Turkish prosecutor indicts six jihadists for alleged attempts to acquire chemicals with intent to produce sarin
Does the truth really set you free? Do I care?
The Turkish Republican Prosecutor in Adana has issued a 132-page indictment, alleging that six members of the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front and Ahrar ash-Sham – one Syrian and five Turks – tried to acquire chemicals with the intent to produce the chemical weapon sarin.
The Turkish newspaper Radikal reports that the suspects were under surveillance by Turkish police after they received information that the al-Nusra members tried to acquire two government-regulated military-grade chemical substances.
11 people were arrested in their safe house in the city of Adana in southeastern Turkey on May 23, 2013, after they had acquired some of the chemicals.
Below is a thoughtful essay by Ambassador Chas Freeman. He describes how the United States has painted itself into a corner on the Syrian Question. Many see this problem in terms of President Obama's missteps, but Freeman shows it goes far beyond one man's grand-strategic foibles.
While Freeman does not express the evolution of grand strategy wrt Syria Question in the following terms, the core issue is, I believe, the increasingly dysfunctional moral design for grand strategy evolved by the United States since the end of the Cold War. Abstractly, this dysfunction takes the form of a growing web of policy-induced mismatches among (a) the codes of conduct and standards of behaviour the United States professes to uphold and others expect the U.S. to uphold, (b) those standards of behaviour we actually adhere to, as demonstrated by our actions, and (c) the conditions in the world we have to contend with. The hypocrisy implicit in this web of mismatches, in abstract terms, is the moral heart of our growing foreign policy crisis and our state of perpetual war.
The crucial importance of having a moral design for grand strategy is described by the late American strategist Col. John Boyd in his seminal Discourse on Winning and Losing. In fact, this notion is the capstone grand strategic ideal synthesizing the tactical, operational, strategic, and philosophical threads of Boyd's entire Discourse. And while the idea is expressed in highly compressed terms on Slides 54-58 of his briefing Strategic Game of ? and ?, one must study the entire Discourse to appreciate both the elegance of his compression, as well as the central importance of forging a grand strategy that is consistent with his ideal.
Exorcising those mismatches from the body politic can start with Syria, but it goes far beyond Syria to our dealings with Middle East, Iran, Russia, China, and indeed the whole world. Nor will it be be easy; extremely powerful domestic factions in the US are profiting from these mismatches, and their corollary state of perpetual war (as I explained here). Ridding ourselves of these mismatches is now the foreign policy challenge of our generation
Ambassador Freeman's thoughtful assembly of the facts associated with our patterns of post-cold war behaviour is worthy of careful study and comparison with Boyd's ideals, because without intending to, he reveals how far the United States has strayed from these ideas. In effect, Freeman has issued a call for an injection of common sense into American foreign policy, and Syria is the place to start working the problem.
US spies missed signs of Aug. 21 Syrian WMD Strike
By KIMBERLY DOZIER
Associated Press, 4 September 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence agencies did not detect the Syrian regime readying a massive chemical weapons attack in the days ahead of the strike, only piecing together what had happened after the fact, U.S. officials say.
One of the key pieces of intelligence that Secretary of State John Kerry later used to link the attack to the Syrian government — intercepts of communications telling Syrian military units to prepare for the strikes — was in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies but had not yet been “processed,” according to senior U.S. officials.
Syria: President Asad gave an interview to Le Figaro which was published by the Syrian news agency Sana on 3 September. Excerpts follow.
Asad denied Syrian forces launched a chemical attack. He said Syria has no motive to make such an attack because it is winning the fight. He challenged the US to produce its proof and show it to the UN since the party making the accusations has the burden of proving them.
He said his soldiers were wounded in the attack on the 21st and the UN inspectors visited them in hospital.
He accused the US President of being a weak leader who succumbed to pressure from small groups and as one who starts wars instead of prevents them.
Concerning a Syrian response to a US attack, he reminded the interviewer that the architects of a war only control the first shot. He said the first and the greatest danger is that the situation will explode into a regional war.
In response to a question about Russian support he said,
The United States, Afghan, Qatari, and Pakistani governments have all voiced their support for the opening of a Taliban office in Doha in order to promote peace negotiations. Some consider transforming the Taliban from an armed insurgency into a legitimate political group to be the critical first step in the Afghan peace process. However, to date, reconciliation efforts have stalled and focus more on rhetoric rather than substance.
There is no concrete evidence that Taliban leadership is either worn down or desperate to reach a peace agreement. Attempting to secure his legacy as a peacemaker, Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants to reach an agreement before the end of his term in April 2014. Because the Taliban have also cooperated somewhat with this principle of reconciliation, it is not immediately clear why the current approach has achieved nothing.
Viet-Nam Viet-Cong Redux
The answer is that the Doha peace process has been riddled with unrealistic expectations, and remains hopelessly inconsistent. Such reconciliation efforts without strategy and clear objectives reflect a hook without bait – while encouraging, these talks are doomed to fail without significant reform. Only with realistic expectations, a coherent strategy, national solidarity, and lots of patience, will reconciliation stand a chance of materializing.
Where We've Been Thus Far
The reconciliation offer requires three specific things from the Taliban: ending violence, breaking ties with al-Qaeda, and accepting the Afghan Constitution. The fourth, less advertised condition is the acceptance of a residual ISAF element in Afghanistan post-2014. At a recent summit in London, British, Afghan and Pakistani leaders set a six-month timeline to reach a peace settlement.
But substantive results are unlikely to emerge until after the 2014 Afghan Presidential elections. This is the single most important date in the reconciliation process and will set the tone for future debate. A six-month deadline to reach an agreement is not only unrealistic, but also damaging to the credibility of the process.
The newly disclosed information includes individual agency budgets along with program area line items, as well as details regarding the size and structure of the intelligence workforce. So one learns, for example, that the proposed budget for covert action in FY2013 was approximately $2.6 billion, while the total for open source intelligence was $387 million.
Some of the information only confirms what was already understood to be true. The budget for the National Security Agency was estimated to be about $10 billion, according to a recent story in CNN Money (“What the NSA Costs Taxpayers” by Jeanne Sahadi, June 7, 2013). The actual NSA budget figure, the Post reported, is $10.8 billion.
And the involuntary disclosure of classified intelligence budget information, while rare, is not unprecedented. In 1994, the House Appropriations Committee inadvertently published budget data for national and military intelligence, the size of the CIA budget, and other details. (“$28 Billion Spying Budget is Made Public by Mistake” by Tim Weiner, New York Times, November 5, 1994)
But the current disclosure of intelligence budget information dwarfs all previous releases and provides unmatched depth and detail of spending over a course of several years, based on original documents. The disclosure is doubly remarkable because the Post chastely refrained from releasing about 90% of the Congressional Budget Justification Book that it obtained. “Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online,” Post reporters Gellman and Miller wrote.
This is not a whistleblower disclosure; it does not reveal any illegality or obvious wrongdoing. On the contrary, the underlying budget document is a formal request to Congress to authorize and appropriate funding for intelligence.
But the disclosure seems likely to be welcomed in many quarters (while scorned in others) both because of a generalized loss of confidence in the integrity of the classification system, and because of a more specific belief that the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy today requires increased public accountability.
Though it has never been embraced as official policy, the notion of public disclosure of individual intelligence agency budgets (above and beyond the release of aggregate totals) has an honorable pedigree.
In 1976, the U.S. Senate Church Committee advocated publication of the total intelligence budget and recommended that “any successor committees study the effects of publishing more detailed information on the budgets of the intelligence agencies.”
In a 1996 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then-Chair Sen. Arlen Specter badgered DCI John Deutch about the need for intelligence budget secrecy.
“I think that you and the Intelligence Community and this committee have got to do a much better job in coming to grips with the hard reasons for this [budget secrecy], if they exist. And if they exist, I'm prepared to help you defend them. But I don't see that they exist. I don't think that they have been articulated or explained,” the late Sen. Specter said then.
Committee Vice Chair Sen. Bob Kerrey added: “I would concur in much of what the Chairman has just said. I do, myself, believe not only the top line, but several of the other lines of the budget, not only could but should, for the purpose of giving taxpayer-citizens confidence that their money is being well spent.”
In 2004, the 9/11 Commission itself recommended disclosure of intelligence agency budgets: “Finally, to combat the secrecy and complexity we have described, the overall amounts of money being appropriated for national intelligence and to its component agencies should no longer be kept secret” (at page 416, emphasis added).
These are clearly minority views. They could have been adopted at any time — as disclosure of the aggregate total was — but they haven't been. (And even these voices did not call for release of the more detailed budget line items that are now public.) And yet they are not totally outlandish either.
The initial response of the executive branch to the Washington Post story will be to hunker down, to decline explicit comment, and to prohibit government employees from viewing classified budget documents that are in the public domain. Damage assessments will be performed, and remedial security measures will be imposed. These are understandable reflex responses.
But in a lucid moment, officials should ponder other questions.
How can public confidence in national security secrecy be bolstered? Is it possible to imagine a national security secrecy system that the public would plausibly view not with suspicion but with support, much as the strict secrecy of IRS tax returns is broadly understood and supported? What steps could be taken to reduce national security secrecy to the bare minimum?
Looking further ahead, is it possible to devise an information security policy that is based on “resilience” to the foreseeable disclosure of secrets rather than on the fervently pursued prevention of such disclosure?
Usually when we get information about black programs it's the result of two or more errors on the part of Congressmen. One will give a budget for a certain area, another will describe black ops as a percentage of that number, and then we get the actual figure. This time thanks to Edward Snowden we get a 178 page report that ended up in the hands of the Washington Post.
That figure of $52.6 billion is eye catching, since it's roughly equal to that of the State Department's whole operating budget. Also interesting that it's doubled in the last eight years, while Congress forced an 18% cut on the State Department in 2011. This has been widely viewed as a method to sabotage Hillary Clinton's presidential chances in 2016, no matter what the cost to the U.S. might be in the mean time.
I've written about the State Department Witch Hunt over Benghazi, which we recently learned to be an effort by the far right fringe to disrupt and discredit the Obama administration, again without regard to what harm they might be doing to overall U.S. interests.
The executive branch faces a crapflood of, well … crap and our emaciated State Department faces an intractable problem in the Mideast, but the inability to get on top of issues has left the whole region sliding towards chaos. If you're an end of days nut that might seem like a good thing, but most Americans would prefer that we not get dragged into another quagmire.
I am disheartened by what I see. Winning elections matters little when a disloyal fringe abuse any gap they find in our government's checks and balances, dragging us one step closer to collapse with each passing day. Our isolationist tendencies are finally starting to kick in and that ought to be followed by some attention to economic development here at home, but if we end up with some regional conflagration in the Mideast we'll be forced to do something on the basis of longstanding alliances. This will be a triple down on the misadventures of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's being made to happen against the will of the majority of the American people.
Kerry Was Wrong
