A French report claims that Turkey encouraged the formation of a jihadist brigade called “Katibat al-Taliban” (KaT)

A French report claims that Turkey encouraged the formation of a jihadist brigade called “Katibat al-Taliban” (KaT)

    Thursday, September 12, 2013   No comments

France's Intelligence Online claimed in a story in its latest issue published on Wednesday that Turkey encouraged the formation of a jihadist brigade called “Katibat al-Taliban” (KaT), which is reportedly made up almost exclusively of Kurds, to fight with the Democratic Union Party (PYD). The story also claimed that some fighters of the alleged group were "members of the PKK who converted to Islam in Turkish prisons,” while others come from schools established by followers of Gülen.

The lawyer of Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen has strongly dismissed claims by a French publication that followers of Gülen are among members of an alleged jihadist formation encouraged by Turkey to fight a political offshoot of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Syria as baseless slanders.
“The claim in question is first of all a blatant and baseless slander that is based on no evidence.  Mentioning the name of my client, who based his entire life on tolerance, dialogue, peace, love for people and one's country, is, to say the least, ruthless and shows a lack of intelligence,” said lawyer Nurullah Albayrak in a statement on Thursday.

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The problems with political bias in the culture of think tanks: Syria expert Senator McCain cited is not an expert after all

The problems with political bias in the culture of think tanks: Syria expert Senator McCain cited is not an expert after all

    Thursday, September 12, 2013   No comments

BY ZACK BEAUCHAMP

Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy, Syria expert, made quite an impression on Senator John McCain. During Senate hearings, the former Presidential candidate quoted at length from her recent Wall Street Journal op-ed painting a rosy picture of a mostly secular, pro-Western anti-Assad insurgency.

“John, do you agree with Dr. O’Bagy’s assessment of the opposition?,” the Senator asked the Secretary of State John Kerry. “I agree with most of that,” he replied.

Except Dr. O’Bagy wasn’t actually a doctor. Her PhD was fabricated, a lie she told her employers at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), an influential neoconservative-aligned think tank, to get hired. Ironically, it ended up being the lie that got her fired Wednesday. This postmodern reenactment of the Icarus myth also provides a bizarrely informative window into the way that Washington’s foreign policy sausage gets made.

O’Bagy got her start last year, when she interned for ISW’s Iraq portfolio while completing a Master’s in Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Kimberly Kagan, the President of ISW, was so impressed that she hired O’Bagy to start even before the young analyst finished her degree. “Her insights and her [Arabic] linguistic skills were tremendous,” Kagan said.

But O’Bagy had already begun to misrepresent her credentials. Kagan told me that she “knew [O'Bagy] was a student at Georgetown in a combined masters/PhD program,” and that new hire was writing a dissertation on “female militancy in Islamic extremist organizations.” Several media outlets have repeated this account as fact in their write-ups of O’Bagy’s firing, all maintaining that she is still in the process of completing a Georgetown doctorate.

This is almost certainly false. Either O’Bagy was at one point enrolled a PhD program and dropped out, or she has been lying the entire time. Some evidence points to the latter.

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What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria: A Plea for Caution From Russia

What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria: A Plea for Caution From Russia

    Thursday, September 12, 2013   No comments

By VLADIMIR V. PUTIN

Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.
Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.

...

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States' policy is "what makes America different. It's what makes us exceptional". It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal..

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NSA shares raw intelligence including American citizens' data with Israel

NSA shares raw intelligence including American citizens' data with Israel

    Wednesday, September 11, 2013   No comments

Read the NSA and Israel's 'memorandum of understanding' 

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process "minimization", but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.

The deal was reached in principle in March 2009, according to the undated memorandum, which lays out the ground rules for the intelligence sharing.

The five-page memorandum, termed an agreement between the US and Israeli intelligence agencies "pertaining to the protection of US persons", repeatedly stresses the constitutional rights of Americans to privacy and the need for Israeli intelligence staff to respect these rights.

But this is undermined by the disclosure that Israel is allowed to receive "raw Sigint" – signal intelligence. The memorandum says: "Raw Sigint includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content."

According to the agreement, the intelligence being shared would not be filtered in advance by NSA analysts to remove US communications. "NSA routinely sends ISNU [the Israeli Sigint National Unit] minimized and unminimized raw collection", it says.

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Police fire tear gas to disperse crowds gathered to denounce protester's death in Turkey

Police fire tear gas to disperse crowds gathered to denounce protester's death in Turkey

    Wednesday, September 11, 2013   No comments

The police staged a fresh crackdown on demonstrators in the early evening hours of Sept. 10, after groups had gathered in Istanbul's Taksim Square to denounce the death of a protester in Antakya during an intervention.

After the crowd swelled in numbers in Taksim Square, police pushed them down through the pedestrian İstiklal Avenue in order to prevent the demonstration from taking place.

Once again tear gas and water cannons were resorted to, with police chasing protesters down İstiklal Avenue and the many narrow side streets in the area.

Police also used tear gas to disperse a crowd that had arrived by ferry at the Karaköy docks, downhill from İstiklal Avenue, in order prevent them from reaching the Taksim area.

The police intervention continued for more than four hours around İstiklal Avenue's side streets.

The Istanbul bar association has stated that 41 people have been detained in Istanbul alone.

Another protest was staged in the district of Kadıköy, on Istanbul's Asian side.

Witnesses and activists claimed that Atakan was hit in the head by a gas canister fired by the police. However, the Turkish police released a statement saying footage from a police camera indicated that Atakan had fallen from a building, and that no intervention by the police was visible.

A doctor present during the protester's preliminary autopsy said there was no evidence to prove that the latter had fallen from a building.

Shortly earlier, police had sealed off Gezi Park next to the square following calls on social media for a demonstration.

The Taksim Solidarity Platform, which initiated the first protests against the destruction of trees in Gezi Park months ago, scheduled a public rally in Taksim Square at around 7 p.m. “We will gather at Taksim with carnations to commemorate Ahmet Atakan and denounce police violence,” the group said via its social media account.

Meanwhile, the under-21 football match between Turkey and Sweden at the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Stadium in the Kasımpaşa district was temporarily interrupted due to tear gas drifting over from the nearby Taksim area.

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Syrian American Woman tells McCain "do not bomb Syria"

Syrian American Woman tells McCain "do not bomb Syria"

    Wednesday, September 11, 2013   No comments

Syrian American Woman tells McCain "do not bomb Syria; minorities are not collateral damage."

Unbelievably John Kerry: Once again, John Kerry’s created an unbelievably big problem out of one little phrase

Unbelievably John Kerry: Once again, John Kerry’s created an unbelievably big problem out of one little phrase

    Tuesday, September 10, 2013   No comments

By: Edward-Isaac Dovere

Throughout his career, Kerry’s had a problem with words. Monday, with just two of them, he managed to illustrate the Obama administration’s overall ambivalence toward a Syria strike, the latest shift in arguments from a man whose case for action has been changing almost with the days of the week.

Saying that any Syria action would be “unbelievably small” was supposed to reassure voters that the White House isn’t hatching a new Iraq-level invasion and occupation. Instead, he just bolstered skeptics who believe the administration’s either only looking for a symbolic move against Syrian President Bashar Assad to be able to claim action or for those who believe that President Barack Obama’s about to blunder into a long-term engagement in yet another fractured Arab nation.

That’s distinct from the new international policy Kerry at first seemed to have stumbled into, but as subsequent comments from White House officials and the president showed through the day, was actually a concerted — but heavily conditional — float, that Assad could stop an attack if the Syrian president somehow turned over his entire chemical weapons arsenal immediately.

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Pierre Piccinin: Assad not Responsible for Ghouta Gas Attack, rebels used gas in Ghouta to trigger Western intervention

Pierre Piccinin: Assad not Responsible for Ghouta Gas Attack, rebels used gas in Ghouta to trigger Western intervention

    Tuesday, September 10, 2013   No comments

A Belgian writer held hostage for five months in Syria has said that his own rebel captors denied that President Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the Ghouta massacre.

Pierre Piccinin said that he and fellow hostage Domenico Quirico, an Italian war reporter, heard their jailers talking about the chemical weapon attack and saying that Assad was not to blame.

Quirico confirmed to La Stampa newspaper that they had eavesdropped such a conversation through a closed door but added that he had no evidence to substantiate what he heard.

Piccinin said the captives became desperate when they heard that the US was planning to launch a punitive attack against the regime over the gas attack in the Damascus suburb.
 

"It wasn't the government of Bashar al-Assad that used sarin gas or any other gas in Ghouta," Piccinin told Belgian RTL radio after he was released.

"We are sure about this because we overheard a conversation between rebels. It pains me to say it because I've been a fierce supporter of the Free Syrian Army in its rightful fight for democracy since 2012," Piccinin added.

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If Obama is not willing to target both the regime and the terrorists in Syria, then Congress should not approve military action

If Obama is not willing to target both the regime and the terrorists in Syria, then Congress should not approve military action

    Monday, September 09, 2013   No comments

by Marc A. Thiessen

Senator Ted Cruz says that in Syria, the United States military should not “serve as al-Qaeda’s air force.” He’s right.

Al-Qaeda has two major strategic objectives: to get control of a nation-state and to get control of weapons of mass destruction. President Obama’s inaction in Syria has brought them closer to accomplishing both objectives.

After announcing that Assad must go in August 2011, Obama dithered for two years. This created a power vacuum, which al-Qaeda has filled — pouring weapons and fighters into Syria, and carving out new safe havens where it controls territory and operates with impunity.

If the United States were to employ military force sufficient to topple Assad, there is now a danger that such an attack could help al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic radicals come to power in Damascus. This may be one reason why the administration is proposing limited, rather than decapitating, strikes against Assad.

But Assad does not have to fall for the terrorists to get their hands on his chemical stockpiles. He simply needs to be weakened enough that he cannot protect them. Al-Qaeda has successfully overrun government prisons in Iraq and military airfields in northern Syria. What is to stop them from overrunning Assad’s chemical weapons facilities? The United States has a vital national interest in making sure that does not happen.

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Who are the Syrian rebels: al-Qaeda in Syria leaders think that Americans are threatening war in Syria to target them, not the regime; other rebels wish U.S. will bomb jihadists

Who are the Syrian rebels: al-Qaeda in Syria leaders think that Americans are threatening war in Syria to target them, not the regime; other rebels wish U.S. will bomb jihadists

    Monday, September 09, 2013   No comments

The four men around him, jihadists from elsewhere in the Arab world, laughed among themselves and looked around to see another group enter. They too had come from far away for jihad — first against the Assad regime and now the US, again.

At a table down the hall, a group of Free Syrian Army fighters were enjoying a late lunch beside an olive grove, wondering out loud what regime targets the US would go for and revelling in the discomfort of the jihadists, whom they felt had ridden roughshod over their war in recent months. "I don't care if the Americans attack them too," said one of the men, whose unit has been joined by the jihadists in several battles. "I'd like that in fact. They need to be scared of someone." The table erupted in laughter, before the men calmed themselves. "I hope the Americans know where their headquarters are," said one.

Business is better at the restaurant than at any point since the start of the civil war, said the owner, who did not want to be named. "They are always polite and they always leave a tip. They just don't want the narghilas (water pipes smoked by locals) anywhere near them."

Outside a recently empty car park is crawling with trucks. The highway, for much of the past year as long, straight and empty as an airport runway, is a bustling thoroughfare of dilapidated trucks and clapped out motorbikes – the favourite form of transport for jihadists and regular fighters alike, who ride in pairs, guns slung across their backs.

The highway leads past a bomb-pocked concrete plant to the town of al-Bab, roughly 25 miles north-east of Aleppo and an opposition stronghold for the past 14 months. Here the evolution of Syria's civil war is written in paint on the walls of schools, civic buildings and advertising hoardings, hijacked by myriad players intent on leaving their mark.

The black banner of al-Qaida, adopted by ISIS, is more prominent in al-Bab than the gold-edged flag of the other al-Qaida-linked group, Jabhat al-Nusra, or the regular units of the Free Syrian Army.

"We don't like it this way," said a local man, Abu Nashat, pointing at a school wall that had been white-washed and then emblazoned with two giant al-Qaida logos. "But who is going to take them on over a tin of paint? We already have a big fight on our hands against the regime. Opening a new battle is not something to do lightly."

Behind two wrought-iron gates was the ISIS command centre, emptied of most of its men before the anticipated air strikes. Two young boys stood guard, their heads swathed in bandanas, their pants cut at ankle length in the manner of the men they emulate.

New-found authority resonates from the commandeered schoolyard. And ISIS members have not been shy in asserting their will here, or elsewhere in northern Syria, where an internecine struggle is in danger of eclipsing the reason for the war. "They think everyone who doesn't think and act like them is an infidel who needs to be punished," said a young fighter from the Liwa al-Tawheed Brigade – a mainstream militia – who ran a clothes shop before the conflict. "While they may have learned how to fight the Americans, they haven't learned anything else from Iraq."

One lesson from Iraq, however, is embraced by many Syrians: the Awakening Movement, also known as the Sahawa, that drove al-Qaida out of Anbar province in 2007.

"We need the same thing here," said a senior member of the Liwa al-Tawheed. "They want to kidnap this revolution. Maybe they already have. But don't mistake all the black flags you see for community support. We just don't have the stomach to fight them now. And who could we hope to support us even if we did? America? Europe? Shame on them. Do they not see that Syria will drag down the whole Middle East?"
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