Category: Iran

Secret trial revelations prompt US-Israeli diplomatic storm

Blogger tells how US government spied on Israeli officials in Washington

By David Usborne, US Editor

Shamai Leibowitz was worried by Israeli attempts to lobby American politicians

A court case against a translator who leaked US government secrets was conducted in secret because it centred on the revelation that the FBI had eavesdropped on Israeli embassy phone calls, it was revealed yesterday.

The extraordinary limitations in place for the prosecution of Shamai Leibowitz, who was sentenced to 20 months in prison for disseminating classified information, meant that even the judge sentencing him did not know what he was supposed to have leaked. “All I know is that it’s a serious case,” Judge Alexander Williams said last year. “I don’t know what was divulged other than some documents, and how it compromised things, I have no idea.”

But now Richard Silverstein, the blogger to whom Leibowitz passed his information, has come forward to defend his source and in so doing has made public another source of difficulty in the strained US-Israeli relationship. Leibowitz passed him about 200 pages of verbatim records of phone calls and conversations between embassy officials, saying that he believed the documents revealed Israeli officials trying unlawfully to influence US policy and edging towards military action against Iran.

“I see him as an American patriot and a whistleblower, and I’d like his actions to be seen in that context,” Silverstein told The New York Times. “What really concerned Shamai at the time was the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, which he thought would be damaging to both Israel and the United States.”

He could not provide hard copies of the documents as he said he had burnt them when the case against Leibowitz came under investigation. But, he said, among the exchanges detailed was one where Israeli officials expressed their nervousness that they were being monitored. They also discussed their intention of drafting opinion pieces to be published under the names of prominent supporters. There has been dismay among civil liberties and open government advocates who point to pledges made by Mr Obama before his election to seek new transparency in Washington. Instead, his administration has launched a record number of prosecutions under the Espionage Act – five including the Leibowitz case. Previously, there had been only four such prosecutions opened by all previous administrations.

The government notably had egg on its face when a case against a former official of the National Security Agency, collapsed this summer. Thomas Drake had faced up to 35 years for leaking information exposing bungling at the agency to The Baltimore Sun. Most of the charges were dropped when the judge insisted that the leaked documents be shown to the jury.

“The government’s penchant since September 11, 2001, for operating in secrecy and hiding behind an executive branch “state secrets” doctrine has damaged our long-term national security and national character,” Mr Drake wrote in The Washington Post last week.

What seems odd in this latest case is that no one in Washington will be shocked to learn that the FBI keeps tabs on the Israeli embassy. Monitoring foreign missions, particularly to screen for spies, is common practice and legal if sanctioned by a special court in the Justice Department.

Leibowitz, meanwhile, seems to have been afflicted more by naiveté than ill-will. The leaked documents, which reportedly include conversations involving at least one US congressman, did appear to reveal lobbying by Israeli officials of Capitol Hill. But that is what diplomats are paid to do.

In addition to the prosecutions, the Obama administration classified more than 77 million government documents last year, a one-year increase of 40 per cent. This zeal to protect government business is in sharp contrast to Mr Obama’s praise in 2008 of whistleblowers, whom he described as, “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government”.

www.independent.co.uk, 7 September 2011

September 7, 2011
‘Muslim countries should not advance NATO’s interests’

TEHRAN – Iranian MP Alaeddin Boroujerdi has advised Muslim countries in the region not to take measures that would serve the interests of the NATO alliance.

Boroujerdi, who is the chairman of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, made the remarks in an interview with the Mehr News Agency published on Sunday in reference to the fact that Turkey has agreed to host an early warning radar as part of NATO’s missile defense system, which is ostensibly meant to counter an alleged ballistic missile threat from Iran.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry announced on September 2 that negotiations over NATO’s anti-missile shield had reached “their final stages.”

However, Turkey did not say when or where the U.S. early warning radar would be stationed, according to the Guardian.

Boroujerdi said, “Muslim countries should maintain security in the region through reliance on their capabilities and cooperation and should not allow a situation to develop where insecurity prevails in the region and NATO’s interests in the region are served by Muslim countries.”

He added, “The Islamic Republic of Iran has the necessary capability to safeguard its security,” and such measures will not deter it.

“NATO not only does not contribute to regional security but is also a major source of insecurity in the region,” Boroujerdi stated.

“NATO’s intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrated the fact that NATO is only pursuing its own interests in the region.

“NATO’s intervention in Libya also proved that NATO has no respect for Muslim countries,” Boroujerdi added.

via ‘Muslim countries should not advance NATO’s interests’ – Tehran Times.

September 5, 2011
Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad

Criminals acquired over 500 DigiNotar digital certificates; Mozilla and Google issue ‘death sentence’

By Gregg Keizer

Computerworld – The tally of digital certificates stolen from a Dutch company in July has exploded to more than 500, including ones for intelligence services like the CIA, the U.K.’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad, a Mozilla developer said Sunday.

The confirmed count of fraudulently-issued SSL (secure socket layer) certificates now stands at 531, said Gervase Markham, a Mozilla developer who is part of the team that has been working to modify Firefox to blocks all sites signed with the purloined certificates.

Among the affected domains, said Markham, are those for the CIA, MI6, Mossad, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft’s Windows Update service.

“Now that someone (presumably from Iran) has obtained a legit HTTPS cert for CIA.gov, I wonder if the US gov will pay attention to this mess,” Christopher Soghoian, a Washington D.C.-based researcher noted for his work on online privacy, said in a tweet Saturday.

Soghoian was referring to assumptions by many experts that Iranian hackers, perhaps supported by that country’s government, were behind the attack. Google has pointed fingers at Iran, saying that attacks using an ill-gotten certificate for google.com had targeted Iranian users.

All the certificates were issued by DigiNotar, a Dutch issuing firm that last week admitted its network had been hacked in July.

The company claimed that it had revoked all the fraudulent certificates, but then realized it had overlooked one that could be used to impersonate any Google service, including Gmail. DigiNotar went public only after users reported their findings to Google.

Criminals or governments could use the stolen certificates to conduct “man-in-the-middle” attacks, tricking users into thinking they were at a legitimate site when in fact their communications were being secretly intercepted.

Google and Mozilla said this weekend that they would permanently block all the digital certificates issued by DigiNotar, including those used by the Dutch government.

Their decisions come less than a week after Google, Mozilla and Microsoft all revoked more than 200 SSL (secure socket layer) certificates for use in their browsers, but left untouched hundreds more, many of which were used by the Dutch government to secure its websites.

“Based on the findings and decision of the Dutch government, as well as conversations with other browser makers, we have decided to reject all of the Certificate Authorities operated by DigiNotar,” Heather Adkins, an information security manager for Google, said in a Saturday blog post.

Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox engineering, echoed that late on Friday.

“All DigiNotar certificates will be untrusted by Mozilla products,” said Nightingale, who also said that the Dutch government had reversed its position of last week — when it had asked browser makers to exempt its DigiNotar certificates.

“The Dutch government has since audited DigiNotar’s performance and rescinded this assessment,” Nightingale said. “This is not a temporary suspension, it is a complete removal from our trusted root program.”

On Saturday, Piet Hein Donner, the Netherlands’s Minister of the Interior, said the government could not guarantee the security of its websites because of the DigiNotar hack, and told citizens not to log into its sites until new certificates had been obtained from other sources.

The DigiNotar breach is being audited by Fox-IT, which told the Dutch government that it was likely certificates for its sites had been fraudulently acquired by hackers.

Several security researchers said the move by browser makers puts an end to DigiNotar’s certificate business.

“Effectively a death sentence for DigiNotar,” said Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, in a Friday tweet.

Mozilla was scathing in its criticism of DigiNotar.

Nightingale ticked off the missteps that led Mozilla to permanently block all sites signed with the company’s certificates, including DigiNotar’s failure to notify browser vendors in July and its inability to tell how many certificates had been illegally obtained. “[And] the attack is not theoretical,” Nightingale added. “We have received multiple reports of these certificates being used in the wild.”

Markham went into greater detail on the hack and its ramifications. “It has now emerged that DigiNotar had not noticed the full extent of the compromise,” said Markham in a Saturday post to his personal blog. “The attackers had managed to hide the traces of the misissuance — perhaps by corrupting log files.”

Because the Google certificate that prompted DigiNotar to acknowledge the intrusion was obtained before most of the others, Markham speculated that there had actually been two separate attacks, perhaps by different groups.

“It is at least possible (but entirely speculative) that an initial competent attacker has had access to [DigiNotar’s] systems for an unknown amount of time, and a second attacker gained access more recently and their less-subtle, bull-in-a-china shop approach in issuing the [hundreds of] certificates triggered the alarms,” he said.

Last week, Helsinki-based antivirus company F-Secure said it had found signs that DigiNotar’s network had been compromised as early as May 2009.

Mozilla will update Firefox 6 and Firefox 3.6 on Tuesday to permanently block all DigiNotar-issued certificates, including those used by the Dutch government.

On Saturday Google updated Chrome to do the same.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

www.computerworld.com, 4 September 2011

September 5, 2011
Libya and Syria: The Neocon Plan to Attack Seven Countries in Five Years

Kurt Nimmo

In the video below, former four star general and NATO commander Wesley Clark talks about the neocon plan to invade seven countries in five years. Included in the plan was an attack on Libya. Clark mentions the plan at two minutes, 26 seconds into the video.

The video was recorded on October 3, 2007, at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco.

Clark’s revelation is nothing new, although it reminds us that the attack on Libya fits into a larger context and there are horrific conflicts to come if the globalists have their way.

Following the election of Obama and a reshuffling of the same old deck in Congress in 2008, it was believed the bad old days of neocon wars were finally behind us. Obama said he would close down the wars and bring home the troops. Instead, he intensified the effort to spread chaos, mayhem and mass murder in the Middle East and South Asia, thus underscoring the fact there is absolutely no difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to creative destruction (it is telling that the neocon Michael Leeden has used the term – creative destruction is a Marxist concept).

Clark has talked about the neocon plan on several occasions. He said the following during a speech at the University of Alabama in October of 2006, recounting a conversation with a general at the Pentagon:

I said, “Are we still going to invade Iraq?” “Yes, Sir,” he said, “but it’s worse than that.” I said, “How do you mean?” He held up this piece of paper. He said, “I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It’s a… five-year plan. We’re going to take down seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we’re going to come back and get Iran in five years. I said, “Is that classified, that paper?” He said, “Yes Sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me, because I want to be able to talk about it.”

The neocons, of course, are merely one of a number of establishment factions, all of them reading from the same script. Obama’s attack on Libya and the impending attack on Syria under the ruse popularly known as the “Arab Spring” (pushed by elite NGOs and the CIA) is interchangeable with the Bush regime’s call to action against the Axis of Evil. The only difference between Democrat Obama and the (supposedly) Republican neocons (who have roots in Trotskyism) is that the neocons are decidedly Israeli-centric in their geopolitical stance.

The global elite do not care about Israel or any other nation-state, but are not above using the neocons – who are highly organized and motivated (despite propaganda depicting them as inept) – in their quest to destroy Arab and Muslim nationalism that directly threatens their drive for hegemonic rule (in particular, Sharia law with its restrictions on banking poses a threat to the banksters).

Syria is the next target followed by the big Kahuna, Iran. For the globalists, who are determined to wreck all nation-states and eradicate national sovereignty and borders, the fact this effort will precipitate the destruction of the “world’s policeman,” the United States, is an extra added bonus.

Multiple wars in multiple and far-stretched “theaters” will ultimately bankrupt the United States, as Ron Paul and a handful of others have warned. Obama has made if perfectly clear that the U.S. will not leave Iraq and Afghanistan and plans to continue attacking Pakistan and failed states in Africa where the CIA cut-out al-Qaeda has appeared on cue.

Wesley Clark’s warning is prescient, but nearly a decade too late. Clark is, at best,disingenuous because he himself a war criminal for the role he played in the slaughter of civilians in Yugoslavia.

www.infowars.com, September 2, 2011

September 4, 2011
UN raises fears over Iran’s nuclear weapons plan

By George Jahn in Vienna, AP

The UN nuclear agency has said it is “increasingly concerned” about intelligence suggesting that Iran continues to secretly work on developing a nuclear payload for a missile and other components of a nuclear weapons programme.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report said “many member states” are providing evidence for the assessment, describing information as “credible, extensive and comprehensive”.

The report was made available after being shared with the 35 IAEA member nations and the UN Security Council. It also said Tehran has fulfiled a promise made earlier this year and started installing equipment to enrich uranium at a new location – an underground bunker better protected from air attack.

Enrichment can produce both nuclear fuel and fissile warhead material, and Tehran – which says it wants only to produce fuel with the technology – is under four sets of UN Security Council sanctions for refusing to freeze it.

Tehran also denies secretly experimenting with a nuclear weapons programme.

www.independent.co.uk, 3 September 2011

September 3, 2011
Iran frees 100 political prisoners

Tehran pardons prisoners in effort to ease tense political atmosphere before parliamentary elections in March

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

Iran has freed 100 political prisoners, thought to be people jailed after unrest across the country in 2009. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

Iran has pardoned 100 political prisoners in an attempt to appease the country’s opposition and reduce tensions seven months before parliamentary elections.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the release from jail of a number of prisoners recommended to him by the head of the judiciary, Sadeq Larijani, to mark Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim festival at the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

Iranian media reported that almost 70 political prisoners out of the hundred had been freed in the past few days, and others had their sentences reduced or suspended. They are thought to have been arrested after Iran’s disputed presidential elections in 2009, but state news agencies described them as “prisoners convicted of security-related crimes”. Some agencies said other prisoners have also been granted clemency.

The semi-official Mehr news agency said: “Based on an agreement of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 100 prisoners charged with security crimes have been granted amnesty. Some of them were involved in post-election sedition two years ago.” Iran describes the post-election unrest as a “sedition” orchestrated by foreign powers.

The mass release is the latest attempt by Iran to ease the country’s tense political atmosphere prior to parliamentary elections in March 2012. Authorities have recently given more space to opposition newspapers and have shown more restraint in dealing with criticism.

Etemaad, Arman, Roozegar and Shargh are newspapers sympathetic to the opposition and the reformist movement. Most were closed after the disputed elections but have resumed publication. Political activists are also reportedly enjoying more freedom in criticising the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Writing in opposition newspapers, reformists have welcomed the release of political prisoners, saying it was a “sigh of relief” for their families. In a column published in Roozegar, Nemat Ahmadi, a prominent lawyer, said the regime had refused to publish a full list of the prisoners and that many of those freed had not had a fair trial. According to Ahmadi, many prisoners have been illegally kept in jail without legal representation.

Some analysts claim Iran is giving ground to the opposition to avoid a repeat of the uprisings that have rocked the Middle East. In reformist newspapers, the extent of the criticism of Tehran’s support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad appears to be unprecedented for Iran’s regime-sanctioned media.

However, human rights activists have expressed concern about opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who have been under house arrest since mid-February after calling for street protests in solidarity with uprisings in the Arab world. Mousavi and Karroubi have remained cut off from the outside world with little news about their health or daily activities.

The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a US-based NGO, warned that Karroubi, 74, had been kept in complete isolation for more than 42 days. It said the former parliamentary speaker and presidential candidate has been under pressure “to appear in front of cameras and make televised ‘confessions’.”

Ardeshir Amir-Arjomand, a senior adviser to Mousavi, signalled that the opposition Green Movement will not take part in elections unless its leaders are freed.

www.guardian.co.uk, 30 August 2011

August 31, 2011