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but was forced to abandon this when one of the Navy SEAL helicopters crashed.

      The Spy Who Billed Me: Hersh Did Not Break Bin Laden Cover Up Story
      http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/05/hersh-did-not-break-bin-laden-cover-up-story.html

      Seymour Hersh’s story, “The Killing of Bin Laden,” in the London Review of Books has a fundamental problem: it’s either plagiarism or unoriginal.

      If it’s fiction—as some have implied, it’s plagiarism. If it’s true, it’s not original. The story was broken here on The Spy Who Billed Me four years ago, in August 2011

      […]

      I have had great respect for Seymour Hersh, arguably one of the greatest investigative journalists of our time. I do not believe his story is fiction. I trust my sources—which were clearly different than his. I am, however, profoundly disappointed that he has not given credit to the one who originally broke the story.

    • La presse semble vouloir régler son compte à ce grand journaliste.

      Etats-Unis. Mort de Ben Laden : une enquête très polémique
      Publié le 12/05/2015

      (...) D’aucuns, à l’instar du site internet Vox [ http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden ] , n’hésitent cependant pas à parler du penchant du journaliste pour la théorie du complot. Pour le journaliste Max Fisher, “l’enquête de Seymour Hersh est certes impressionnante à lire, mais elle ne résiste pas à un examen minutieux des faits et est bourrée de contradictions et d’incohérences”. Elle serait une bonne illustration de la dérive de Seymour Hersh “qui s’est éloigné, ces dernières années, du journalisme d’investigation pour s’engager sur le terrain glissant des conspirations.” (...)

      cet article a été repris et cité ce matin sur France-Culture Par Thomas CLUZEL

      Que s’est-il passé la nuit où Ben Laden a été tué ? x
      12.05.2015
      http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-revue-de-presse-internationale-que-s-est-il-passe-la-nuit-ou-

    • Oui, l’article de Vox a beaucoup circulé. Cet article de The Nation (assez marrant) répond à l’article de Vox : It’s a Conspiracy ! How to Discredit Seymour Hersh | The Nation
      http://www.thenation.com/blog/207001/its-conspiracy-how-discredit-seymour-hersh

      Max Fisher, now at Vox, learned well during his apprenticeship under Marty Peretz at The New Republic. This week, he was among the first to try to smear Seymour Hersh’s piece in the London Review of Books, which argued that pretty much everything we were told about the killing of Osama bin Laden was a lie. Most importantly, Hersh’s report questions the claim that Washington learned of OBL’s whereabouts thanks to torture—a claim popularized in the film Zero Dark Thirty.

      There’s a standard boiler plate now when it comes to going after Hersh, and all Fisher, in “The Many Problems with Seymour Hersh’s Osama bin Laden Conspiracy Theory,” did was fill out the form: establish Hersh’s “legendary” status (which Fisher does in the first sentence); invoke his reporting in My Lai and Abu Ghraib; then say that a number of Hersh’s recent stories—such as his 2012 New Yorker piece that the United States was training Iranian terrorists in Nevada—have been “unsubstantiated” (of course, other reporters never “substantiated” Hersh’s claim that Henry Kissinger was directly involved in organizing the cover-up of the fire-bombing of Cambodia for years—but that claim was true); question Hersh’s sources; and then, finally, suggest that Hersh has gone “off the rails” to embrace “conspiracy theories.”

      […]

      To accuse Hersh of falling under the thrall of “conspiracy theory” is to repudiate the whole enterprise of investigative journalism that Hersh helped pioneer. What has he written that wasn’t a conspiracy? But Fisher, and others, believe Hersh went too far when in a 2011 speech he made mention of the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei, tagging him as a Dan Brown fantasist. Here’s Fisher, in his debunking of Hersh’s recent essay: “The moment when a lot of journalists started to question whether Hersh had veered from investigative reporting into something else came in January 2011. That month, he spoke at Georgetown University’s branch campus in Qatar, where he gave a bizarre and rambling address alleging that top military and special forces leaders ‘are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.… many of them are members of Opus Dei.’”

      But here’s Steve Coll, a reporter who remains within the acceptable margins, writing in Ghost Wars about Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey: “He was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion.… He attended Mass daily and urged Christian faith upon anyone who asked his advice…. He believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.” Oliver North, Casey’s Iran/Contra co-conspirator, worshiped at a “’charismatic’ Episcopalian church in Virginia called Church of the Apostles, which is organized into cell groups.”

      Not too long ago, no less an establishment figure than Ben Bradlee, the editor of The Washington Post, could draw the connections between the shadowy national security state and right-wing Christianity: Iran/Contra was about many things, among them a right-wing Christian reaction against the growing influence of left-wing Liberation Theology in Latin America. Likewise, the US’s post-9/11 militarism was about many things, among them the reorganization of those right-wing Christians against what they identified as a greater existential threat than Liberation Theology: political Islam. Fisher should know this, as it was reported here, here, and here, among many other places.

      Eager to debunk Hersh, it’s Fisher who has fallen down the rabbit hole of imperial amnesia.

    • Seymour Hersh Article Alleges Cover-Up in Bin Laden Hunt - NYTimes.com
      http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/seymour-hersh-article-alleges-cover-up-in-bin-laden-hunt.html?ref=todayspap

      In one conceivable episode, Mr. Hersh writes that American intelligence officials were alerted to Bin Laden’s whereabouts by a Pakistani military officer who walked into the United States Embassy in Islamabad and was subsequently paid a reward and moved by the C.I.A. to the United States. The account told by the Obama administration after the raid — that the C.I.A. tracked down Bin Laden through the work of dogged analysts — was a ruse intended to protect the real informant, according to Mr. Hersh.

      It is a deception that the C.I.A. has employed before, claiming for years that it discovered that one of its own, Aldrich H. Ames, was passing intelligence to the Soviet Union through the work of a team of analysts. The truth that eventually emerged was that crucial evidence against Mr. Ames came from a Soviet spy working for the C.I.A.

      Yet other claims by Mr. Hersh would have required a cover-up extending from top American, Pakistani and Saudi officials down to midlevel bureaucrats.

      [...]

      Mr. Hersh is standing by his article. In a brief telephone interview on Monday, he said, “You can have your skepticism.”

      His manner was cheerful and breezy, and he seemed unfazed about the controversy his reporting has stirred up. It is not the first time that Mr. Hersh’s work has been met with hostility from the authorities, and he laughed loudly at the mention of the denials from the White House and others.

      “Those are classic nondenial denials,” he said, before rushing off to take a call from another reporter.

      [...]

      [...] Mr. Hersh’s story would probably have gained much less traction had it not been for the often contradictory details presented by the Obama administration after the raid, and the questions about it that remain unanswered.

    • Les révélations de Seymour Hersh sur l’assassinat de Ben Laden sont à prendre au sérieux
      12 mai 2015 | Par Thomas Cantaloube
      http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/120515/les-revelations-de-seymour-hersh-sur-lassassinat-de-ben-laden-sont-prendre

      Le vétéran américain du journalisme d’investigation livre dans un long article une version différente de ce qui s’est passé en mai 2011 à Abbottabad, quand le leader d’Al-Qaïda a été tué par un commando américain. Son récit est crédible et informé, autant en tout cas que celui fourni jusqu’ici par la Maison Blanche.

    • « L’Assassinat d’Oussama ben Laden » par Seymour Hersh (3/4)
      Par Seymour Hersh pour la London Review of Books, le 10 mai 2015
      http://www.reopen911.info/News/2015/05/14/lassassinat-doussama-ben-laden-par-seymour-hersh-34
      Suite de la deuxième partie de l’article.

      ““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““
      L’Assassinat d’Oussama ben Laden (London Review of Books) - (4/4)
      http://www.legrandsoir.info/l-assassinat-d-oussama-ben-laden-london-review-of-books-4-4.html
      ou
      http://www.reopen911.info/News/2015/05/15/lassassinat-doussama-ben-laden-par-seymour-hersh-44

    • The Detail in Seymour Hersh’s Bin Laden Story That Rings True - Carlotta Gall
      http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/magazine/the-detail-in-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-story-that-rings-true.html

      On this count, my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s. Beginning in 2001, I spent nearly 12 years covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The Times. (In his article, Hersh cites an article I wrote for The Times Magazine last year, an excerpt from a book drawn from this reporting.) The story of the Pakistani informer was circulating in the rumor mill within days of the Abbottabad raid, but at the time, no one could or would corroborate the claim. Such is the difficulty of reporting on covert operations and intelligence matters; there are no official documents to draw on, few officials who will talk and few ways to check the details they give you when they do.

      Two years later, when I was researching my book, I learned from a high-level member of the Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding Bin Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an intelligence asset. After the book came out, I learned more: that it was indeed a Pakistani Army brigadier — all the senior officers of the ISI are in the military — who told the C.I.A. where Bin Laden was hiding, and that Bin Laden was living there with the knowledge and protection of the ISI.

      […]

      I do not recall ever corresponding with Hersh, but he is following up on a story that many of us assembled parts of. The former C.I.A. officer Larry Johnson aired the theory of the informant — credited to “friends who are still active” — on his blog within days of the raid. And Hersh appears to have succeeded in getting both American and Pakistani sources to corroborate it. His sources remain anonymous, but other outlets such as NBC News have since come forward with similar accounts. Finally, the Pakistani daily newspaper The News reported Tuesday that Pakistani intelligence officials have conceded that it was indeed a walk-in who provided the information on Bin Laden. The newspaper names the officer as Brigadier Usman Khalid; the reporter is sufficiently well connected that he should be taken seriously.

  • How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text ~ The Intercept
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text

    Top-secret documents from the archive of former #NSA contractor Edward #Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

    The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.

    Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.
    https://www.facebook.com/DIA/posts/10152405356825919

    La #voix automatiquement transformée en #texte brut, voilà qui pourrait inspirer les #radios et notamment #Radio_France pour indexer les émissions dans les #moteurs_de_recherche et ainsi faire des #podcasts de vraies ressources documentaires, ce qu’elles sont déjà mais de manière plus ou moins confidentielles (selon l’énergie dépensée à renseigner les pages de chaque émission).

    Ca rappelle un peu le projet de l’IRI, « Ligne de temps » :
    http://www.iri.centrepompidou.fr/outils/lignes-de-temps

    Reste bien sûr à arracher cette techno au secret des services, toujours pionniers en matière d’#innovation.

    #reconnaissance_vocale
    cc @latrive @thbaumg @sparf @xporte

  • Could German court halt White House’s ‘illegal’ drone war? An exclusive extract from Chris Woods’ new book Sudden Justice | The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
    http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/04/27/could-german-court-halt-white-house-drone-war-chris-woods-boo

    The debate over America’s use of drones to kill its own citizens has never been as intense. Last week in an unprecedented announcement, President Barack Obama admitted that CIA drones had killed three Americans in Pakistan in January, including al Qaeda hostage and aid worker Warren Weinstein.

    It is not just Americans who have been killed. As new research by the Bureau shows, Weinstein is one of at least 38 Westerners to have been killed in the US’s covert drone war on terror. Citizens of some of some of America’s closest allies – the UK, Germany, Australia and Canada among them – are among the dead.

    The deaths of these Westerners represent a mere fraction of the total death toll for drones. Yet their killing pose troubling questions for the White House over the legality of the programme. There is also growing concern within allied countries.

    On May 27 a Cologne court will begin hearing complaints from three Yemeni survivors of a US drone strike, in a case brought by Reprieve and the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights.

    Complaints centre on the use of Ramstein airbase by the US. The Intercept recently published leaked top secret documents showing that all drone satellite data from Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia transits through the German military base.

    That means Ramstein will inevitably have helped facilitate the drone killing of seven or more German citizens by America, actions which may give further traction to the impending lawsuit. Kat Craig, from Reprieve, told the Bureau: “The time has come for Germany and the US’s other Western allies to face the facts: they are complicit in an illegal and immoral war – one which violates their own legal framework and should see them prosecuted.”

    Could the case succeed? The track record of Europe’s courts on earlier CIA progammes, including torture and rendition, is not encouraging.

    In this exclusive extract from Chris Woods’ new book Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars, the former Bureau reporter shows how Germany’s role in the CIA’s covert drone wars has been highly controversial for years.

    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/17/ramstein
    #drones #USA #Allemagne #Justice

  • When Will Obama Apologize for All the Other Innocent Victims of #Drone Strikes?

    In the fall of 2013, Rafiq ur Rehman, a school teacher from the remote tribal region of North Waziristan, in Pakistan, stood with his 12-year-old son, Zubair, and 9-year-old daughter, Nabila, in Washington, D.C., preparing to challenge one of the U.S. government’s most secretive means of killing.


    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/24/obama-drone-apology

  • When Will Obama Apologize for All the Other Innocent Victims of Drone Strikes?
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/24/obama-drone-apology

    “Today, if Nabila or Zubair or many of the civilian victims — if they are watching on TV the president being so remorseful over the killing of a Westerner, what message is that taking?” Akbar said Thursday in an interview with The Intercept.

    The answer, he argued, is “that you do not matter, you are children of a lesser God, and I’m only going to mourn if a Westerner is killed.”

  • Germany is the Tell-Tale Heart of America’s Drone War
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/17/ramstein

    This is a joint investigation with the German news magazine Der Spiegel.

    A TOP-SECRET U.S. intelligence document obtained by The Intercept confirms that the sprawling U.S. military base in Ramstein, Germany serves as the high-tech heart of America’s drone program. Ramstein is the site of a satellite relay station that enables drone operators in the American Southwest to communicate with their remote aircraft in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and other targeted countries. The top-secret slide deck, dated July 2012, provides the most detailed blueprint seen to date of the technical architecture used to conduct strikes with Predator and Reaper drones.

    Amid fierce European criticism of America’s targeted killing program, U.S. and German government officials have long downplayed Ramstein’s role in lethal U.S. drone operations and have issued carefully phrased evasions when confronted with direct questions about the base. But the slides show that the facilities at Ramstein perform an essential function in lethal drone strikes conducted by the CIA and the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa.

    The slides were provided by a source with knowledge of the U.S. government’s drone program who declined to be identified because of fears of retribution. According to the source, Ramstein’s importance to the U.S. drone war is difficult to overstate. “Ramstein carries the signal to tell the drone what to do and it returns the display of what the drone sees. Without Ramstein, drones could not function, at least not as they do now,” the source said.

    The new evidence places German Chancellor Angela Merkel in an awkward position given Germany’s close diplomatic alliance with the United States. The German government has granted the U.S. the right to use the property, but only under the condition that the Americans do nothing there that violates German law.

    Secret Details of Drone Strike Revealed As Unprecedented Case Goes to German Court
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/17/victim-u-s-drone-strike-gets-day-german-court

    http://seenthis.net/messages/362326

  • Germany is the Tell-Tale Heart of America’s Drone War

    A TOP-SECRET U.S. intelligence document obtained by The Intercept confirms that the sprawling U.S. military base in Ramstein, Germany serves as the high-tech heart of America’s drone program. Ramstein is the site of a satellite relay station that enables drone operators in the American Southwest to communicate with their remote aircraft in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and other targeted countries. The top-secret slide deck, dated July 2012, provides the most detailed blueprint seen to date of the technical architecture used to conduct strikes with Predator and Reaper drones.


    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/17/ramstein
    #Allemagne #USA #Etats-Unis #drones #technologie