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by pianoblues » Thu Jun 13, 2013 3:25 am
“The people who participate in this don’t know what the scenario is.”
“Working with the media.” “Their mission is to get a story,” frame 11 instructs. “Building a longstanding relationship with journalists and reporters ensures that they get the right story and that they serve as a resource when needed.”
by pianoblues » Fri Jun 14, 2013 8:48 am
by pianoblues » Fri Jun 14, 2013 9:07 am
http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/17/richard-deslauriers-the-special-agent-in-charge/
National Security
Richard DesLauriers: The Special Agent in Charge
By Massimo CalabresiApril 17, 201314 Comments
Boston Marathon crime scene
SHANNON STAPLETON / Reuters
On Friday, July 9, 2010, FBI special agent Richard DesLauriers disembarked from a chartered Vision Airlines jet on the tarmac of Vienna’s Schwechat International Airport, accompanied by 10 Russian sleeper agents and their families. Nearby, four Russian prisoners got off a plane that had just landed from Moscow. The two groups headed toward each other under the baking Central European summer sun for a rare and unusually large exchange of captured spies. It was the culmination of what a former senior Justice Department official calls “one of the most complicated and impressive counterintelligence operations” in recent U.S. history.
Less than three years later, DesLauriers is facing a very different challenge. As special agent in charge of the FBI office in Boston, DesLauriers, 53, is running the Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation into the Boston Marathon attacks, the first successful terrorist bombings on U.S. soil since 9/11. The bombing is a different kind of case from the one DesLauriers spent his career investigating: a 25-year veteran of counterintelligence, he made his bones running operations against foreign spies, not tracking down and busting terrorists. For DesLauriers and the FBI, the Boston Marathon bombing is a high-visibility test.
Former and current colleagues at the FBI and Justice Department say DesLauriers and the FBI are up to the task, and they say the roll-up and exchange of the Russian spies, dubbed Operation Ghost Stories, shows it. After 9/11 the FBI was criticized for failing to coordinate with other agencies and for being stuck in a Cold War–era mind-set. In the roll-up of Ghost Stories the FBI pulled off a politically and diplomatically delicate operation that involved coordination with multiple intelligence agencies, U.S. attorney’s offices and local field agents. “Rick is the real deal,” says David Kris, former assistant attorney general for National Security during the Russian roll-up, “He’s very, very good, extremely methodical and organized.”
On paper, DesLauriers looks like a classic FBI special agent. He grew up in Longmeadow, Mass., went to Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., and then got a J.D. at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. — “a good Catholic boy,” says his friend and former FBI colleague John Slattery, who worked with him in counterespionage for 15 years. DesLauriers joined the FBI as a special agent in 1987 and went straight into spy work. After a few years in New York and D.C., he returned to Boston in 1997 ultimately supervising the FBI’s counterintelligence programs in the Northeast. In March 2008, he was promoted to head the FBI’s counterintelligence operations and espionage investigations as deputy assistant director.
Richard DesLauriers
After the 2008 election, DesLauriers was given the unenviable assignment of rolling up Operation Ghost Stories. The Obama Administration, prodded by the powerful new CIA chief Leon Panetta, decided to deliver on a long-standing desire of the agency’s clandestine service to free four agents who had been jailed by the Russians. Looking around for something to trade for them, the Administration settled on the Russian sleepers, foreign agents being watched by the FBI while operating in America. The plan was to arrest and trade the 10 Russian sleepers in the U.S. for the four agents being held in Moscow.
“The bureau had to figure out, O.K., how in the hell do we play this,” says Slattery. The case would require DesLauriers to coordinate hundreds of people in different agencies, successfully arrest the spies without alerting them beforehand, and collect enough evidence of the spies’ activities to ensure they could be convicted.
But the toughest part could have been getting FBI field agents to work with the CIA. Operation Ghost Stories was one of the FBI counterintelligence division’s biggest successes. For more than a decade, agents had been running wires and surveillance on the 10 “illegals,” Russian nationals who were living and working in the U.S. under deep cover and without the protection of diplomatic immunity. “These were some of the best intelligence operatives the Russians have ever had,” says the former senior Justice Department official. And until they were arrested, they were unaware the FBI was monitoring them as passed intelligence to handlers from the Russian government.
Throughout the Cold War, the FBI and CIA famously clashed over intelligence matters, and the 9/11 Commission Report found miscommunication between the agencies had contributed to missing the plot. So when the FBI counterintelligence division was told that it should roll up one of its most successful operations against unsuspecting spies and give them a free ticket home in exchange for some captured CIA agents, not everyone was happy. Says Slattery, “There was a broader national-security equity at stake. Rick saw that and I think communicating that down to the agents in the field, everybody accepted that in the end it was a great case, despite the fact that it didn’t end with anybody sitting in jail for a real long time.”
Not all DesLauriers’ characteristics are well suited for counterterrorism. “He comes across as a bit bookish,” says the former senior Justice Department official. Obsessed about being read into the details of the cases, DesLauriers “could be criticized for overdoing it,” says Slattery, meaning his friend is a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to being prepared. And where counterintelligence agents can spend years monitoring suspects without arresting them, counterterrorism cases can be rapidly changing.
But Slattery and others say the Russian roll-up shows DesLauriers is up to managing a complicated case like the Boston bombing. FBI director Robert Mueller apparently agrees: he named DesLauriers to run the Boston FBI office on July 1, 2010, eight days before the Massachusetts native would complete the Operation Ghost Stories spy swap at the airport in Vienna.
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/17/ri ... z2WCA6FPzw
by FourthBase » Mon Jun 17, 2013 4:32 pm
by Hunter » Mon Jun 17, 2013 4:58 pm
FourthBase » Mon Jun 17, 2013 4:32 pm wrote:So, no one is interested that "Danny" the possible Uyghur and his amanuensis James Alan Fox derive from the same Northeastern which was one of only two schools to participate in Urban Shield? Or that the other school was the Massachusetts Police Academy where Collier and Donohue graduated together in 2010?
by FourthBase » Mon Jun 17, 2013 5:13 pm
pianoblues » 12 Jun 2013 00:22 wrote:A page ago I shared a link to the 'Operation Shield' biz...seems odd to me that such a plan for a terrorist drill would share so many elements with an actual terrorist attack; stolen cars, reports of supposed self-inflicted gun wounds, coordinated efforts among local and federal law enforcement...Coupled with the sightings and photos of the National Guard's folks just happening to be at the scene of the crime measuring effects on their bomb-o-meter...Today's read: Richard DesLauriers, the head of the Boston FBI office is stepping down, retiring...beh, feels like he's another student of Homeland Security education who wasn't able to write his answer to an essay question at the end of test before the bell rang. Boston's Fire dept. Chief as well....
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/11/bosto ... gia-boston
Boston Bombing Paranoia Nostalgia: Boston Really Was Planning a Backpack Bomb Public Drill
Brian Doherty|
Jun. 11, 2013 6:23 pm
The details of this truth is stranger than fiction and fiction often stumbles on truth story were in Boston Globe last week though I didn't come across them til today:
The scenario had been carefully planned: A terrorist group prepared to hurt vast numbers of people around Boston would leave backpacks filled with explosives at Faneuil Hall, the Seaport District, and in other towns, spreading waves of panic and fear. Detectives would have to catch the culprits.
Months of painstaking planning had gone into the exercise, dubbed “Operation Urban Shield,” meant to train dozens of detectives in the Greater Boston area to work together to thwart a terrorist threat. The hypothetical terrorist group was even given a name: Free America Citizens, a home-grown cadre of militiamen whose logo would be a metal skull wearing an Uncle Sam hat and a furious expression, according to a copy of the plans obtained by the Boston Globe.
But two months before the training exercise was to take place, the city was hit with a real terrorist attack executed in a frighteningly similar fashion. The chaos of the Boston Marathon bombings disrupted plans for the exercise, initially scheduled for this weekend, forcing police to postpone. Now officials must retool aspects of the training.
“The real thing happened before we were able to execute,” said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the planned exercise. “We’ve already been tested.”
This would have been the third year for Urban Shield....
The training, funded by a $200,000 Homeland Security grant, will probably be rescheduled to early next year, said Transit Police Chief Paul MacMillan....
And why not stick to the original plan, huh?
“Why wouldn’t we do it?” MacMillan said. “Just because we had one event doesn’t mean that we might not have another one. And it behooves us to continually work together to investigate these types of incidents.”
Fans of false flag paranoia talk of "crisis actors"....
Officials from a dozen agencies had been meeting for months to plan the scenario. They behaved much like movie producers, recruiting students from Northeastern University and the Boston Police Academy to play the parts of terrorists and witnesses.
They scouted warehouses and homes around Chelsea and Winthrop that could be used as a terrorist safe house.
The basic plot was this: Half a dozen members of Free America Citizens wanted to gauge police response to a bomb scare. They would plant hoax devices, then stay on the scene to watch and record the bomb squad and detectives as they responded, as a dry run to a larger attack.
The participating detectives, however, would not have known they were being watched. They would only be told that they were responding to an urgent terrorist threat. The goal of the training was for them to figure out the motives of Free America Citizens as they investigated the case, the official said....
It gets weirder:
In the training scenario, investigators participating in Urban Shield would have to track down footage of the bombers caught by street surveillance cameras and the phones of “witnesses.”
They would have to call on intelligence analysts to figure out which terrorist cell might be threatening the city.
In the scenario, the terrorists would flee police in stolen cars they would dump in cities outside Boston, which would compel detectives from different jurisdictions to cooperate and share intelligence.
One major clue would have been the body of one of the terrorists found near a stolen car, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. There were also false leads to keep investigators guessing, the official said....
Modern policing.
“Death is so close to me,” Danny recalled thinking. His life had until that moment seemed ascendant, from a province in central China to graduate school at Northeastern University to a Kendall Square start-up.
Danny spoke softly but steadily in a 2 1/2 hour interview at his Cambridge apartment with a Globe reporter and a Northeastern criminology professor, James Alan Fox , who had counseled Danny after the former graduate student approached his engineering adviser at Northeastern.
Donohue and Collier were reportedly members of the same Massachusetts Police Academy class.
by Hunter » Mon Jun 17, 2013 6:11 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Jun 17, 2013 7:52 pm
Posted: 28 May 2013
iDE named TOP 100 NGOs by The Global Journal
Harnessing Irrigation Technology for Good
“One of the leading voices in the ‘appropriate technology’ movement, psychiatrist turned social entrepreneur Paul Polak founded iDE in 1982 as an organization devoted to the manufacture, marketing and distribution of affordable, scalable micro-irrigation and other low-cost water recovery systems throughout the developing world. Envisioning the rural poor as potential entrepreneurs and customers rather than charity recipients, iDE relies on local manufacturing, retailing, and maintenance resources to make affordable technologies available to farmers. The organization’s emblematic success has been the ‘treadle pump’ – a more efficient and user-friendly technology than traditional manual pumps. More than 1.5 million have been sold in Bangladesh alone, creating $1.4 billion in net additional income per year.” – The Global Journal, Top 100 NGOs Edition
Posted: 17 October 2012
Carbon Finance Boosts iDE’s Clean Water Business in Cambodia
For the first time in Asia, a sustainable and market-based water filtration business has been registered under the voluntary Gold Standard scheme, and will benefit from carbon offset funding, illustrating that carbon markets can support sustainable technologies that improve the lives of poor populations. iDE’s Cambodian social enterprise, Hydrologic, manufactures ceramic water purifiers which provide clean water to rural households, reduce the amount of wood burned to boil water, create local jobs, and bolster economic development. Hydrologic was recently named winner of a 2012 Ashden Award. Start-up resources for Hydrologic came from several sources including the USAID WaterSHED project in form of grants and technical assistance.
Posted: 16 April 2012
iDE Wins Wharton’s Inaugural Lipman Prize
Lipman prize acceptance
On Friday April 13, iDE was selected as the winner of the Wharton School’s inaugural Barry and Marie Lipman Family Prize for our innovative, market based water, sanitation & hygiene projects. We’re extremely honored to be the first recipient of this prestigious award!
Here’s a short video produced for the award ceremony:
Lipman Prize Winner: iDE
And here’s the official press release:
Philadelphia, PA, April 13, 2012 – The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania announced today the winner of its inaugural Barry & Marie Lipman Family Prize – iDE, a social enterprise that has pioneered innovative, market-based approaches to safe water and sanitation access. Chosen from hundreds of organizations worldwide devoted to social impact and building sustainable solutions for social and economic challenges, iDE received $100,000 and bragging rights at a gala marking the event’s culmination last night at the Wharton School. iDE and the two other finalist organizations, KOMAZA, a pioneering forestry social enterprise, and MedShare, a distributor of surplus medical supplies, will all profit from unprecedented, synergistic opportunities with Penn and Wharton.
“The $100,000 is one thing but the partnership with Penn and Wharton is just absolutely outstanding,” said Cordell Jacks, the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WaSH) Program Co-Director at iDE. “We really believe that we’re going to change the world with toilets and we think that a partnership here is going to bring together great people, creative ideas and really solve a global public health challenge, something that is very finite and can be achieved in our lifetime. So it’s just really exciting to do this together with the University.”
About the 2012 Lipman Family Prize Winner:
iDE is an international nonprofit organization helping poor rural households in the developing world to access the tools and knowledge they need to increase their income. iDE’s productive water solutions create and increase both food production and incomes, and with innovative drinking water and sanitation technologies, iDE gives rural households the basis for healthier and more dignified livelihoods.
iDE’s involvement with improved sanitation began in Cambodia, which has 16 percent sanitation coverage. Cambodia has the second to worst rural sanitation coverage outside of Africa, at only eight percent. Furthermore, Cambodia loses approximately seven percent of its GDP, USD $448 million per year, due to poor sanitation. iDE Cambodia’s Sanitation Marketing Program (SanMark) recently reached the milestone of 10,000 latrines sold and, in 2011, the organization was awarded a major grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Stone Family Foundation and the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) to scale the SanMark approach nationally in Cambodia, targeting an additional 160,000 households. Building further on these successes in Cambodia, iDE has recently secured funding for WaSH activities in Bangladesh and Nepal with a $400,000 UNICEF-funded scoping and piloting project utilizing the model and support of iDE Cambodia to promote both water filters and low cost, sanitary latrines.
About the Lipman Family Prize:
Currently in its inaugural year, the annual Lipman Family Prize has been made possible by a $6.5 million gift from Wharton alumnus Barry R. Lipman and his wife, Marie.
“For more than ten years, I have had a strong desire to impact the non-profit/social responsibility sector,” said Barry R. Lipman, co-founder of California law firm Goldfarb Lipman. “Through a partnership with the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School, my dream has been realized with the awarding of the first Lipman Family Prize. Penn and I eagerly look forward to annually honoring an organization whose mission is to improve the lives of those less fortunate.”
Administered by the University of Pennsylvania through the Wharton School, the Lipman Family Prize is governed by an interdisciplinary Steering Committee comprised of faculty, and staff from across the University of Pennsylvania, drawing upon the expertise of such entities as the Center for High Impact Philanthropy, Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management, the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, and the School of Social Policy and Practice.
The selection of Prize finalists involved a Student Selection Committee that reviewed initial submissions and conducted the due diligence process under staff guidance, and a Prize Committee that selected the finalists and chose the winner.
“This is the beginning of a long partnership with iDE, KOMAZA and MedShare as new members of the Wharton and Penn community,” said Thomas S. Robertson, the dean of the Wharton School. “The possibilities of these cross-sector collaborations are powerful and we look forward to our ongoing role in fostering sustainable new solutions for the advancement of society as a whole.”
For more information on the 2012 Lipman Family Prize and to view videos from the March 2012 site visits to the three finalist organizations, visit www.wharton.upenn.edu/lipmanfamilyprize.
http://www.ideorg.org/ourstory/news.aspx
by pianoblues » Tue Jun 18, 2013 3:46 am
Boston Is One of the Best Prepared U.S. Cities to Handle a Crisis
Henry Grabar
Apr 19, 2013
Witnesses repeatedly described the scene Monday at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, where two bomb blasts ripped through a crowd of spectators, as unimaginable. Security experts called Friday's citywide "shelter-in-place" order unprecedented, and onlookers could only compare the siege in Watertown, where soldiers, SWAT teams, helicopters and armored Humvees cordoned off a large swath of the neighborhood, to a movie.
But emergency management personnel in the Boston region had not only been imagining such a complex scenario, they had been rehearsing it.
Over the past two years, area hospitals had sent teams of doctors and nurses to citywide training exercises and run internal drills for mass casualty incidents like bombs, plane crashes, and fires. Vivid, citywide disaster simulations – conducted in 2011 and 2012 – put hundreds of officials through hypothetical 24-hour crisis situations. Boston is one of four U.S. cities whose all-hazards plan has been accredited by EMAP, the national emergency planning evaluation program.
"Even local businesses these days have response plans in place," says Rick Nelson, a veteran of the National Counterterrorism Center and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
So when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded on Monday afternoon, Boston's emergency operations centers knew what to do. Emergency medical personnel affixed tourniquets – Boston’s first responders all carry these battlefield dressings, though many ambulances and hospitals nationally do not – to bloodied limbs. The most serious casualties were distributed among area hospitals, a technique known to optimize critical care during disaster events. Boston Marathon medical tents set up for fatigued runners were transformed within minutes into trauma centers. Police officers took up positions to keep spectators off the course and turned back runners approaching the finish line.
As the medical response unrolled, a parallel series of preventative measures were put into action. Service on Boston’s Green Line, which has a station at Copley Square near the scene of the attacks, was suspended between Kenmore and Park Street. Security checks were installed at local transit hubs. The FAA temporarily grounded all flights at Logan International Airport.
The scene on Boylston Street was an admirable display of bravery, skill and calm by first responders and volunteers. But less remarked, and equally remarkable, was the value of the city's foresight. Few U.S. cities could have been better prepared for the events of this week.
"Everything that you saw happen within seconds of the explosion," says James Baker, the president of security consultancy Cytel Group, "was all because someone thought they should be prepared for that." Baker would know. In the past 24 months, he has helped Boston run two massive, 24-hour worst-case scenario simulations that bore no small resemblance to the situation unfolding this afternoon in Watertown.
• • • • •
Over the past decade, the Department of Homeland Security has funneled billions of dollars towards the protection of U.S. cities. Boston is one of the DHS's "Tier 1" U.S. metro areas -- in DHS's view, one of the country's ten most likely targets for terrorism. The Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), the largest part of the Homeland Security Grant Program, distributes half a billion dollars annually to 31 U.S. metros, and sent $11 million to Boston in the 2012 fiscal year.
Few U.S. cities could have been better prepared for the events of this week.
The Metro Boston Homeland Security Region (MBHSR) -- nine cities including Boston -- directs that money into an array of local counterterrorism programs. In the past few years, the MBHSR has upgraded over 5,000 portable radios for first responders and installed a communication system inside the tunnels of the Boston T.
Part of that money must go towards live drills, so over the past couple years, Boston has conducted two citywide disaster simulations with Cytel Group's Urban Shield, using the preparation and after-action reports from the first trial (in May 2011) to improve the city's preparedness in the second, in November 2012. (The city also hosted an emergency management summit last August.)
U.S. cities have been doing disaster drills for decades, and some exercises -- such as Detroit's World War II black-out drills or Portland's 1955 "Operation Greenlight" -- have been of some magnitude. But in the last decade, the trend in disaster drills has moved from the purely local exercise to the vertically integrated simulation that coordinates a reponse across the different levels of government. "What is different," Nelson says, "is the range and depth of missions they're responding to."
Urban Shield, which Baker started in 2007, is one of several drill programs that have sprung up over the last decade in response to DHS grants for thorough emergency preparedness training. In 2010, it received UASI's honorable mention for best overall program.
In Boston, Urban Shield was sufficiently disruptive and expansive that Mayor Thomas Menino’s felt obliged to ask residents to remain calm:
“Urban Shield: Boston will run for a 24-hour period. As a result residents in the area may hear simulated gunfire, observe officers responding to simulated emergencies, or see activity in the Boston Harbor. Each scenario will be run multiple times, and organizers urge residents not to be alarmed.”
The drills, which included hostage situations, HazMat incidents and a movie theater shooting, brought together emergency officials from the city, state and federal government, as well as from the Boston Police, SWAT teams, the Fire Department, EMS, local hospitals, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the Coast Guard. All in all, there were over 600 participants in the November drill, from over fifty different departments and agencies.
"What the Urban Shield program does is test it all at the same time – bomb squads working, swat teams working, fire, HazMat, search and rescue, command centers activated, all your radio systems, hospitals activated – everyone's kind of working together," says Baker, who worked closely with the city to execute the simulation. "That's where you start to find your gaps – who can't speak to whom on the radio. You identify the real problems when you get everyone together."
The drills are intended to be strikingly lifelike. Urban Shield has worked with Strategic Operations, a Hollywood effects company that also helps prepare army medics for the battlefield. (Their disaster scenario staff, Baker says, include an amputee.) With a generous helping of moulage, their drills aim to force officials to confront both the logistical and atmospheric challenges of a disaster.
"The leadership is outstanding," Baker says, referring to Boston. "I have found that they are proactive and forward thinking – they invested a lot of time and energy in getting ready for something that they never thought would happen."
Speaking of the Urban Shield program in a video released in September, Daniel Linskey, superintendent-in-chief of the Boston Police Department, sounded oddly prescient. "You have to train for things that may be out of the ordinary," he said, "because you can't wait for them to happen to be ready."
• • • • •
Nationwide, the hierarchy of emergency management can be staggeringly complicated, and the varying power structures within U.S. states — think of how L.A. County contains 88 cities, while New York City contains five counties — make it difficult to generalize about who calls the shots.
"Even local businesses these days have response plans in place."
For example: Boston has an Emergency Operations Center run out the city's Office of Emergency Management. Massachusetts has a State Emergency Operations Center, run out of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. The MBHSR (which runs the Boston Regional Intelligence Center) is a federal jurisdiction that contains nine cities.
What began as the Cold War-era Office of Civil Defense has long since evolved into alphabet soup, which poses two related problems for disaster planners: first, how do all these agencies communicate when something goes wrong, and second, and more importantly, how does the DHS begin to regulate and standardize city responses, making it easier for the federal government to lock up with local jurisdictions during crises?
Since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, experts say, collaboration and communication between agencies and jurisdictions has been one DHS's highest priorities. "Government agencies are better at talking to each other, coordinating, cooperating," says Stevan Weine, a psychiatry professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies counterterrorism and resilience. "They're better at partnering with other entities, local communities, the business community."
Though every city has an all-hazard plan by one name or another, it can be difficult to predict how various authorities will interact in a time of crisis. "Coordination is key," Nelson says. Boston's MBHSR, like many regional DHS jurisdictions, is working to implement the National Incident Management Program (NIMS), a national framework for disaster reporting and response.
"When you talk about disasters, it’s all about partnerships," says Ken Kondo, a program specialist at the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management. Training exercises are indispensable. Last month, Kondo says, L.A. County performed an exercise in response to an imagined 7.8-magnitude earthquake, working out hypotheticals with the National Guard, the Red Cross and dozens of city and county departments in between.
Not every effort at integration across departments has gone so smoothly. In 2003, DHS began to develop a network of "fusion centers," cross-agency intelligence outlets designed to assist law enforcement, public safety, emergency response, and other regional authorities in "preventing, protecting against, and responding to crime and terrorism." The program has had its growing pains: a 2012 Senate investigation found that fusion centers mostly gathered "irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence," and often spent money frivolously.
The Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 U.S. fusion centers, was not available for comment this week. But Mike Sena, the President of the National Fusion Center Association, who defended the program after the Senate report, said the BRIC was designed to operate in exactly the sort of inter-agency crisis situation occurring in Boston "This is what fusion centers were built for," Sena told the Wall Street Journal.
The DHS has also strived to institute a system of best practices across cities. According to Cytel's James Baker, the impetus for this is obvious: "If we're doing it one way, and you're doing it another way, we should figure out which way is better."
But given the variations in the power structure, not to mention the geographic and structural differences between cities, a standard municipal operating procedure is, for now, beyond reach. "Every city has its unique requirements," Nelson says. Additionally, resource allocation varies widely. (New York City receives nearly one-third of UASI funding; many of the country's populous metros do not receive any at all.)
FEMA's "Comprehensive Preparedness Guide 101" [PDF], released in 2010, tentatively positions itself as a textbook for emergency operations plans -- while acknowledging the critical differences between cities, and the virtues of bottom-up disaster planning (my italics): "This Guide recognizes that many jurisdictions across the country have already developed EOPs that address many emergency management operations. Therefore, CPG 101 establishes no immediate requirements, but suggests that the next iteration of all EOPs follow this guidance."
Above, a "functional" emergency operations plan format, which FEMA estimates is the most commonly used EOP. Courtesy FEMA "Comprehensive Preparedness Guide 101."
The Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP) further encourages a convergence of local and state planning strategies. Established in 2003 under the guidance of DHS and FEMA, EMAP is the country's first accreditation program for all-hazards plans -- the first comparative body that holds all municipal, state, and university emergency plans to a common, respective standard. In November, under the leadership of Rene Fielding, director of the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, Boston became one of only four cities nationwide to receive EMAP accreditation.
DHS-funded programs like Urban Shield also help spread best practices between cities -- as they move from region to region, they share lessons learned. (Two of the EMAP-accredited cities, Boston and Austin, have also held Urban Shield events.) Each Urban Shield simulation also draws dozens of professionals from other, smaller cities, who come to watch and learn.
• • • • •
Municipal departments also study each other's tactics. While a city like Boston might have a hard time learning from New York City -- the world's most sophisticated police force is actually too good to be helpful (they have over a dozen foreign operatives, for example, and in some countries rivaling the CIA for intelligence) -- it can draw lessons from elsewhere.
For U.S. cities, Israel is a particular area of focus. In October, officials from ten U.S. police departments (though not Boston) traveled to Israel to study counterterrorism, security and resilience. And Israel is a case study for more than just police: Mass General Hospital in Boston, which received dozens of victims from the Marathon bombings, had previously consulted Israeli doctors to “revamp their disaster-response planning.”
Resilience, in particular, is one area in which the Israelis excel -- and one that U.S. authorities have been eager to import to U.S. disaster areas.
"When you think about political violence, there’s 'How do we stop it?', and if we can’t stop it, 'How do we respond?'" says Victor Asal, director of the Homeland Security Certificate concentration at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. "One of the components is resilience – how do you get back to the way things were. And that’s different than finding out who did it."
"In Jerusalem, when a terrorist attack happens," he adds, "if you walk by six or 12 hours later, you wouldn’t know it. They clean it up and they get people going."
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in Bloomberg View on Tuesday, also cited Israeli resilience. A decade ago, arriving at a Jerusalem cafe the day after a terrorist attack there killed seven people, he found the scene nearly indistinguishable from any other day. "There is no satisfactory solution to the problem of mass anonymous violence," he writes. "As a result, resilience becomes the paramount response. Keeping your wits about you as individuals, as a government and as a culture is what counts."
Whether today's Boston lockdown, prompted by the manhunt for Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, constitutes a necessary security tactic or a failure of resilience is already the subject of considerable debate. "A shelter-in-place of this magnitude is unheard of," says Nelson, who could not think of a parallel occurance in recent U.S. history. It might be the first time since the Watts Riots of 1965 that so large an urban area has been placed on lockdown.
by stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jun 18, 2013 1:52 pm
James Baker's Overview
Current
President at Cytel Group, Inc.
Past
Assistant Sheriff at Alameda County Sheriff's Office
Education
Granada High School, Livermore California
Columbia College, Missouri
Connections
142 connections
Websites
Company Website
Company Website
Company Website
James Baker's Summary
Working with government regions throughout the United States, as well as Internationally, related to enhanced Homeland Security Programs.
Facilitating the internationally respected Urban Shield Exercise in critical regions in the United States and the Middle East
James Baker's Experience
President
Cytel Group, Inc.
August 2010 – Present (2 years 11 months) United States, Amman Jordan
Cytel Group is committed to developing a single, data driven strategy that outlines national risks, capabilities, vision, structure, as well as goals and objectives for enhanced homeland security. Cytel Group delivers proven products and processes to clearly track and articulate risks and capability and capacity, as well as accurately identify existing gaps and areas in need of improvement.
Cytel Group specializes in the following areas:
Intelligence Information and Analysis
Risk/Threat Assessment
Policy Review and/or Development
Major Program Review and/or Development
Emergency Operations and Crisis Management
Public Health and Medical Preparedness
Critical Incident Evaluation and After Action Reports (AAR)
Specialized/Customized International Training Programs
Leadership Development
Military/National-Local Government Integrated Exercises
Full-Scale Exercise Leaders
International Urban Shield Exercise Program Managers
Assistant Sheriff
Alameda County Sheriff's Office
Government Agency; 5001-10,000 employees; Government Administration industry
October 1989 – March 2011 (21 years 6 months) Oakland, California
The Alameda County Sheriff's Office has over 1,600 FTE positions with a budget of approximately $300 million. As Assistant Sheriff I was responsible for the Agency's budget development and fiscal management, human resources, training, planning and research, all national accreditations, and Information Technology. In addition, I was responsible for the Detention and Corrections Division and worked with the Regional Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) Region as an Advisory Board Member. I have a strong working knowledge of all operations, SWAT, EOD/Bomb Squad, Regional Homeland Security, etc.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jameslesterbaker
by Canadian_watcher » Tue Jun 25, 2013 12:36 am
Boston Bombings: Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a Double Agent Recruited by the FBI?
By Prof Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, June 24, 2013
Amid the swirl of mysteries surrounding the alleged Boston bombers, one fact, barely touched upon in the mainstream U.S. media, stands out: There is a strong possibility that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers, was a double agent, perhaps recruited by the FBI.
If Tsarnaev was a double agent, he would be just one of thousands of young people coerced by the FBI, as the price for settling a minor legal problem, into a dangerous career as an informant.
That he was so coerced is the easiest explanation for two seemingly incompatible incidents in his life:
The first is that he returned to Russia in 2012, ostensibly to renew his Russian passport so he could file an application for US citizenship.
The second is that Tsarnaev then jeopardized his citizenship application with conspicuous, provocative — almost theatrical — behavior that seemed more caricature than characteristic of a Muslim extremist.
False Notes
While walking around in flashy western clothes in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, he visited his cousin, Magomed Kartashov, a prominent Islamist leader, already on the Russians’ radar. The two reportedly spent hours discussing Tsarnaev’s wish to join a terrorist cell there in the Caucasus. Later, Russian authorities asked Kartashov if he had tried to incite Tsarnaev with “extremist” views. Kartashov said it was the other way around: he had tried to convince Tsarnaev that “violent methods are not right.”
Experts agree that Tsarnaev could not have expected such provocative activity to escape the notice of the vigilant Russian authorities.
Back in America, Tsarnaev again called attention to himself as a radical Muslim. Just one month after he returned from his trip, a YouTube page that appeared to belong to him featured multiple jihadist videos that he had purportedly endorsed.
And in January 2013, he got himself thrown out of a mosque in Cambridge for shouting at a speaker who compared the Prophet Mohammed to Martin Luther King Jr. Tsarnaev rarely attended this mosque, but he must have known it was moderate. (He had done something similar the previous November at the same mosque.) Typically, jihadists are trained to blend in, to be as inconspicuous as possible. Did Tsarnaev go to this mosque with the express intent of smoking out possible radicals?
The key to Tsarnaev’s puzzling behavior may lie in the answer to another question: when exactly did Tsarnaev first come to the attention of the FBI? The timeline offered by the agency, and duly reported in the mainstream media, has been inconsistent. One story line focused on the FBI’s response to an alert from Russian authorities.
Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times, wrote, on April 24, 2013,
The first Russian request came in March 2011 through the F.B.I.’s office in the United States Embassy in Moscow. The one-page request said Mr. Tsarnaev ”had changed drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to a part of Russia “to join unspecified underground groups.”
The Russian request was reportedly based on intercepted phone calls between Tsarnaev’s mother and an unidentified person (The Guardian [London], April 21, 2013). According to another source, several calls were intercepted, including one between Tsarnaev and his mother.
So was it the Russian alert in March 2011 that first prompted the FBI to investigate Tsarnaev? This conclusion seems undermined by another report in the Times—written four days earlier by the same two reporters plus a third– that dated the agency’s first contact with Tamerlan and family members at least two months earlier, in January 2011.
If the FBI interviewed Tsarnaev before the Russians asked them to, then what prompted the agency’s interest in him? Were his contacts here as well as in Russia considered useful to American counterintelligence?
The Canadian Connection
Although it’s not known why the Russians were intercepting phone calls involving the Tsarnaevs, one reason might have been Tamerlan’s connection, direct or indirect, with a Canadian terrorist named William Plotnikov. According to USA Today, a Russian security official told the AP that
Plotnikov had been detained in Dagestan in December 2010 on suspicion of having ties to the militants and during his interrogation was forced to hand over a list of social networking friends from the United States and Canada who like him had once lived in Russia, Novaya Gazeta reported. The newspaper said Tsarnaev’s name was on that list, bringing him for the first time to the attention of Russia’s secret services.
According to a slightly different version, Plotnikov, “while under interrogation in the militant hotbed of Dagestan, named Tsarnaev as a fellow extremist.”
The similar backgrounds of Plotnikov and Tsarnaev make it likely that they had indeed been in contact. Both were recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Both had successful boxing careers in North America, and both surprised their friends by converting to Islamist extremism.
Plotnikov was a member of the Caucasus Emirate, an al-Qaeda ally, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been searching for him since 2010. By 2011 the United States had joined the Russians in targeting this terrorist group as an al-Qaeda ally, and had offered $5 million for information leading to the capture of the group’s leader Dokka Umarov. (Moscow Times, May 27, 2011)
Plotnikov was killed in July 2012 in a shootout between militants and police in Dagestan. Tsarnaev left Dagestan for America two days after Plotnikov was killed.
US and Russia Share Concerns
Tsarnaev’s hopes for a Russian passport would have been put at risk by his openly provocative behavior in Dagestan –unless he was acting as an informant. But for which government, the U.S. or Russia?
The United States and Russia have two shared concerns in the “arc of crisis” stretching from Afghanistan to the Caucasus – terrorism and drugs. The two problems are interrelated, because drugs, especially in the Caucasus, help finance terror operations. This vitally affects Russia, both because it has one of the highest heroin death rates in the world, and even more because some of its member republics, like Dagestan, are up to 80 percent Muslim. This shared concern has led to a successful joint US-Russia anti-drug operation in Afghanistan.
Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev caught up in a similar counter-intelligence operation?
The FBI’s Dysfunctional Informant Program
One of the more controversial features of the FBI’s informant program is the frequency with which FBI agents coerce young people into the dangerous role of informant, as a price for settling a minor legal problem. Tsarnaev fits the mold. His successful career as a boxer was interrupted and his application for U.S. citizenship was held up (and perhaps denied) because “a 2009 domestic violence complaint was standing in his way.” This alone would mark him as a candidate for recruitment.
Thousands of vulnerable young people avoid our overcrowded prisons by agreeing to become snitches, sometimes wearing a wire. In this way a person whose only crime may have been selling marijuana to a friend can end up risking his career and even his life. And for what?
According to Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker,
The snitch-based system has proved notoriously unreliable, fuelling wrongful convictions. In 2000, more than twenty innocent African-American men in Hearne, Texas, were arrested on cocaine charges, based on the false accusations of an informant seeking to escape a burglary charge. This incident, and a number of others like it, prompted calls for national legislation to regulate informant use.
After 9/11, the coercive techniques of the FBI drug war, along with half of the agents using them, were redirected to surveillance of Muslims. The emphasis was no longer on investigation of specific crimes, but the recruitment of spies to report on all Muslim communities.
In 2005 the FBI’s Office of the Inspector General found that a high percentage of cases involving informants contained violations of the FBI’s own guidelines. Its report noted that since 2001 the rules had been loosened to reflect the new emphasis on intelligence gathering and. by extension, the bureau’s urgent need for informants.
According to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, … nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants—who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own—have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.
A writer for Mother Jones, Trevor Aaronson, also investigated the FBI’s informant-led terrorism cases for over a year; he too found that in a number of cases, “the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity.”
Refuse the FBI and See What Happens
And what happens to Muslims who refuse to become spies? The case of Ahmadullah Niazi is not atypical. Niazi was one of several members of a California mosque who sought a restraining court order against another member–actually an FBI informant–who was flagrantly advocating violence in their midst. When Niazi was subsequently asked to become an informant himself and refused, he was arrested on charges of lying to immigration officials about alleged family connections to a member of Al Qaeda. The charges were ultimately withdrawn, but by then both Niazi and his wife had lost their jobs.
Another Muslim, Khalifa al-Akili, when pressured to become an informant, complained to the Guardian newspaper in London that “he believed he was the target of an FBI ‘entrapment’ sting.” One day after the Guardian contacted al-Akili, the FBI arrested him on a felony charge for illegal gun possession, based on the fact that two years earlier he had used a friend’s rifle (at a firing range), something he was prohibited from doing since he already had a drug conviction on his record. Al-Akili was held without bail as a potential threat to the public, and ultimately convicted.
These recruitments were taking please in a climate of fear. In addition to the tens of thousands of Muslims in America who were interviewed or investigated after 9/11, there were also by 2003 (according to an American imam’s compilation of US Government figures), 6,483 detained or arrested, 3,208 deported, 13,434 in process of deportation, and 144,513 interviewed and then registered under a Special Registration program of the Justice Department.
It is instructive to study how the FBI handled drone victim Anwar al-Awlaki. Right after 9/11, Awlaki was the “go-to” imam for the U.S media, because of his willingness to denounce the atrocity as anti-Islamic. But a few years earlier, while a Muslim cleric in San Diego, he had been twice arrested and convicted for soliciting prostitutes. According to Awlaki, he had been set up both times, because the U.S. government had been trying to recruit him as a spy:
In 1996 while waiting at a traffic light in my minivan a middle aged woman knocked on the window of the passenger seat. By the time I rolled down the window and before even myself or the woman uttering a word I was surrounded by police officers who had me come out of my vehicle only to be handcuffed. I was accused of soliciting a prostitute and then released. They made it a point to make me know in no uncertain terms that the woman was an undercover cop. I didn’t know what to make of the incident. However a few days later came the answer. I was visited by two men who introduced themselves as officials with the US government … and that they are interested in my cooperation with them. When I asked what cooperation did they expect, they responded by saying that they are interested in having me liaise with them concerning the Muslim community of San Diego. I was greatly irritated by such an offer and made it clear to them that they should never expect such cooperation from myself. I never heard back from them again until in 1998 when I was approached by a woman, this time from my window and again I was surrounded by police officers who this time had go to court. This time I was told that this is a sting operation and you would not be able to get out of it.
Awlaki’s allegations may have been at least partly true. In 2002, when he came under suspicion in Operation Green Quest, an investigation of Muslim nonprofit organizations, the FBI reportedly did try to flip him, using prostitution charges.
According to U.S. News,
FBI agents hoped al-Awlaki might cooperate with the 9/11 probe if they could nab him on similar charges in Virginia. FBI sources say agents observed the imam allegedly taking Washington-area prostitutes into Virginia and contemplated using a federal statute usually reserved for nabbing pimps who transport prostitutes across state lines.
Were the FBI’s recruitment efforts successful? Another Muslim “person of interest,” Ali al-Timimi, tells a strange tale about al-Awlaki’s unnaturally provocative behavior:
When Awlaki came to his home, Timimi said, he started talking about recruiting Western jihadists. “Ali had never, in his whole life, even talked to the guy or met him,” Timimi’s lawyer, Edward MacMahon, told me. “Awlaki just showed up at his house and asked him if he could assist him in finding young men to join the jihad.” MacMahon said that Timimi was suspicious of Awlaki showing up “completely out of the blue” (Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars, 71).
Timimi’s attorneys argued that Awlaki was wearing a wire at the time, and asked that the US Government produce the tapes, which would show Timimi’s rejection of Awlaki’s terrorist request. The Government refused, on the grounds that “We are aware of no authority for this request.” Timimi, a promising research scientist, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Another glaring indication that Awlaki had been flipped is the ease with which he was able to return to the US from studies in Yemen in 2002, even though there was outstanding warrant for his arrest.
On October 9, 2002, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Colorado “abruptly filed a motion to have the warrant for Awlaki’s arrest vacated and dismissed.”
On October 10, Awlaki and his family arrived at JFK airport on a flight from Saudi Arabia. After a brief period of confusion, Customs officials released them and recorded later that the FBI had told them “the warrant had been removed on 10/9.” In fact, documents show the warrant was still active, and was only vacated later that day.
Asked to comment on these anomalies, former FBI agents indicated there were only two likely explanations: either the bureau let the cleric into the country to track him for intelligence, or the bureau wanted to work with him as a friendly contact.
Does a similar analysis apply to the FBI’s curious “relationship” with Tamerlan Tsarnaev?
Despite Tsarnaev’s inflammatory behavior, as reported by the Russians and also in this country, a senior law enforcement official told the New York Times that intelligence agencies never followed up on Tsarnaev once he returned to the U.S., because their investigation “did not turn up anything and it did not have the legal authority to keep tabs on him”
This claim sounds strange in the light of recent revelations about widespread surveillance of telephone and Internet traffic of ordinary Americans and the ease with which law enforcement officials obtain warrants to probe more deeply into the activities of anyone suspected of ties to “terrorists.”
The case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, like that of Anwar al-Awlaki, leaves many unanswered questions. But one thing seems clear: the FBI’s informant program, especially when dealing with the War on Terror, has proliferated wildly out of control.
by The Consul » Tue Jun 25, 2013 1:14 am
by pianoblues » Tue Jun 25, 2013 2:46 am
And here is my original, unpublished conclusion to my story:
One cannot, in a brief article, to do justice to the horrendous account of how the U.S. harassment of Awlaki and other Muslims changed him from an imam denouncing terrorist attacks into a fugitive calling for jihad against America. Of course we cannot know what Awlaki’s actual beliefs were at any moment, and it is quite possible that Awlaki’s apparent performance as an informant with Timimi was a sham on two levels, designed to deceive not only Timimi but also the FBI.
The Awlaki case leaves us with similar unanswered questions about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s behavior. Even if Tsarnaev was coerced by legal problems into becoming an informant, this knowledge would tell us little of his actual opinions about jihad. But if he was indeed coerced in this way, this would add him to the depressing and lengthening list of other Muslims who have been accused of murders after also having allegedly acted as double agents. The list ranges from the Nairobi Embassy bomber Ali Mohamed in the United States to Haroon Rashid Aswat (a suspected mastermind of the London subway bombings in 2005), to the French gunman Mohamed Merah in France.
It is important to recognize that some of these double agents – such as Merah – may have been doubly coerced: coerced first by an agency to become informants – and then, when uncovered by those they targeted, coerced to commit a crime. The dysfunctional scandal that is the FBI’s current informants program would have yet another horror added to it, if it turned out that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who had vulnerable family back in Dagestan, had been doubly coerced in this fashion.
In conclusion, the notion that Tsarnaev acted in Dagestan as a double agent cannot be proven, but is in light of what we know the most likely explanation for his provocative behavior in Dagestan. What is absolutely certain however is that the FBI’s informant program, especially when dealing with the War of Drugs or the War on Terror, has proliferated wildly out of control; and needs to be brought back to strict conformance with FBI guidelines.
{My text was footnoted, but FaceBook does not transmit footnotes.]
I do not necessarily subscribe to the hypothesis that Tamerlan was doubly coerced, which I first put forward three weeks ago in a draft version of this article. If we are going to guess, my first guess now might be that he and Dzhokar thought they were playing a role as part of a Craft International antiterrorist drill.
by pianoblues » Tue Jun 25, 2013 5:01 am
The Consul » Tue Jun 25, 2013 5:14 am wrote:A good journalist would look at the money they spent and who they were with when they were spending it, especially Tamerlane.
by stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jun 25, 2013 5:07 pm
OpEdNews Op Eds 6/6/2013 at 15:34:30
Is This the Man Who "Radicalized" Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?
By Joe Giambrone
by From Brian Glyn Williams Website
Brian Glyn Williams (right)
Source: brianglynwilliams.com
"I hope I didn't contribute to it. That kid and his brother identified with the Chechen struggle." --Brian Glyn Williams, South Coast Today , April 19th 2013
Who is Brian Glyn Williams, and why was he telling his local newspaper such things relating to the alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? This question may be highly relevant to our understanding of the bombing and of the longstanding Chechen insurgency itself. It was Williams who contacted South Coast Today reporter Steve Urbon first, and not vice-versa. This important article indicates a series of contacts between professor Williams and the boy who would later be accused of terrorism and mass murder at the 2013 Boston Marathon.
Brian Glyn Williams bills himself as an associate professor of Islamic History at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. That's where his byline tends to stop, abridged as it is. Recently however, Williams has come clean about his CIA past as a field operative in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and around Central Asia in the early 2000's. He studied, of all things, the motivations of "suicide bombers," establishing himself as an expert on the subject. Professor Williams also has a longtime association with the Jamestown Foundation, created by the head of the CIA in 1984 and steered by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Williams' role as an "analyst" for Jamestown Foundation is usually also omitted from his byline, when his editorials appear in such mainstream journals as the Huffington Post, The Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere. Such failure to disclose his personal connections to US intelligence and to an intelligence-connected front organization mirrors his non-disclosure concerning his personal relationship with the alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in those very same publications.
A website called Major History profiled Professor Williams in March of 2013. There they wrote, "[Brian Glyn Williams'] work has taken him to " Afghanistan to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. Williams was tasked with helping law enforcement and intelligence agencies understand the motivations and behaviors of suicide bombers"" As Williams' formal education is in history, rather than psychological profiling, this may seem a bit out of the ordinary. "[Williams'] findings about suicide bombings in Afghanistan were informed by his understanding of tribal identities as much as fervor for the Jihadist movement. He came to these conclusions after being sent to Afghanistan by the CIA to perform firsthand research on these types of attacks. This type of fieldwork is unusual for most academics but especially for historians..."
Which version of Brian Glyn Williams are we reading?
In 2008 Williams wrote a Field Report on Suicide Bombers of Afghanistan, for the Middle East Policy journal. No indication was given to readers that his specific trip to Afghanistan was as a CIA operative. That disclosure does not seem to have been made until March of 2013. In the piece, Dr. Williams, a lowly associate professor of Islamic History, said, ""it was my research on Afghanistan's suicide bombers that had drawn me from the safety of my world to the Pashtun tribal regions"" That may be so, but it is certainly not the entire story.
Williams' elaborate 2011 defense of the CIA's drone assassination campaign is an exercise in bolstering the CIA's policies without fully disclosing his own linkages or self-interests. Writing in the West Point CTC Sentinel , "Brian Glyn Williams is Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He formerly taught at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies." That's all that Williams discloses in Accuracy of the U.S. Drone Campaign: The Views of a Pakistani General.
FrontPage Magazine managed to locate Brian Glyn Williams after the Boston Marathon bombings and noted, "Professor Brian Glyn Williams teaches the only course in the country about the Chechen wars and said Dzokhar emailed him questions in the spring of 2011." No mention of CIA or Jamestown, but was this at all unexpected given Williams' persistent pattern of non-disclosures?
As Williams is billed as the sole academic in the US worth talking to about the Chechen wars, he should quite know all about the Islamic Jihad that has raged there since the 90's and which FrontPage describes clearly just further down in the article. " When Osama Bin Laden set up a training camp in Chechnya in 1995, he wanted to "establish a worldwide Islamic state"'"
Who are the Chechen rebel "commanders?"
Canadian Broadcasting (CBC) reported in 2010 , "Last year, a charismatic rebel commander calling himself Said Buryatsky bragged on the rebel website Kavkaz Center he was training new suicide bombers". Buryatsky" studied for several years in Saudi Arabia" A new leader, Dokka Umarov, emerged declaring the new goal was to separate all six Muslim majority provinces in the Russian Caucasus from the Russian Federation, and create a new Islamic state ruled by Sharia law. Admired for his Saudi religious education Buryatsky quickly became Umarov's chief ideologist. He also became a valued military strategist."
Doku Umarov is the current leader of the Chechen insurgency, and he is known as "Russia's Bin Laden." His website Kavkaz Center is hosted in Finland. On June 29th of 2010 the US State Department designated Doku Umarov a "global terrorist." In June of 2012 Finnish prosecutors were reported to have linked the US State Department itself to funding for Doku Umarov's website operations -- the Kavkaz Center.
In April of 2013, Brian Glyn Williams suggested to his Huffington Post readers to visit the Kavkaz Center website to see that these Chechens allegedly don't target Americans. Williams claimed, "While the small number of Chechen rebels were later radicalized in the 2000s and came to see their war for national independence as a defensive jihad, they had no reason to attack distant America."
Williams, of course, knows that an Al Qaeda training camp was established in Chechnya in 1995. He suggests, "For a view into their world see the Chechen rebels' website Kavkaz Center ." The owner of that website in Finland, Mikael Storsjo received a "four-month suspended sentence" in 2012 for "assisting Chechen terrorists to enter Finland illegally."
Brian Glyn Williams knows full well that Doku Umarov is a terrorist and that the bombings gleefully boasted about on his Jihad website Kavkaz Center are in fact acts of terrorism. As Umarov is officially designated a "global terrorist" by the US government itself, should Mr. Williams be supporting him, his group and his website rhetorically?
More to the point: Did Williams recommend this website and its activities to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?
The distinction that Williams stresses repeatedly is that "they had no reason to attack distant America." The clear implication here is that terrorist attacks against Russians are of no concern and should not be of concern to readers.
Doku Umarov's Al Qaeda-connected group is famous for the massacre of almost 400 civilians at a school in Beslan, Russia in 2004. FrontPage continues its summation of more recent attacks: ""a November 2009 train bombing that killed 28; suicide bombings in a Moscow subway by female operatives in March 2010 that killed 40; and an airport bombing in January 2011 that killed 36."
Upon reading Brian Glyn Williams suggestion in the Huffington Post to visit Kavkaz, I clicked the link and found this recent post (5/20/13): " Two blasts in Dagestan killed and injured more than 50 puppets [21:56] Russian invaders reported that 2 blasts went off within an interval of 15 minutes in Shamilkala, the capital the Caucasus Emirate's Province of Dagestan."
by Taken From Kavkaz Center Homepage
Source: Kavkaz Center Homepage (5/20/13)
One must infer that the above is acceptable in Mr. Brian Glyn Williams' view, as it does not target Americans. While Williams vehemently denies any connection between the Chechens and Saudi Wahabbis, the Chechen commanders themselves may see it quite differently.
In the South Coast Today report by Steve Urbon, Brian Glyn Williams described his communications with the younger Tsarnaev brother. "[Dzhokhar] wanted to learn more about Chechnya, who the fighters were, who the commanders were. I sort of gave him background." What Mr. Williams considers "background" is the key question here, and his specific emails and any other correspondence with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be investigated fully.
The "commanders" were, and are, Doku Umarov, Said Buryatsky and a distinguished gentleman named Shamil Basayev. Basayev arranged for 850 hostages to be taken at a theater in Moscow in 2002, demanding Russia give up the province of Chechnya and pull out. During the siege 130 civilians died as well as all 40 of Basayev's armed terrorists.
When Williams defends the Chechen "cause" and "struggle", just which cause is he defending exactly?
Williams next tells his Huffington Post readers, "It seems that the older Tamerlan then converted his brother Dzhokar to the fanatical cause". Ah, but here is where we must insist on a full disclosure from Mr. Brian Glyn Williams himself.
To a Fox News audience, "Williams said that after [Dzhokhar] contacted him, he emailed back a syllabus. He said he didn't even remember the interaction until he talked to a friend."
In the South Coast Today , however, "Williams recalled [Dzhokhar] clearly, though the two never met and communicated by email, Williams sending him links to academic papers he's published and books he recommended." Williams then made his case for propagandizing the boy. "As Williams put it, an ancient civilization was being wiped away... there are stories of mass killings, death camps, mass graves, torture, destruction."
In the Fox report Williams reiterated his recurring thesis. "He said the official [Chechen rebel] leadership is more secular and moderate, but there is an extremist element that sees the Russians as "infidels. '" That is the story of the Chechen conflict that Williams peddles to whomever will listen, including the eager students at the University of Massachusetts and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But what is secular or moderate about Mr. Umarov and his Saudi-trained chief ideologist and suicide bomber trainer, Mr. Buryatsky? It is they who are responsible for the Kavkaz Center, which Brian Glyn Williams linked to in his Huffington Post piece.
In another article that Williams wrote a week after the Boston bombing, Who Are The Chechens? , he told us, "Having taught what is perhaps the only class in America, if not the world, on this obscure land for nine years"" and nothing about his CIA-contracted field work. If ever a conflict of interest should be disclosed, then this is surely that time. The man taught about a foreign insurgency in Russia at a public University for nearly a decade despite being a field operative on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency. He apparently never disclosed this fact at the time, nor even in this post-bombing article. It remains a mystery why he chose to disclose his CIA past at all in Major History in March of this year. One motivation may have come from the publisher of his new book "Predators: The CIA's Drone War on al Qaeda," where it is also mentioned . Williams' CIA bona fides may be seen as a useful marketing blurb to sell the book to readers. In this new era of Zero Dark Thirty the CIA is overwhelmingly sold to the American public as being the good guys, their Church Commission dirty laundry revelations long since forgotten.
Never disclosed in Williams' one-sided portrayal of his subject matter is the United States' covert role in sponsoring, funding and encouraging Jihad against first the Soviets in Afghanistan (1979), and then in former republics of the Soviet Union including Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya and Dagestan. For all the inspiring talk of desperate "David versus Goliath" Chechen Jihadist warriors, the proxy nature of these insurgencies does not merit any mention by the professor.
What is the Jamestown Foundation?
by Screenshot of Jamestown Foundation Website
This NGO was founded in 1984 by William Casey, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Reagan, as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski and exiled Soviet-bloc intelligence defectors. It was a Cold War information collection and propaganda source used to strategically weaken the Soviet Union and to advance US interests in Asia, a mission that continues today undeterred. SourceWatch states, "Jamestown's work has contributed directly to the spread of democracy and personal freedom in the former Communist Bloc countries." In other words it is an active political player in the region. It also has an extensive record of influencing the internal politics of "Communist Bloc countries" so that they become "former."
Zbigniew Brzezinski is famous for designing and launching the 1979 Jihad in Afghanistan that drew the Soviets into their own "Vietnam," thereby weakening Soviet Russia and draining its resources on a US-engineered and supported proxy war. The arms and fighters flowed through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia primarily, in partnership with the CIA. Radical Islamic fighters were recruited from all over the Arab world to go fight a Jihad in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.
Brzezinski bragged about this success against the Soviets and simultaneously dismissed concerns over Islamic fundamentalism. "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" Brzezinski's 1997 book The Grand Chessboard predicted major wars in Central Asia, the oil, gas and mineral rich Caspian region and the Caucasus as necessary for insuring America's "primacy" in the world. His goal is based upon world domination by America and its allies, and his entire career has been in service to this goal. Brzezinski holds the highest position at the Jamestown Foundation.
Currently, says SourceWatch: "Global Terrorism Analysis is a subset of The Jamestown Foundation which publishes three journals, Terrorism Monitor" Spotlight on Terror" and "Terrorism Focus." It also publishes, "Chechnya Weekly." Jamestown boasts a lengthy roster of paid analysts, and Brian Glyn Williams is a longtime contributor.
Former National Security Agency officer Wayne Madsen says , "The Jamestown Foundation is part of a neo-conservative network that re-branded itself after the Cold War from being anti-Soviet and anti-Communist to one that is anti-Russian and "pro-democracy.'" Madsen notes several further connections. "The network not only consists of Jamestown and the Caucasus Fund but also other groups funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the [George Soros] Open Society Institute (OSI).
Jamestown and Caucasus Fund were flagged by Georgian state security as holding training seminars in 2012 attended by none other than Tamerlan Tsarnaev during his trip to Russia in the first half of the year. This second connection between Jamestown Foundation and the Tsarnaev brothers bolsters the idea that the two brothers were being recruited by US intelligence and were not "lone wolves" as is presented uncritically across the US corporate media spectrum. A further connection to both the CIA and to USAID leads directly to the boys' uncle Ruslan Tsarni . That's three. And now we have reasonable suspicion to investigate further persons associated with these shady and highly-motivated organizations.
USAID, which uncle Ruslan Tsarni worked with -- or more likely for -- since the 1990s, was recently expelled from Russia for interfering in the internal politics of that country. This interference is a consistent pattern, one that has flipped multiple countries from the Russian alliance to the NATO/US alliance, including Georgia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine.
Back to Chechnya
Brian Glyn Williams' so-called expertise on the Chechen conflict stems directly from official US policy since the Cold War, and that is a policy to break up the Soviet Union and Russia in order to weaken it, and to therefore strengthen the US / NATO alliance and expand it into Asia. The dissolution of Chechnya and Dagestan is seen as a continuation of the break-up of the rest of the Soviet Union, despite Chechnya being a part of Russia for 150 years. The Chechen insurgency of the 1990s sprung up in similar fashion to other radical Islamic insurgencies promoted by the US and its allies throughout Central Asia. Numerous foreign fighters flooded in to fight the Russians in similar fashion to the Afghanistan Jihad, also known as Operation Cyclone.
Brian Glyn Williams' 2004 paper on the subject provides clues to his motivations, and they are far from neutral or academic. In From "Secessionist Rebels" to "Al-Qaeda Shock Brigades": Assessing Russia's Efforts to Extend the Post-September 11th War on Terror to Chechnya, Williams wrote, ""Condoleeza Rice, tellingly proclaimed "not every Chechen is a terrorist and the Chechens' legitimate aspirations for a political solution should be pursued by the Russian government.'"
In other words, the US demanded that secession and the break-up of Russia be permitted by the Russian government. When the United States itself faced secession and break-up in 1860, this was not exactly welcomed by those in power.
The strategy of defining terrorists working in the interests of US policymakers as "freedom fighters" and dismissing their atrocities by characterizing them as the work of a small "minority," seems to originate with Zbigniew Brzezinski. Williams quotes Brzezinski in the piece: "What should be done? To start with the US should not fall for Russia's entreaty that 'we are allies against Osama bin Laden'... Terrorism is neither the geopolitical nor moral challenge here [in Chechnya]."
This is an ideological foundation for ignoring terrorism whenever and wherever it suits US interests. Such has been the policy for a long, long time and in the Muslim world easily shown back to 1979. Terrorism in Chechnya is described by Professor Williams as not being from the majority, but from a minority. Essentially a straw man argument, no one would claim that terrorists are a majority in the first place. This exact argument is used by US apologists concerning Syria today in regards to the Al Qaeda connected Al Nusra Brigades operating there.
In The Atlantic on April 26th of this year, Brian Glyn Williams told American readers, "There is a minority among the rebels that subscribe to the global view of jihad. But overall Chechens are very pro-American and pro-Western." The first sentence claims a minority "among the rebels," but the second statement seeks to bolster the first claim by mentioning "overall" about Chechen civilians in general. The first claim, however is false, and the actual fighters committing bombings, hostage takings and shootings in Russia on behalf of Chechen independence are connected with Doku Umarov and his Jihad to establish Sharia Law. Therefore Williams is wrong on the facts today and misleading his readers.
One of the most useful sources of information to debunk Brian Glyn Williams is, surprisingly enough, Brian Glyn Williams' own papers, like the 2004 piece cited above. "" President Bush went on to declare that "Arab terrorists' linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization were operating on Chechen territory and ought to be "brought to justice.'28 U. S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, went a step further and proclaimed "Russia is fighting terrorists in Chechnya, there is no question about that, and we understand that." His entire paper reads like a Cold War propaganda piece designed to dispute the assessment of even Bush and Powell and to put forth the myth that the Chechens are not in any way, shape or form linked to Al Qaeda, which is a demonstrably false premise. Williams mentions that the Taliban recognized the breakaway Chechen Emirate as a legitimate government in 2000, but he dismisses this fact as a "purely symbolic gesture."
Remember, this is the man who is currently authoring a book to destroy the idea that Chechen terrorism is in any way linked to Al Qaeda. His April 19th interview with Steve Urbon ended with, "[Chechens] are not Al Qaeda. Repeat: They are not Al Qaeda." Chechen fighters, however, are overwhelmingly radical Islamists, and this is where Williams is debunked as a tale spinner.
In the Huffington Post , April 25th, Williams wrote, "I myself personally traveled to Afghanistan in 2003 and interviewed numerous Taliban prisoners of war held by Northern Alliance Uzbek General Dostum." Williams does not disclose his CIA assignment on that trip nor who this General Dostum actually is . Patrick Cockburn described Dostum as follows. "In northern Afghanistan General Rashid Dostum, a warlord of notorious brutality but an ally of the CIA, had hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners buried alive or packed into containers to suffocate."
Here with Dostum and friends, the ever-objective Professor Williams found a consistent story: no Chechens. "None of them had ever seen or heard of Chechens; it was like looking for the Chechen Big Foot ." That's a nice story, but is it the truth?
In his 2004 report, Williams tells how this very question was essentially the purpose of his mission, his CIA assignment. "My goal was to see if any of these prisoners of war had seen or fought alongside one of the "thousands' of "Chechen die-hard Al Qaeda fanatics' reported to have fought against U. S. forces in the Afghan theater." His mission was to make the distinction between Chechens and Al Qaeda, apparently at the behest of the CIA. He has been dutifully repeating this claim ever since. His new book to be released next year, entitled "Inferno in the Caucus: The Chechen insurgency and the Mirage of Al Qaeda," will attempt to make this same argument again.
Mark Ames at NSFWCorp was first to challenge Wiliams' "Chechen Big Foot" claim. Ames compiled a list of articles to dispute Williams.
"[Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld told reporters , "There's Chinese in there, there's Chechens in there"'" Agence France-Presse, on March 22, 2002: ""Chechen fighters in Afghanistan who have thrown their lot in with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network." Even US Generals were quoted specifically referring to Chechens in Afghanistan and allied with Bin Laden. "We know the history of the Chechens. They are good fighters and they are very brutal," [US Major General Frank] Hagenbeck said. The general said he has heard of reports out of the Pentagon that a unit of 100-150 Chechens had moved into southern Afghanistan." And here is more evidence that Brian Glyn Williams claims does not exist: "General Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces, said in Moscow Thursday that Chechen fighters were among the al-Qaeda fighters taken prisoner by US troops but gave no figures." The New York Times reported, "Between 100 and 200 Qaeda and ''non-Afghan'' fighters, including Arabs, Chechens and Uzbeks, have been killed in heavy fighting so far, General Franks said..." During the battle of Tora Bora the NY Times reported Chechens as the fiercest fighters, "By all accounts, the Arab and Chechen fighters have put up the stiffest resistance."
Williams also tied his own 2003 mission to Afghanistan with official US policy changes during that time period, "" the White House's evolving foreign policy had, by 2003, come to have a more balanced view of the Chechen separatists and a three-dimensional view of their supposed links to international terrorism. The U. S. State Department" limited itself to designating several fringe Chechen terrorists groups led by rogue field commander Shamil Basayev as "Foreign Terrorist Organizations.'"
Williams' entire career aligns with this policy change. His field work was directly in service of bolstering this view and gathering evidence in support of maintaining good relations and support for Chechen "freedom fighters" who persist to this day in trying to break away from Russia. This is Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard in action.
Security Holes Are Part of the Game
Mark Ames at NSFW details how this very same policy of treating Chechen terrorists as "freedom fighters" directly impacted the September 11th attacks, in particular the thwarted investigation of "20th hijacker" Zacharias Moussaoui one month before the attacks.
""Minneapolis agent Harry Samit got the US Embassies in Paris and London to look into Moussaoui's background," said Ames. "The FBI's legal attaché in Paris got back to Minneapolis with some startling news establishing a link between Moussoui and the Saudi warlord in Chechnya, Khattab. The only problem was that by August 2001, US policy did not recognize the Chechen rebels as terrorists with links to Al Qaeda or Bin Laden."
An FBI memo already established al Khattab as an Al Qaeda terrorist, but the investigation of Moussaoui's laptop was denied to the FBI Minneapolis officers and to Coleen Rowley, the legal advisor there. "True, there was an FBI memo on the FBI director Louis Freeh's desk explicitly warning that terrorists linked to Khattab and Bin Laden were planning a major attack, but the memo was dismissed, and the FBI man in Washington DC, who should have seen that memo but claims he didn't, rebuffed Minneapolis and shut down their requests for a warrant to look in Moussaoui's laptop."
Brian Glyn Williams mentions Khattab in other articles, acknowledging his Saudi roots, funding and role in setting up training camps in Chechnya in 1995. Williams also admits that the indigenous Chechen rebel leadership made a strategic alliance with Khattab and his Al Qaeda support network in 1999. Williams himself wrote, "Although the Russian Federation had initially limited its retaliatory bombing strikes to Khattab's camps in southeastern Chechnya, the Kremlin launched a total invasion of Chechnya in October 1999. This indiscriminate invasion drove Chechnya's moderate leadership (the only force in Chechnya that might have assisted in expelling the foreign jihadis) into a strategic alliance with Khattab and his IIB." Straight from the horse's mouth. Sounding a lot like those attempting to hold Williams to account, he himself told of the foreign Jihadist infusion, Islamists who travelled into Chechnya to engage in warfare and terrorism. Wrote Williams, "Young Egyptians, Yemenis, Saudis, Pakistanis, Turks, etc. continue to make their way at great risk to Chechnya to assist the Chechens in their uneven struggle. Many of those who have fought in Chechnya have been radicalized by their experience as front line jihadis." Thorough as the good professor is, he even places Al Qaeda's number 2 at the time, and now top Al Qaeda leader Zawahiri in Dagestan. "December 1996. Ayman al Zawaheri, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and member of Al Qaeda's ruling troika, travels to Dagestan in search of a new base of operations"" These Chechen/Al Qaeda links, many of which are admitted to by Williams himself, are striking and irrefutable... but inconvenient for current policy makers. Excerpts are taken from, "The 'Chechen Arabs': An Introduction To The Real Al-Qaeda Terrorists From Chechnya," Jamestown Foundation, Publication: Terrorism Monitor Volume: 2 Issue: 1 , May 5, 2005, by Brian Glyn Williams.
So what the hell was Brian Glyn Williams telling Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?
And for how long? How many communications? What was motivating these communications? What is the relationship between Jamestown Foundation and ongoing covert operations in the Caucasus? What was the relationship of Jamestown Foundation to Tamerlan Tsarnaev on his trip to Dagestan in 2012? What is the relationship between the brothers and their uncle Ruslan Tsarnai and to his former father in law, CIA mastermind Graham Fuller? How did individuals in US intelligence cancel threat warnings issued on Tamerlan Tsarnaev? Who hid Tamerlan Tsarnaev's threat warnings from local Boston police and from members of the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force?
Brian Glyn Williams ended his 2005 article with this statement: "As for the Chechens themselves, the world awaits the arrest of a single Chechen by coalition forces for involvement in Al Qaeda terrorism anywhere in the globe." What a bit of irony that the Chechen arrested for terrorism in Boston was communicating directly with Brian Glyn Williams and was mentored in his Chechen roots and heritage by Williams personally. We can only hope that the FBI thoroughly investigates what Williams told Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and which specific "commanders" and "fighters" he vouched for and personally recommended to the boy.
All emphases were added.
Joe Giambrone publishes Politcal Film Blog (@polfilmblog), and he dares anyone to try this Hell of a Deal .
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