AP:Clinton: Time running out for diplomacy with Iran

Clinton: Time running out for diplomacy with Iran

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_CLINTON_MIDEAST?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-03-31-13-14-34

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made clear Saturday that time is running out for diplomacy over Iran's nuclear program and said talks aimed at preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon would resume in mid-April.

With speculation over a possible U.S. or Israel military attack

adding urgency to the next round of discussions in Istanbul set for April 13, Clinton said Iran's "window of opportunity" for a peaceful resolution "will not remain open forever."

She also expressed doubt about whether Iran has any intention of negotiating a solution that satisfies the U.S., Israel and other countries that believe Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran contends the program is solely for peaceful energy and research purposes.

"We're going in with one intention: to resolve the international community's concerns about Iran's nuclear program," Clinton told reporters after attending a security conference in Saudi Arabia.

"Our policy is one of prevention, not containment. We are determined to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon," America's top diplomat said.

"We enter into these talks with a sober perspective about Iran's intentions. It is incumbent upon Iran to demonstrate by its actions that it is a willing partner and to participate in these negotiations with an effort to obtain concrete results."

Her remarks followed President Barack Obama's announcement Friday that the U.S. was moving ahead with penalties aimed at depriving Iran of oil revenue, while also working with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states to ensure ample global petroleum supplies.

Clinton prodded Gulf governments to develop a coordinated defense strategy against Iranian missiles. With tensions rising in the region, she said American and Gulf militaries should cooperate to improve maritime security as well.

Underscoring the limits of U.S.-Gulf cooperation, however, U.S. officials confirmed Saturday that the United Arab Emirates had shut down an American-funded democracy group, following similar Emirates action against a German organization this past week.

Discussions also covered ways to pressure Syrian President Bashar Assad to end a year of bloodshed from the uprising against his rule, but the focus was on Iran.

"It soon will be clear whether Iran's leaders are prepared to have a serious, credible discussion about their nuclear program, whether they are ready to start building the basis of a resolution to this very serious problem," Clinton said. "It is up to Iran whether they are ready to make the right choice. ... What is certain is that Iran's window of opportunity to seek and obtain a peaceful resolution will not remain open forever."

She said pressure from the economic penalties and international isolation was increasing on Iran to show it is serious about satisfying the world's concerns.

Iran and the six nations involved in the negotiations- the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - met in Istanbul 14 months ago. But the talks ended after two days with the sides unable to even agree on what to talk about.

Iran has used past talks to delay sanctions or try to divide the international front, while pressing ahead with its nuclear program.

Obama has underlined the need to give time for diplomacy alongside penalties. He said Friday that the U.S. would move ahead with potential measures against U.S. allies and other countries that keep buying Iranian oil. It was the latest step in the campaign to starve Iran of money for its nuclear activity.

The president said the world oil market was tight, but deep enough to keep the squeeze on Iran.

Clinton, who met Friday for almost two hours with Saudi King Abdullah, said the U.S. and Saudi Arabia share an interest in ensuring stable energy markets that foster economic growth.

She recognized the kingdom's efforts to meet increased market demand for countries weaning themselves off Iranian petroleum imports. She also said the U.S. and Sunni governments of the region would cooperate to counter Iranian threats against shipping in the Gulf and Tehran's support for "the Assad regime's murderous campaign."

Before arriving later Saturday in Turkey, where she planned to attend a 60-nation "Friends of the Syrian People" meeting Sunday, Clinton lamented what she called the Assad government's shelling of civilian neighborhoods and targeting of mosques and churches.

She said these attacks have continued despite Assad's acceptance of U.N. mediator Kofi Annan's plan to end the crisis. That plan includes an immediate cease-fire and an eventual democratic transition.

In a concluding statement, the U.S. and the other countries at Saturday's meeting urged Annan to issue a timeline for putting his plan in place.

Western diplomats want to give diplomacy a chance, having invested months of effort to persuade Russia and China, veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council, to unite behind a common approach. But they, like the Syrian opposition, fear Assad may only be playing for time.

Assad said he wants the plan to succeed, but insists the opposition must first commit to a cease-fire.

The West says the Syrian government must pull back its troops first, and U.S. officials say much of the diplomacy right now concerns the choreography of how the two sides would lay down their arms.

More than 9,000 people have been killed in Syria's violence since last March, according to U.N. estimates.

Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among the most impatient and have spoken about possible military intervention, from arming Syria's badly overmatched rebels to creating safe zones from which the rebels can operate.

"I believe we all agree on the need for an immediate cease-fire to the systematic killing," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said at a news conference with Clinton.

He said the Syrian government's crackdown has "reached the level, at the very least described as crimes against humanity, on which the international community should not remain silent."

Washington fears a military escalation could lead to all-out civil war and play into Assad's hands, considering his vastly more powerful military.

Clinton said officials meeting in Turkey would discuss "additional steps to increase pressure on the regime, provide humanitarian assistance despite the efforts of the regime to block access and advance plans for an inclusive, democratic and orderly transition that addresses the aspirations of the Syrian people."

Clinton said she regretted the decision by the Emirates' this past week to close down the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute and Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation. She said she expressed her displeasure in a meeting Saturday with the foreign minister and said the U.S. would continue to press its case.

independent:Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all Defector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003

Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all

Defector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/man-whose-wmd-lies-led-to-100000-deaths-confesses-all-7606236.html

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

"Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."

US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy".

As for his former boss: "I don't see any way on this earth that Secretary Powell doesn't feel almost a rage about Curveball and the way he was used in regards to that intelligence."

Another revelation in the series is the real reason why the FBI swooped on Russian spy Anna Chapman in 2010. Top officials feared the glamorous Russian agent wanted to seduce one of US President Barack Obama's inner circle. Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI's head of counterintelligence, reveals how she got "closer and closer to higher and higher ranking leadership... she got close enough to disturb us".

The fear that Chapman would compromise a senior US official in a "honey trap" was a key reason for the arrest and deportation of the Russian spy ring of 10 people, of which she was a part, in 2010. "We were becoming very concerned," he says. "They were getting close enough to a sitting US cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue." Mr Figliuzzi refuses to name the individual who was being targeted.

Several British spies also feature in the programme, in the first time that serving intelligence officers have been interviewed on television. In contrast to the US intelligence figures, the British spies are cloaked in darkness, their voices dubbed by actors. BBC veteran reporter Peter Taylor, who worked for a year putting the documentary together, describes them as "ordinary people who are committed to what they do" and "a million miles" from the spies depicted in film. He adds: "What surprised me was the extent to which they work within a civil service bureaucracy. Everything has to be signed off... you've got to have authorisation signed in triplicate."

Would-be agents should abandon any Hollywood fantasies they may have, says Sonya Holt at the CIA recruitment centre. "They think it's more like the movies, that they are going to be jumping out of cars and that everyone carries a weapon... Yes we're collecting intelligence but we don't all drive fast cars. You're going to be writing reports; you're in meetings so it's not always that glamorous image of what you see in the movies."

FOXNEWS:The boomerang effect: Could American cyberweapon be turned against us?

The boomerang effect: Could American cyberweapon be turned against us?

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/03/31/boomerang-effect-could-americas-best-cyberweapon-be-turned-back-upon-us/#ixzz1qkhSegto

Viruses like Stuxnet and Duqu are the atom bombs of cyberwarfare, experts say, a key tool in U.S. and foreign military arsenals. But some worry that this new generation of digital weapons could be co-opted by enemy forces -- and used against their creators.

After the Stuxnet virus hit Iran's nuclear power plants in 2010, it was collected and disseminated, falling into the hands of hackers and code-crafters worldwide. Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief, is confident that the U.S. wrote the code -- and may have allowed the U.S.'s greatest cyberweapon ever to leak into enemy hands.

“It got loose because there was a mistake,” Clarke said in an interview with the Smithsonian. "And if you’re a computer whiz you can take it apart and you can say, ‘Oh, let’s change this over here, let’s change that over there.’ Now I’ve got a really sophisticated weapon. So thousands of people around the world have it and are playing with it."

"And if I’m right, the best cyberweapon the United States has ever developed, it then gave the world for free.”

Call it the boomerang effect -- the weapon you designed to hit others can come right back at you.

And while many still disagree that the U.S. was responsible for Stuxnet, often citing Israel as a prime suspect, the software is now unquestionably out in the wild. What if someone used it against us? Can viruses in general be turned against their masters?

Yes and no, explained Liam O Murchu, a manager of operations at Symantec Security Response, where the firm has tirelessly analyzed Stuxnet and variants such as Duqu.

“From a practical view of what you can actually do, it would be very hard to take Stuxnet, reimage it, and target someone new without the source code,” O Murchu told FoxNews.com. “So from that point of view, it’s not so dangerous to have Stuxnet out in the wild right now. Even if you get your hands on it, you don’t have the source code to refashion it to do something else.”

Retired general and former CIA chief Michael Hayden thinks the issue is far more black and white.

“There are those out there who can take a look at this ... and maybe even attempt to turn it to their own purposes," he said in an interview with the CBS television show "60 Minutes" earlier this month.

Indeed, most countries today have the ability to take apart and reassemble a virus or any other bit of code. It's a common practice called code-reuse, said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security Advisor at security firm Sophos.

"We see code-reuse everywhere all the time. If someone else did something like [Stuxnet or other viruses] and it worked, why not reuse it?" he told FoxNews.com.

"Most advanced countries in the world have I’m sure the capability of pulling something like that off," Wisniewski added.

While rejiggering malware may or may not be simple, its existence by definition reduces the barrier of entry, O Murchu said.

“The real danger is that it’s essentially a roadmap on how to conduct these kinds of attacks,” O Murchu told FoxNews.com. “It shows all the components you need, the expertise you need, and how you would approach doing an operation like this, how much time and money spent.”

The "roadmap" concept may present the biggest danger of boomeranging, experts agreed.

"Taking something like Stuxnet literally as a piece of code that you could modify and use, I couldn’t see. Using it as a roadmap, however? Absolutely."

Like the virus that causes the flu each season, a vaccine can prevent most variants of the disease -- but inevitably, something unexpected develops.

"We will stop anything that’s a direct variant of Stunxet," Wisnewski told FoxNews.com, "but that won’t stop something in the style of Stuxnet."

“People looking at Stuxnet can figure out all of this information,” O Murchu said. “Stuxnet shows that it can be achieved.”

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/03/31/boomerang-effect-could-americas-best-cyberweapon-be-turned-back-upon-us/#ixzz1qkhgWeZ3

FOXNEWS:Threat from Al Qaeda affiliate even greater since death of al-Awlaki, US officials say

Threat from Al Qaeda affiliate even greater since death of al-Awlaki, US officials say

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/03/30/threat-from-al-qaeda-affiliate-even-greater-since-death-al-awlaki-us-officials/#ixzz1qkUI34ed

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, is more of a threat today than it was six months ago despite the death of the American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, according to US officials familiar with the situation.

Asked if the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen was stronger and better positioned than it was at the time of Anwar al-Awlaki’s death Sept. 30 in a CIA drone strike, one official simply responded, “Yes.”

“AQAP has been on an upward trajectory,” Fox News was told. As the Al Qaeda affiliate has strengthened its base in southern Yemen, U.S. officials said the “expanded domestic footprint provides more room and more opportunity to invite operatives from abroad, more recruits to train and continue plotting external attacks.”

One U.S. official even characterized AQAP’s expansion since May of 2011 as “a bit of a land grab for them,” going as far as to describe how easy it had become for foreign jihadis to join Al Qaeda’s most active affiliate which has increasingly moved from a covert to an overt organization.

“I could take a flight to Aden and get in a taxi cab and tell them to take me to the AQAP check point and get out where (Al Qaeda’s) black flag is flying at the entrance to Zinjibar (another strategic port city in the south) and ask, 'how do I get in on the fun.'"

The group, behind the last two major plots against the United States, including the underwear bomber plot in 2009 and the cargo printer bombs in 2010, remains global in its focus, U.S. officials said, adding that the leadership actively seeks to identify a replacement for the New Mexico-born cleric, who was the first American on the CIA’s kill-or-capture list.

“It’s not exactly clear that there is someone who can fill his (Al-Awlaki’s) shoes,” a U.S. official explained. “Our initial indications are that they (AQAP) are trying to fill his shoes, but it may not be a single individual who is capable of doing it.”

While the new Yemeni president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has publicly committed to taking the fight to Al Qaeda in his country, U.S. officials describe a new leader whose hands are full with domestic concerns and tribal conflicts. Yemen was characterized as “fragile” and in a “tenuous” situation where instability has not only opened the door to jihadis but also Iran.

“Iran has increasingly bolstered its influence in Yemen in a way we didn’t really see before,” a U.S. official said, reflecting on the last few months where analysts have “definitely seen an increase” in military and financial support.

While the U.S. official cautioned that Tehran is not seen as having a major influence on the ground yet, Fox News was told that the Iranian regime seems determined to hedge its bets by arming and providing money in the north and financial support in the south.

“Yemen is also an area for the struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia to play out. Iran sees an opportunity to step in – because everything is shifting and there is a lot of room to maneuver," the official said.

The trajectory over the next six months to a year was described as concerning given the group’s leader, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, was a longtime protege of Usama bin Laden who believed in the “global jihad,” combined with deteriorating conditions on the ground.

“I don’t know if the word bleak is too dire," one U.S. official said. “But we’ve used it to refer to the long-term picture because declining resources water and oil, the pressures on society now are much greater when it comes to the pressure that could fragment Yemeni society."

Fox News Chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge's bestselling book "The Next Wave: On the Hunt for al Qaeda's American Recruits" draws on her reporting into Al-Awlaki and his new generation of recruits -- Al Qaeda 2.0.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/03/30/threat-from-al-qaeda-affiliate-even-greater-since-death-al-awlaki-us-officials/#ixzz1qkURTB9J

NYTIMES:Iraq Casts a Pall Over U.S. Effort to Fathom Iran

Iraq Casts a Pall Over U.S. Effort to Fathom Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/world/middleeast/assessing-iran-but-thinking-about-iraq.html

WASHINGTON — At the nation’s top spy agency, the ghosts of Iraq are never far away.

One C.I.A. analyst who had helped develop some of the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction had a breakdown months after the Iraq war began; he had participated in the post-invasion hunt there that found the weapons did not exist. When he eventually was given a new assignment assessing Iran’s nuclear program, he confided a fear to colleagues: that the intelligence community might get it wrong again.

“He felt enormous guilt that he had gotten us into the war,” said one former official who worked with the analyst. “He was afraid it was going to be déjà vu all over again.”

Today, analysts and others at the C.I.A. who are struggling to understand the nuclear ambitions of Iran are keenly aware that the agency’s credibility is again on the line, amid threats of new military interventions. The intelligence debacle on Iraq has deeply influenced the way they do their work, with new safeguards intended to force analysts to be more skeptical in evaluating evidence and more cautious in drawing conclusions.

Former intelligence officials say that this shows appropriate vigilance in dealing with often murky information, while some detractors argue that the agency is not just careful but also overly skittish on Iran, reluctant to be blamed for any findings that might lead the United States to bloodshed.

“For a lot of people in the intelligence community, there is a feeling that they don’t want to repeat the same mistake,” said Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence analyst who resigned to protest what he considered the Bush administration’s politicization of the prewar Iraq intelligence. “The intelligence community as a whole has better practices now partly because of the scar tissue they still have from Iraq,” added Mr. Thielmann, now a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington.

Paul Pillar, a former senior C.I.A. analyst on the Middle East, says he believes that analysts are guided by the facts in making their assessments about Iran, but that they almost certainly have Iraq weighing on them.

“Because intelligence officials are human beings, one cannot rule out the possibility of the tendency to overcompensate for past errors,” said Mr. Pillar, now the director of graduate studies at the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Top intelligence officials have said that analysts believe that Iran has been moving to expand its infrastructure and technological ability to become a nuclear power, but that the Iranian leadership has not made a decision to build an atomic bomb.

Current and former senior American officials acknowledge, though, that there are significant gaps in their knowledge, and that they may not be able to quickly detect any decision to restart Iran’s weapons program, which they concluded had been halted in 2003.

After the misjudgments on Iraq, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies imposed new checks and balances, including a requirement that analytical work be subjected to “red teaming.” That means a group of analysts would challenge the conclusions of their colleagues, looking for weaknesses or errors.

The intelligence community also now requires that analysts be told much more about the sources of the information they receive from the United States’ human and technological spies. Analysts were left in the dark on such basic issues in the past, which helps explain why bogus information from fabricators was included in some prewar intelligence reports on Iraq. And, when they write their reports, they must include better attribution and sourcing for each major assertion.

“I think the Iraq experience gave them thicker skins,” said one former senior intelligence official, who like several others quoted in this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity about internal agency matters. “There was a lot of work done to tighten up the tradecraft.”

Unlike the prelude to the Iraq war, when many critics accused Bush White House officials of cherry-picking the intelligence to conform to their policy, some outside analysts say they do not see evidence of the Obama administration pushing intelligence officials to come up with predetermined answers.

“The intelligence was so heavily politicized on Iraq,” said Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. “The higher up the chain in the government the intelligence reporting went, the more it got massaged, and the doubts and caveats got removed.”

But now, he said, “I haven’t heard any complaints about the administration pressuring the intelligence community to tilt the intelligence.”

He added that while conservative political leaders in the United States and Israel had complained about the intelligence assessments on Iran, such outside criticism did not have the same impact it would coming from the White House.

“It’s one thing to have the prime minister of another country come to town and say time is short, but it’s another thing to have the vice president go to Langley and pressure people,” he said, referring to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s repeated visits to C.I.A. headquarters before the Iraq war.

But some conservatives who support more aggressive action to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon argue that the C.I.A.’s restraint has, in fact, been influenced by political pressure exerted by the Obama administration. President Obama has said he would use military force only as a last resort against Iran, and conservatives argue that the Obama administration does not want the intelligence community to produce any reports suggesting the Iranians are moving swiftly to build a bomb.

“The intelligence analysts I’ve dealt with have always been willing to engage in debates on their conclusions, but there is top-down pressure to make the assessments come out a certain way,” said John R. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former ambassador to the United Nations in the Bush administration.

Memories of Iraq have clouded the debate on Iran ever since the United States intelligence community first concluded in 2007 that Iran had halted its weapons program four years earlier. In late 2007, Michael McConnell, then the director of national intelligence, took a new National Intelligence Estimate — the consensus of analysts at the government’s 16 intelligence agencies — to the White House to brief President George W. Bush about the report’s startling new findings.

Officials at the White House, still stung from the criticism on Iraq, quickly realized that they would face a firestorm of protest if they did not make the findings public, according to former administration and intelligence officials. A classified version of the new assessment would go to the Congressional intelligence committees, where lawmakers would see that analysts had reached a sharply different conclusion about Iran than they had two years earlier, when they had concluded that Iran’s weapons program was still under way.

News of the shift would probably leak to the news media, and White House officials feared that the administration would then be accused of suppressing intelligence on Iran, just as it had been criticized for doing on Iraq, according to the former officials. White House officials also worried that they would be accused of tainting the intelligence process, so they pressed Mr. McConnell to have the intelligence community write and issue its own declassified summary.

Some senior intelligence officials who rushed to write the document over a weekend objected to disclosing their conclusions, but to no avail. “I was told that I didn’t get it; this wasn’t a request,” one official recalled.

Once published, the report created an uproar. Conservative critics blasted C.I.A. officials, saying that the intelligence community was freelancing and trying to influence the political debate, and to make up for its shortcomings on Iraq by now trying to stop a war with Iran. Among them was Mr. Bolton, who dismissed the 2007 assessment as “famously distorted” and called on Congress to investigate its politicization.

Stung by those attacks, and the aftershocks of the poisonous political debate over the role of the intelligence community on Iraq and Iran, officials at the C.I.A. and other agencies did not release a public version of the 2010 assessment on the Iranian nuclear program, which concluded that while Iran had conducted some basic weapons-related research, it was not believed to have restarted the actual weapons program halted in 2003.

Thomas Fingar, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the time of the 2007 assessment on Iran, said that analysts had to be willing to make tough calls based on fragmentary evidence, and not get distracted by what he called the rare instances of political pressure or their own previous lapses.

“Learning from past mistakes is imperative,” he said. “Worrying about them is pointless.”

MSNBC:Muslim Brotherhood says it will run candidate for president in Egypt election

Muslim Brotherhood says it will run candidate for president in Egypt election

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/31/10959476-muslim-brotherhood-says-it-will-run-candidate-for-president-in-egypt-election

CAIRO -- Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has announced it will field its own candidate for Egypt's presidential election on May 23.

The announcement of Khairat al Shater's selection by the Brotherhood's executive committee is a significant departure for the group, which initially vowed it would not field a candidate from within the organization. The Muslim Brotherhood's political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, already controls nearly half of parliament.

Before he can run, Shater must win the endorsement of 30 members of parliament (he will easily do that). But he will also need a pardon from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to overturn a previous conviction. During Hosni Mubarak's decades-long rule, Shater was imprisoned for several years more than once. A popular uprising forced Mubarak to resign in February 2011.

Shater is considered the architect of the Muslim Brotherhood's political emergence in recent years and often credited for coming up with many of the movement's policies. Shater, a millionaire businessman, also controls the group's finances.

The Muslim Brotherhood decision will certainly ring alarm bells in Washington and has already angered many in Egypt who have been warning that the Brotherhood is slowly attempting to take over all aspects of political life, including parliament, local councils, the constitutional committee and now the presidency.

WASHPOST:Panetta: Political dysfunction threatens security

Panetta: Political dysfunction threatens security

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/panetta-political-dysfunction-threatens-security/2012/03/30/gIQAKWRslS_blog.html

“Dysfunction in Washington ... threatens our security and raises questions about the capacity of our democracy to respond to crisis.”

That warning came from Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta Thursday night at a dinner sponsored by Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, which had just given him its Eisenhower Award for excellence in leadership.

He called the dysfunction “a political crutch” and “not a part of the American spirit.”

Behind Panetta’s remarks is the frustration he feels looking at the current political deadlock in Congress over deficit reduction. He has been there before — as chairman of the House Budget Committee, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and chief of staff at the White House.

“One thing that I’ve learned over my career is that governing requires people coming together to get things done, not to pound their fists on the table and stand in the way,” he told an audience that included present and former government officials, members of Congress, defense industry representatives and dozens of college students.

The Obama administration’s defense strategy and budget now before Congress, Panetta said, came after tough internal Pentagon negotiations among senior military officers from all the services, who realize the budget crisis required compromises on personnel levels and weapons programs. No service got all it wanted or thought it needed. That proved, Panetta said, “it’s still possible to forge consensus and take the long-term view at the highest levels of government”

Panetta concluded by recalling that the nation got through World War II with “the greatest generation”; one lesson from Eisenhower, he said, was that “the service and sacrifice of a single generation can leave all of us a better life.”

He referred to today’s all-volunteer military, which for more than 10 years has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as the “next greatest generation of Americans.”

“Surely, if this next greatest generation is willing to take the risks necessary to keep America safe, our political leadership should be willing to take the risks necessary to solve the problems facing this nation,” Panetta said.

Panetta’s predecessor, Robert Gates, last December gave the same type of lecture, in which he talked about Washington’s short supply of “civility, mutual respect, putting country before self and country before party, listening to and learning from one another, not pretending to have all the answers and not demonizing those with whom we differ.”

Gates, too, talked about politicians’ inability “to sustain bipartisan strategies and policies needed to address our very real and serious problems.”

There must be something good in the Pentagon’s water.

WASHPOST:White House sees more pain for Iran as it clears way for further sanctions

White House sees more pain for Iran as it clears way for further sanctions

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-sees-more-pain-for-iran-as-it-clears-way-for-further-sanctions/2012/03/30/gIQAj9yAmS_story.html

Coordinated pressure by the Obama administration and its European allies has caused a rapid fall in oil revenue to Iran, squeezing that nation’s economy ahead of nuclear talks next month, U.S. officials and industry analysts said Friday.

The financial pain is likely only to increase in the months ahead. On Friday, the White House formally certified that global oil supplies are sufficient to accommodate deeper cuts in Iranian oil imports, a technical step that clears the way for the implementation of even tougher economic sanctions set to take effect three months from now.

U.S. officials say the threat of harsher sanctions — combined with a European oil embargo scheduled to begin July 1 — is already costing Iran billions of dollars in lost revenue as the country’s traditional customers begin to turn elsewhere for petroleum. At the same time, administration officials and oil analysts say they are increasingly confident that Saudi Arabia and other suppliers can make up for Iran’s shortfall, easing the risk of global shortages and further price spikes.

“We are fully prepared to go forward with these sanctions,” a senior administration official told reporters Friday. “The best outcome here is to have the broadest number of countries working together to send a clear message to Iran.”

The new measures are intended to pressure Iran into agreeing to strict curbs on its nuclear program at negotiations set to begin in mid-April. Western officials are describing the talks as a last best chance for a diplomatic settlement of an Iranian nuclear crisis that has driven up oil prices while spurring fears of military strikes.

The price of Brent crude rose 49 cents Friday to finish at $122.88 per barrel.

Western intelligence agencies believe that Iran is using its ostensibly civilian nuclear infrastructure to develop the components for nuclear weapons, a charge Iran vehemently denies.

The administration’s decision to press forward with deeper sanctions highlights the political risks confronting President Obama. Sharp cuts in Iranian oil could drive energy prices higher, alienating middle-class voters upon whom Obama depends for reelection.

At the same time, a failure to back painful sanctions against Iran could invite attacks by the president’s Republican rivals while also raising the risk of a unilateral military strike by Israel against Iranian nuclear facilities.

The new sanctions, signed into law in December, target the Central Bank of Iran, the financial institution that processes payments for nearly all of Iran’s foreign oil sales. One provision, set to take effect June 28, imposes sanctions on any foreign bank or company that continues to engage in oil transactions with the Iranian central bank.

The administration has granted waivers to 11 countries that have agreed to end or sharply reduce oil imports from Iran, and its diplomats are encouraging Iran’s remaining customers to agree to similar cuts. On Friday, Turkey, a major consumer of Iranian oil, announced that it would slash Iranian imports by 10 percent. Turkish officials were in talks with Saudi Arabia about making up the shortfall.

Already, the cuts have had an impact on Iran’s economy and its currency, the rial. The pressure will soon become “greater than anything Iran has faced before,” said the senior administration official, who insisted on anonymity in describing the conclusions of U.S. economic assessments.

“It is already far beyond what anyone anticipated two years ago,” the official said.

Many oil analysts predict that Iran’s exports could eventually fall by half, amounting to 1 million barrels per day, as the July embargo by the European Union kicks in and the United States pressures its allies not to buy Iranian crude.

Countries including Japan and Italy are already cutting back on purchases, and Iran’s exports fell by 300,000 barrels daily in March, according to the Swiss oil-shipping firm Petro-Logistics.

Oil prices rose slightly Friday, continuing a steady advance, and analysts said prices were likely to remain high as countries wean themselves from oil from Iran, which now exports about about 2 million barrels a day, or 2.8 percent of the global market.

Saudi Arabia has increased production by about 600,000 barrels per day since October, making up for much of the shortfall, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that OPEC spare capacity was at about 2.7 million barrels per day.

While that’s fairly low by historical standards, there are signs it might be enough for now. Global oil demand has been restrained this year, and a recent surge in oil production from North America has given the world some breathing room.

“There’s nothing in the numbers that should give government pause” about whether there’s enough capacity to make up a shortfall, said Sarah Emerson, managing principal at Energy Security Analysis.

It’s unclear just how much Iran’s exports will actually be squeezed. Much depends on whether the country can make up the drop in European and Japanese demand by selling elsewhere in the world.

“China is one of the biggest unknowns,” said David Pumphrey, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. While China cut back on imports from Iran in February over a pricing dispute, it’s unclear whether China can continue to shun Iranian oil. Its domestic oil companies have difficulty passing on high prices to Chinese consumers, and they may find the prospect of discounted Iranian oil too good to pass up.

On the other hand, China may also be wary of flouting globally coordinated sanctions.

Other countries, meanwhile, may pick up the slack. India’s imports from Iran surged in January, and Iran may find buyers for its oil in countries such as Thailand and Burma.

From Iran’s end, the biggest calculation to make is whether the drop in exports will hurt more than the benefit it is gaining from rising oil prices as tensions flare. Last year, thanks to increasing prices, the country earned an estimated $97 billion from oil sales, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Yet a recent Reuters analysis found that Iran could see its oil revenue cut in half, by $50 billion, if exports fall to 1.5 million barrels a day and it has to sell some of its oil at a discount.

“If Iran really is forced into halving its exports, that changes the cast of negotiations” with the United States, Emerson said. “But the sanctions only work if everybody’s on board.”

NYTIMES:Obama Finds Oil in Markets Is Sufficient to Sideline Iran

Obama Finds Oil in Markets Is Sufficient to Sideline Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/business/global/obama-to-clear-way-to-expand-iranian-oil-sanctions.html

WASHINGTON — After careful analysis of oil prices and months of negotiations, President Obama on Friday determined that there was sufficient oil in world markets to allow countries to significantly reduce their Iranian imports, clearing the way for Washington to impose severe new sanctions intended to slash Iran’s oil revenue and press Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

The White House announcement comes after months of back-channel talks to prepare the global energy market to cut Iran out — but without raising the price of oil, which would benefit Iran and harm the economies of the United States and Europe.

Since the sanctions became law in December, administration officials have encouraged oil exporters with spare capacity, particularly Saudi Arabia, to increase their production. They have discussed with Britain and France releasing their oil reserves in the event of a supply disruption.

And they have conducted a high-level campaign of shuttle diplomacy to try to persuade other countries, like China, Japan and South Korea, to buy less oil and demand discounts from Iran, in compliance with the sanctions.

The goal is to sap the Iranian government of oil revenue that might go to finance the country’s nuclear program. Already, the pending sanctions have led to a decrease in oil exports and a sharp decline in the value of the country’s currency, the rial, against the dollar and euro.

Administration officials described the Saudis as willing and eager, at least since talks started last fall, to undercut the Iranians.

One senior official who had met with the Saudi leadership, said: “There was no resistance. They are more worried about a nuclear Iran than the Israelis are.”

Still officials said, the administration wanted to be sure that the Saudis were not talking a bigger game than they could deliver. The Saudis received a parade of visitors, including some from the Energy Department, to make the case that they had the technical capacity to pump out significantly more oil.

But some American officials remain skeptical. That is one reason Mr. Obama left open the option of reviewing this decision every few months. “We won’t know what the Saudis can do until we test it, and we’re about to,” the official said.

Worldwide demand for oil was another critical element of the equation that led to the White House decision on sanctions. Now, projections for demand are lower than expected because of the combination of rising oil prices, the European financial crisis and a modest slowdown in growth in China.

As one official said, “No one wants to wish for slowdown, but demand may be the most important factor.”

Nonetheless, the sanctions pose a serious challenge for the United States. Already, concerns over a confrontation with Iran and the loss of its oil — Iran was the third-biggest exporter of crude in 2010 — have driven oil prices up about 20 percent this year.

A gallon of gas currently costs $3.92, on average, up from about $3.20 a gallon in December. The rising prices have weighed on economic confidence and cut into household budgets, a concern for an Obama administration seeking re-election.

On Friday afternoon, oil prices on commodity markets closed at $103.02 a barrel, up 24 cents for the day.

Moreover, the new sanctions — which effectively force countries to choose between doing business with the United States and buying oil from Iran — threaten to fray diplomatic relationships with close allies that buy some of their crude from Tehran, like South Korea.

But in a conference call with reporters, senior administration officials said they were confident that they could put the sanctions in effect without damaging the global economy.

Iran currently exports about 2.2 million barrels of crude oil a day, according to the economic analysis company IHS Global Insight, and other oil producers will look to make up much of that capacity, as countries buy less and less oil from Iran. A number of countries are producing more petroleum, including the United States itself, which should help to make up the gap.

Most notably, Saudi Arabia, the world’s single biggest producer, has promised to pump more oil to bring prices down.

“There is no rational reason why oil prices are continuing to remain at these high levels,” the Saudi oil minister, Ali Naimi, wrote in an opinion article in The Financial Times this week. “I hope by speaking out on the issue that our intentions — and capabilities — are clear,” he said. “We want to see stronger European growth and realize that reasonable crude oil prices are key to this.”

By certifying that there is enough supply available, the administration is also trying to gain some leverage over Iran before a resumption of negotiations, expected on April 14.

The suggestion that Saudi Arabia is prepared to make up for any lost Iranian production is intended to remove Iran’s ability to threaten a major disruption in the world oil supply if it does not cede to Western and United Nations demands to halt uranium enrichment.

However, administration officials concede that it is unclear how the oil markets will react to Iranian threats even with the president’s latest certification that there is sufficient oil to fill the gap. “We just don’t know how much negotiating advantage we have gained,” said one senior administration official who has been involved in developing the policy.

In a statement, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said the administration acknowledged that the oil market had become increasingly tight, with output just besting demand.

“Nonetheless, there currently appears to be sufficient supply of non-Iranian oil to permit foreign countries” to cut imports, he said.

American officials have also discussed a coordinated release of oil from the national strategic reserves with French and British officials.

Some energy experts question whether Saudi Arabia really has enough spare capacity to make up for the loss of Iran’s oil. But the determination of the United States and Europe to combat high prices might be enough to quiet the markets.

The White House “can have a very limited material impact on the size of supplies,” said David J. Rothkopf, the president of Garten Rothkopf, a Washington-based consultancy. “But they can have a much larger impact on perceptions. In this case, it’s not so much the producers as the energy traders who are moving market prices — and that’s where the White House wants to play a role.”

Additionally, the White House has the ability under the law to waive the new sanctions if they threaten national security or if oil prices spurt, increasing the flow of money to Iran’s government.

NEWSMAX:Dempsey: Latin America Ties Key to War on Terror

Dempsey: Latin America Ties Key to War on Terror

Read more on Newsmax.com: Dempsey: Latin America Ties Key to War on Terror
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!

The U.S. military's top general says he worries that smuggling networks used to move illegal drugs into the U.S. from Central America could one day be a path for a terrorist's bomb.

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey made that point repeatedly this week on his first trip to Latin America as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Dempsey is not advocating a surge of U.S. military activity in Latin America, although the Obama administration has identified the region as increasingly important to U.S. national security.

Dempsey said it would be in U.S. interests to help Colombia and other nations in Central and South America break up the drug-smuggling networks before they can be used as an avenue to move terrorist weapons or fighters across the southern U.S. border.

Read more on Newsmax.com: Dempsey: Latin America Ties Key to War on Terror
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NYTIMES:Iranian Official Cites April 13 as Date for Nuclear Talks

Iranian Official Cites April 13 as Date for Nuclear Talks

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/world/middleeast/iranian-official-cites-april-13-as-date-for-nuclear-talks.html?ref=world

LONDON — A senior Iranian official was quoted on Wednesday as saying that long-awaited talks with world powers on his country’s disputed nuclear program would begin on April 13 and he hoped the venue would be Istanbul.

The comments by Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi represented one more step in a tortuous diplomatic minuet over the proposed nuclear talks that is playing out against a backdrop of speculation about a possible military strike by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Iran is also caught in a tightening noose of economic and diplomatic penalties ordered by United States, the United Nations and the European Union, including an embargo on purchases of Iranian oil set to come into force on July 1.

Mr. Salehi named the date as he welcomed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey in Tehran.

The encounter between officials of the two disparate neighbors underscored Turkey’s efforts to project regional power on issues including Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the yearlong uprising in Syria. Istanbul is currently the host city for unity talks among exiled Syrian opposition groups and is set to be the venue for a gathering of the so-called Friends of Syria, including Western and Arab countries and organizations seeking a solution to the crisis.

Mr. Erdogan arrived in Tehran from a nuclear security summit in South Korea, where he met with President Obama. He plans to spend two days in talks with Iranian leaders, Iranian state media said.

According to Iranian state media, Mr. Salehi said Iran and representatives of the six powers — the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany — would be held on April 13.

“Istanbul has expressed its readiness to host these talks and is still one of the probable options for hosting these negotiations,” Mr. Salehi said. “I personally believe that Istanbul is the better option for hosting the negotiations.”

“We hope the venue for the talks will be determined within the next few days,” he said.

The last time the world powers met with Iranian officials was in January 2011, when talks in Istanbul ended in failure. Western leaders say they suspect Iran is seeking the capability to construct nuclear weapons, but Tehran says its program is for peaceful purposes.

Earlier this month, the negotiating powers said they were ready to resume face-to-face negotiations.

“I have offered to resume talks with Iran on the nuclear issue,” said Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, who represents the six powers in dealings with Iran. “’We hope that Iran will now enter into a sustained process of constructive dialogue which will deliver real progress.”

The resumption of negotiations could relieve pressure from Israel to use military force against Iran. But the decision is not without risks. Direct talks could allow Iranian negotiators to exploit various nations’ differences, effectively playing for time while Tehran’s scientists press ahead with nuclear ambitions. Failure could offer a rationale for military strikes.

Press TV, the Iranian state satellite broadcaster, said Tehran was ready to resume the talks “based on common grounds.” However, Iran has repeatedly made clear that it will not negotiate on any of its nuclear rights. “Iran maintains that, as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, it has every right to acquire and develop nuclear technology for peaceful objectives,” Press TV said.

Mr. Salehi’s statement came after the United States added an Iranian cargo airline, three officials from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and a Nigerian trading agent to its sanctions blacklist on Tuesday, citing evidence they had conspired to funnel illicit weapons shipments to Syria and Africa disguised as humanitarian aid and building materials.

The Treasury Department in Washington said the airline, Yas Air, had tried to transport AK-47 assault rifles, machine guns, mortar shells and ammunition to Syria as part of Iran’s support for Damascus, which is also subject to American sanctions. David S. Cohen, under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said the Treasury’s action “exposes Iran’s malign influence in the Middle East, Africa and beyond.” Iran has denied sending weapons to Syria.

NYTIMES:Hard Line on Iran Places White House in a Bind

Hard Line on Iran Places White House in a Bind

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/world/middleeast/hard-line-on-iran-places-white-house-in-a-bind.html?_r=1&ref=world#

WASHINGTON — As American and European diplomats prepare for crucial negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, the White House finds itself caught in a bind: for the diplomatic effort to work, American officials say, the Iranian government must believe that President Obama is ready and willing to take military action.

Yet tough talk, necessary as it might be for successful diplomacy, contributes to a sense that war may be unavoidable. And it masks the fact that Mr. Obama, and his military commanders, remain deeply worried about the consequence of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, either by Israel alone or a strike that could draw in the United States.

“Obama had two main objectives — to deflect Israeli pressure to conduct or acquiesce in a premature war, and to neutralize Republican criticism that he is too soft on Iran and too hard on Israel,” said Robert Malley, program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. “On those fronts, mission accomplished.”

But, Mr. Malley added, “victory came at a price.” By stating clearly that containment of a nuclear-armed Iran is off the table, Mr. Obama may have committed America to military action to halt Iran if other means fail to do so, Mr. Malley said.

Some White House officials acknowledge that in an election year when Republican candidates are calling for tougher action against Iran, the misgivings expressed by the Pentagon — both publicly and privately — over a strike could provide the president with some political cover.

A classified war simulation conducted by United States Central Command this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli airstrike, for example, found that an Israeli attack could lead to a wider regional war, draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, providing recent evidence to the skeptics — not only in the Pentagon but also in the White House and intelligence community as well — who have warned that any action by Israel against Iran could prove perilous.

At the same time, some current and former administration officials worry that any hesitancy about considering military action that is expressed in the United States could lull the Iranians into thinking that they do not need to make concessions at the negotiating table, just at a time when the diplomatic effort has taken center stage.

“For diplomacy to work there has to be a coercive side,” said Dennis B. Ross, a former senior official at the National Security Council who handled Iran policy. “If the Iranians think this is a bluff, you can’t be as effective. The message to the Iranians is: you’ve got an option.”

And even Israeli officials who have pushed for tougher action from the United States say they would much rather see a diplomatic end to the crisis. “At the end of the day, Israel doesn’t want to strike Iran either,” one Western diplomat said.

Added David Makovsky, an Israel expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: “The next move on the chess board is diplomacy. It has to be diplomacy, and there has to be an effort to get diplomacy to work.”

But some White House officials clearly feel that diplomatic options for resolving the crisis are being overlooked amid all the talk about force. The risk, they say, is that the debate will take on a momentum of its own.

There is also a sense at the White House that the administration is not getting enough credit for putting together a global coalition to enforce economic sanctions against Iran that is also creating the conditions for a possible diplomatic solution to the problem — even as administration officials say the military option is never off the table.

White House officials declined to discuss these deliberations on the record, citing their extreme sensitivity, both with the Israelis and with other parts of the administration, chiefly the Pentagon.

Mr. Obama, after his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel this month, warned Republican candidates and others against “loose talk” of war. Yet at a news conference with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, the president said the window for diplomacy with Iran was “shrinking.”

There are differences of opinion among top administration officials about the likelihood of a pre-emptive Israeli military strike.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for example, is said to be less worried than Mr. Obama that Mr. Netanyahu will pull the trigger in the coming months, several officials said. Mr. Biden bases his judgment on his long relationship with Mr. Netanyahu, which dates from the prime minister’s first stint in office in the 1990s.

But unlike the internal administration debate over Afghanistan, the White House and Pentagon appear to be on the same page about Iran. Whatever the cliché about military leaders being more gung ho about going to war than their civilian counterparts, the reality is that the American military has often led the argument against military engagement, including in the recent conflict in Libya, past conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda, and even now on the question of whether the United States should engage militarily in Syria.

The concern about going to war with Iran that is emanating from the Pentagon did not start with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta. His predecessor, Robert M. Gates, as well as Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were equally outspoken.

“Both of those guys were counseling on the risks of military action, and quite publicly,” said a senior military official. “Their successors have reaffirmed that — and that is where the building’s leadership is on this.”

Senior Pentagon civilian officials and military officers say the cautious Iran comments from Mr. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are not part of any organized messaging campaign by the White House.

“As is appropriate in addressing a matter of this importance, senior leaders from across the government — led by the president — have discussed the potential consequences of a military conflict with Iran,” said George Little, the Pentagon press secretary.

The warnings, officials said, reflect the assessments by both leaders that an Israeli preventive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities may provoke a round of counterattacks that might lead to a wider war that would involve the United States after years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials said they were aware of reports in the Israeli news media of high-level unhappiness, up to and including the office of Mr. Netanyahu, at the stern warnings issued by Mr. Panetta and General Dempsey.

“The chairman’s job is to provide options and to provide the risks and benefits of various options,” a senior Pentagon official said, referring to General Dempsey. “But ultimately, the civilian leaders — the National Command Authority — make the final decision.”

Several military officials said the cautious tone set by Mr. Panetta and General Dempsey flowed directly from the fact that one of the military’s metrics in weighing potential conflict is the body bag.

“We are going to bear the brunt of any retaliation from Iran,” said another senior military officer. “It will be our men and women, whether overt and ugly or covert and just as ugly.”

DAILYBEAST:Lynnae Williams: The CIA Spy Who Tweets

Lynnae Williams: The CIA Spy Who Tweets

Mar 29, 2012 12:20 PM EDT

Lynnae Williams has a beef with the CIA—and she’s using her Twitter account to tell the world about it. In the process, Eli Lake reports, she may be disclosing a few details the agency would rather not publicize.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/29/lynnae-williams-the-cia-spy-who-tweets.html

The Twitter feed belonging to Lynnae Williams at first glance looks like most Twitter feeds. There are tweets about what she is reading (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Madame Bovary); tweets about politics (leans toward the Occupy movement); and tweets about food (tuna casserole, carrot-cake muffins).

But on closer inspection, the feed features something rare for Twitter and even the Internet: detailed disclosures about the CIA. On Tuesday for example, Williams tweeted, “The #Farm is #CIA's training center near #Williamsburg, Virginia. I think it's the Kisevalter Center or something.”

In other tweets, Williams, who in 2009 spent nearly four months training to be a CIA spy, details her own experiences with CIA case officers, psychiatrists, and the special security division of the agency that serves as the CIA’s police force. In short, Williams since late February has been disclosing details of her brief CIA career in 140 characters or less.

I caught up with the 35-year-old would-be spy on Wednesday at the Washington mission for the Palestine Liberation Organization. She was interviewing for a job there in government and press relations. “The interview went well,” she said, even though “I don’t have substantial knowledge in the area. I don’t speak the language.” Williams, who does speak Japanese, added, “I don’t know enough about the [Arab-Israeli] conflict, but I hope they resolve it.”Williams says she began tweeting because she wanted an outlet to tell the world about her disputes with the CIA and what she calls a pattern of corruption at the agency. She also publishes a blog called CIA corrupt. “I wanted to start the Twitter account with my blog to get out my message,” she says.

A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment for this story. Another U.S. intelligence officer, who was not authorized to speak to the press, told The Daily Beast that the agency is aware of the Twitter feed and that Williams is a hot topic on classified social networking, such as the classified intelligence community version of Facebook known as A-Space. Williams has disclosed her official medical records on her blog and other personal documents related to her time in the intelligence community.

Williams’s main grievance with the agency revolves around her termination. Williams says that as a trainee in the agency’s national clandestine service, she was sent to Dominion Hospital, a public mental-health facility in northern Virginia. Williams referred to the hospital in the interview and her Twitter feed as the CIA’s “psychological prison.” She said the place had white walls and inedible food, and that doctors there urged her to take Risperdal, a drug commonly prescribed to schizophrenics and Lithium, a drug prescribed to manic depressives.

Williams says she refused and eventually her parents drove up from Atlanta and discharged her. “They wanted to keep me for observation,” she said. “It’s not a nice place, it’s dilapidated. It’s called a hospital, but it’s a prison, you can’t get out unless they let you out.”


All told, by Williams’s account, she spent one night at Dominion Hospital in 2009 and then another five days in the hospital's outpatient program.

Melissa Ozmar, a spokeswoman for Dominion Hospital said, “We’re not going to disclose information about what patients we see that work for certain agencies. Given the proximity of our facility, it is not unrealistic to think that employees and their families for some agencies would seek help from our hospital.”

Ozmar declined to discuss Williams or her stay at Dominion. “It’s not our practice to discuss anything about our patients,” she said. When asked if she agreed that the hospital was like a prison, Ozmar said, “ For patient safety we do have restricted access. But the hospital could not in anyway be compared to a prison.”

Williams say she first applied to work at the CIA in 2006, while she was earning her master's degree at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. She landed a job instead at the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst. At first, Williams says, she worked on counterterrorism projects, then on studies of China’s leadership. In 2007, she says, she was shipped out to a clandestine facility in Iraq, where she worked as an Arabian Peninsula analyst.

In July 2009, Williams says she was transferred to the CIA’s national clandestine service training program, where she took the “field tradecraft course.” Williams says her life changed permanently on Oct. 27, 2009, when a colleague reported her to CIA security for what she says was "bizarre and inappropriate behavior," such as looking on classified computers for information about herself and telling colleagues that she was being followed. She had a meeting with a CIA psychiatrist that day, who ordered her to take a medical exam, with urine samples, and inquired about her self-acknowledged attention deficit disorder. “She asked me about my family’s mental-health history,” Williams says of the CIA psychiatrist. “My aunt has schizophrenia—I did not tell her that.” Later that evening, Williams had an auto accident and says she was cited by Washington, D.C., police for leaving the scene. After that, Williams says, the CIA ordered her to Dominion Hospital.

Since her time there, Williams has been fighting a largely losing battle with the agency. In 2010, she says, her security clearance was suspended and the agency stopped paying her salary. She is pursuing legal redress against the CIA for wrongful termination, but her odds don’t look good. On Wednesday, Williams posted on Twitter a response from the American Civil Liberties Union declining to take up her case.

Mark Zaid, a national-security attorney who regularly represents intelligence officers in legal actions against the U.S. intelligence community, said, “Based on the current state of the law, unfortunately the judiciary will not adjudicate adverse clearance decisions, no matter how abusive, incorrect, or absurd they may have been."

Zaid says that medical issues at the CIA can at times “be used as weapons,” adding “I have had CIA clients sent to alcohol and drug treatment. The agency has spent thousands of dollars for people to get treatment and then they fire them, which doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Without a security clearance, Williams will not likely be able to find employment with intelligence contractors, as many retired intelligence officers do. Nonetheless, she says she will continue to apply for jobs in foreign affairs. She also intends to continue tweeting. “I did not think of myself as a whistleblower.” But on further reflection, Williams acknowledges, “I suppose it would be an appropriate term.”

Eli Lake is the senior national-security correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He previously covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times. Lake has also been a contributing editor at The New Republic since 2008 and covered diplomacy, intelligence, and the military for the late New York Sun. He has lived in Cairo and traveled to war zones in Sudan, Iraq, and Gaza. He is one of the few journalists to report from all three members of President Bush’s axis of evil: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

GUARDIAN:Bomb Iran and it will surely decide to pursue nuclear arms

Bomb Iran and it will surely decide to pursue nuclear arms

If Israel's 1981 bombing of Iraqi nuclear facilities teaches us anything, it's that the quickest way to help the Iranians make up their minds is to attack them

Sunday 25 March 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/25/bomb-iran-nuclear-arms-iraq-israel

On 7 June 1981 a phalanx of Israeli F-16 fighter-bombers entered Iraqi airspace on the orders of the then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Their mission, codenamed Operation Babylon, was to destroy Saddam Hussein's nascent nuclear programme. In less than two minutes the eight F-16s dropped 16 1,000-kg bombs on the unfinished Osirak nuclear reactor, situated 10 miles south of Baghdad. It was an audacious attack: the world's first successful air strike on a nuclear facility.

Begin claimed to have averted "another Holocaust" by denying Saddam "three, four, five" nuclear bombs. American politicians – from Dick Cheney to Bill Clinton – would later agree with him.

Fast forward to 2012, and the Osirak attack is constantly invoked as a template for military action against Iran. Last month Amos Yadlin, director of Israel's Institute for National Security Studies and one of the pilots who bombed Osirak, said Iraq's nuclear programme was "never fully resumed" after that attack. "This could be the outcome in Iran," he declared in the New York Times. Earlier this month the current Israeli prime minister and sabre-rattler-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu used a speech on Iran to again praise the Osirak operation, reminding his audience of how Begin ordered the attack despite being "well aware of the international criticism that would come".

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, Operation Babylon was a dismal failure – and did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do. For a start, Saddam wasn't building a bomb at Osirak. Richard Wilson, a nuclear physicist at Harvard University who inspected the wreckage of the reactor on a visit to Iraq in 1982, noted how it had been "explicitly designed" by French engineers "to be unsuitable for making bombs" and had been subject to regular inspections by both on-site French technicians and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

"The Iraqis couldn't have been developing a nuclear weapon at Osirak," Wilson tells me, three decades on. "I challenge any scientist in the world to show me how they could have done so."

For Wilson, the Israeli raid marked not the end of Saddam's nuclear weapons programme but the beginning of it. Three months later, in September 1981, Saddam – smarting from the Osirak incident and reminded of Iraq's vulnerability to foreign attack – established a fast-paced, well-funded and clandestine nuclear weapons programme outside of the IAEA's purview. Nine years after Osirak, Iraq was on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb.

Wilson's analysis is shared today by leading non-proliferation experts, including Columbia University's Richard Betts ("there is no evidence that Israel's destruction of Osirak delayed Iraq's nuclear weapons programme. The attack may actually have accelerated it"); Emory University's Dan Reiter ("the attack may have actually increased Saddam's commitment to acquiring weapons"); and Harvard University's Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer ("it triggered a covert nuclear weapons programme that did not previously exist").

In the context of the current Iranian nuclear crisis, says Wilson, the lesson to learn from Osirak is that "you've got to be damn careful not to create the situation you're trying to avoid".

And it isn't just academics in ivory towers who are sounding the alarm. "When we talked about this in the government, the consensus was that [attacking Iran] would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent – an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret," revealed General Michael Hayden, George W Bush's CIA director, at a seminar in January.

Remember: the collective view of the US intelligence community is that the Iranian regime doesn't have a bomb, isn't building a bomb, and hasn't yet decided whether it even wants a bomb. If Osirak teaches us anything, it's that the quickest way to help the Iranians make up their minds is to attack them.

And what would such an attack from the air achieve? US officials concede that Iran's nuclear facilities could be up and running again within two years. What then? Do we bomb them every two years? Make it a biennial event? Or, alternatively, perhaps, go for a full-scale invasion and occupation of Iran? That, after all, would the only way to guarantee that the Iranians didn't restart their programme in the way that Saddam did.

Listen to the verdict of America's top generals. At a conference in February, General James Cartwright, the former vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was asked whether bombing Iran would prevent the self-styled Islamic Republic from obtaining nuclear weapons. "No," he replied bluntly, before adding: "You're not going to kill the intellectual capital to just rebuild the centrifuges someplace else and continue on." Fellow panellist Admiral William Fallon, the ex-head of US Central Command, tapped his shoe on the floor to indicate how only "boots on the ground" could stop the Iranians from building a bomb.

Both Barack Obama and David Cameron continue to repeat the inane mantra that "all options are on the table". They aren't. Only a madman would give the order to invade and occupy a country three times the size and population of Iraq.

It's time we stopped learning the wrong lessons from history. A bombing campaign, on the Osirak model, won't work and could make matters worse; an invasion and occupation might work but isn't "on the table".

If the goal is to prevent – and not just delay – Iran from possessing a nuclear weapons capability, then the truth is that there is no military option. The only way to end this crisis is through direct diplomacy between the US and Iran; by jaw-jaw not war-war. Everything else is noise.

• This article was amended on 26 March 2012. It originally stated that the 1981 attack was the world's first air strike on a nuclear facility. It was the first successful strike, but the Iranian air force had also tried (and failed) to destroy Osirak a year before. This has now been corrected

GUARDIAN:Israel's Kadima party elects Shaul Mofaz as leader

Israel's Kadima party elects Shaul Mofaz as leader

Former defence minister defeats Tzipi Livni and vows to oust Binyamin Netanyahu's government at next election

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/28/israel-kadima-shaul-mofaz-leader

Israel's former defence and military chief Shaul Mofaz has won a resounding victory over Tzipi Livni to lead the Kadima party.

Final results in the Kadima leadership contest showed Mofaz captured 62% of the votes and Livni 37%. Afterwards, Mofaz spoke confidently of ousting Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister in the next national elections, scheduled for October 2013.

"We will win the political and national battles we face," he told a cheering crowd. "In the general elections we will replace Netanyahu's government."

Polls show that toppling Netanyahu would be an uphill battle: Kadima, currently the largest faction in parliament, is losing support to the centrist Labour party and the dovish Meretz. Kadima would also be expected to lose seats to the television personality Yair Lapid, who has not yet formed a political party.

Mofaz is best known for the tough tactics he adopted as military chief and defence minister during the four-year Palestinian uprising that ended in 2004. In 2008, he briefly rattled global oil markets by saying Israel would attack Iran as a last resort if Tehran did not abandon its suspected nuclear weapons programme.

In recent years he has adopted a more statesmanlike approach, proposing the immediate establishment of a provisional Palestinian state and addressing socio-economic issues and women's rights.

Livni, who a few years ago was among Israel's most popular politicians, has faced heavy criticism for what is widely seen as an ineffective term as opposition leader.

Kadima was founded in November 2005 by the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who defected from the Likud party with many of its top officials, including Livni and Mofaz, in an effort to move forward more boldly on peacemaking than some Likud members wanted.

Sharon suffered an incapacitating stroke shortly after that, and although peacemaking resumed under his successor, Ehud Olmert, it stalled at the end of Olmert's term.

TELEGRAPH:US drone strikes on Yemen escalate America has dramatically escalated its drone strikes war in Yemen with the tempo of attacks rising to par

US drone strikes on Yemen escalate

America has dramatically escalated its drone strikes war in Yemen with the tempo of attacks rising to parity with incidents in Pakistan since the installation of a new government this month.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/9171946/US-drone-strikes-on-Yemen-escalate.html

President Barak Obama has authorised all but one of the estimated 44 drone strikes by the US in the troubled Arab state since 2002 and has overseen a rapid increase in attacks since last May with 26 incidents recorded.

The pace appears to be accelerating with nine attacks so far this year and at least five this month, including a strike last week near the terrorist hot bed of Zinjibar. Up to 30 militants were killed in three separate missile strikes on the town, eyewitnesses said.

Nationwide the figures are comparable to those in Pakistan where America has struck on ten occasions, even as it scales back activities in the face of a backlash from an angry public.

Research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at City University has found that as many as 516 people have been killed in the attacks - mostly suspected members of al-Qaeda's local ally al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Up to 104 were civilians.

With the majority of the attacks carried out by the CIA or US special forces command from a base nearby Dijbouti, American officials refused to confirm or acknowledge the attacks.

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President Obama has, however, made plain his determination to go after AQAP, which he has described as "a network of violence and terror" that has attracted a number of US citizens to its cause, including the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki.

Awlaki was killed last September, along with Samir Khan, editor of AQAP's English-language propaganda magazine Inspire, which had been blamed for recruiting Western-raised youths to Islamic radicalism.

Days later a follow-up attack killed other militants – but also Awlaki's 16-year old son and 17-year old nephew. AQAP's ability to speak to an English-language audience was finished.

Elizabeth Quintada, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute. said the drone strikes had successfully damaged AQAP, having secured the tacit backing of Yemeni leaders, but still carried the risk of embroiling the US in Yemen's internal turmoil.

"The strikes in Yemen are government-permitted if not government-sponsored and are a very effective way to hit terrorist camps," she said. "But because there is a general uprising against the government of Yemen there is a concern about the accuracy of intelligence and groups using America's firepower for their own purposes."

The increase in attacks this month appears linked to the installation of a new president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. In his recent inauguration speech he called for "the continuation of war against al-Qaeda as a religious and national duty".

Despite multiple reports of US military action in Yemen, the US rarely acknowledges its secret war. A US state department spokesman, speaking on background terms, would this week say only that "I refer you to the Government of Yemen for additional information on its counterterrorism efforts".

However a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks records a conversations between Gen David Petraeus – now the head of the CIA – and Yemen's former president Ali Abdullah Saleh discussing a US attack in December 2009 in which civilians were killed. A Yemen parliamentary commission later found that 14 alleged terrorists died in the attack as well as 44 civilians.

Despite public pressure, US officials have never investigated the deaths. Sheikh Himir Al-Ahmar, deputy speaker of Yemen's parliament said the local authorities had dealt with the incident.

"The families of the victims were indeed paid appropriate compensation by the Yemeni Government," he said. "The American authorities did not get involved in this process in any way.'

Campaigners have called on the US to take responsibility for its covert war from the skies. Amnesty International, which carried out its own investigation into the December 2009 attack, said this week that the US failure to investigate credible reports of civilian deaths was troubling.

"With an increase in such operations in places like Yemen, unless one gets to the bottom of who was killed, why, and what precautions were taken to protect civilians, then there is a risk such mistakes will be repeated in the future," said Philip Luther, director of Amnesty's Middle East programme.