Fire: The Overlooked Threat.

People sometimes obsess over the potential threat posed by terrorist attacks that use things such as chemical weapons, electromagnetic pulses or dirty bombs. Yet they tend to discount the less exciting but very real threat posed by fire, even though fire kills thousands of people every year. The World Health Organization estimates that 195,000 people die each year from fire, while according to the Global Terrorism Database an average of 7,258 people die annually from terrorism, and that includes deaths in conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

There are also instances in which fire is used as a weapon in a terrorist attack. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and embassy communications officer Sean Smith, the two diplomats killed in the attack on the U.S. office in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, did not die from gunfire or even rocket-propelled grenade strikes but from smoke inhalation. This fact was not lost on the U.S. Department of State Accountability Review Board that investigated the Benghazi attack. In an interview published by Reuters on Feb. 24, former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, the head of the Accountability Review Board, said more attention should be paid to the threat fire poses to diplomatic posts. 

Fire can be deadly and destructive. But whether a fire is intentionally set, as in the Benghazi example above, or is the result of an accident or negligence, there are some practical steps individuals can take to protect themselves.

Fire as a Weapon

The use of fire as a weapon, especially against diplomatic facilities, is not new. It was seen in the November 1979 sacking and burning of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, and in the April 1988 mob and arson attack against the U.S. Embassy annex in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. In February 2008, the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, was heavily damaged when a mob lit its lobby on fire. More recently, on Sept. 14, 2012, three days after the Benghazi attack, millions of dollars' worth of damage was done at the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, Tunisia, after a mob set outbuildings and vehicles ablaze. Fires set by demonstrators also caused extensive damage to the adjacent American school.

 Fire has been used to attack non-diplomatic facilities as well. During the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, the group of attackers holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel started fires in various parts of the hotel. Anarchists and radical environmental and animal rights activists have also conducted arson attacks against a variety of targets, including banks, department stores, the homes and vehicles of research scientists and even a ski resort.

Fire has also been a weapon frequently mentioned by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in its longstanding efforts to encourage Muslims living in the West to conduct simple attacks. In an interview featured in the first edition of Inspire magazine, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Nasir al-Wahayshi encouraged would-be jihadists to burn down forests and buildings as a way to strike terror into the hearts of their adversaries. This theme was expanded upon in Inspire magazine's ninth edition, which actually contained a photo tutorial on how to construct timed incendiary devices as well as a fatwa noting that it was religiously permissible to light forest fires as an act of war. It is suspected that Palestinian groups have also been responsible for a number of fires in Israel and the West Bank.

But fire is not a weapon to be used against only buildings and forests -- it can also be used to attack transportation targets. In March 2008, a Uighur separatist attempted to light a fire in the restroom of a China Southern Airlines flight from Urumqi to Beijing using two soft drink cans filled with gasoline that she had smuggled onto the flight. Fire is extremely dangerous aboard aircraft because of the oxygen-rich environment, the sensitive nature of avionic controls, the presence of thousands of gallons of jet fuel and the toxic smoke that results from burning plastics and other materials that make up a plane. Examples of deadly fires aboard aircraft include the September 1998 incident involving Swissair Flight 111, in which all 229 people aboard were killed after the crew was overcome by smoke, and the May 1996 ValuJet crash in the Florida Everglades. In a case similar to the one at hand, a June 1983 fire that started in the restroom of Air Canada Flight 797 resulted in the deaths of 23 of the 46 passengers on board. Autopsies showed that most of them died as a result of smoke inhalation.

Trains have also been targeted for arson. In August 2006, an attack against two German trains failed when the timed incendiary devices placed onboard failed to ignite. A February 2007 attack against a train in India proved far more deadly. Two timed incendiary devices placed aboard the Samjhauta Express killed 68 people and injured another 50. Two additional unignited devices were later found in other cars aboard the train. Had they functioned properly, the death toll would have been much higher.

Incendiary devices are not only quite deadly if properly employed, they also have an advantage over explosive devices in that they can be constructed from readily available materials such as gasoline and kerosene. Even the aluminum powder and iron oxide required to manufacture a more advanced incendiary compound such as thermite can be easily obtained or even produced at home.

Another consideration is that quite often other forms of attacks, such as those using explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades or even tracer ammunition, can spark fires. Many of the victims of the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings were affected not by the bombs' blast effect but by the smoke from the resultant fires.

Precautions

In addition to the threat of fire as a weapon or resulting from another form of attack, many deadly fires result each year from accidents or negligence. Such fires are deadly enough in the United States and Europe, where there are strict fire codes, but their impact is often magnified in less-developed countries, where fire codes are nonexistent or poorly enforced. For example, while sprinkler systems are mandatory for hotels in the United States, in many parts of the world they are not required.

When I was working on protective details overseas, I learned that it is not uncommon to find items stored in emergency stairwells, leaving them obstructed or sometimes impassable. It is also not unusual to find fire doors that have been chained shut due to the criminal threat.

One thing that can be done to mitigate the threat from fire is to check emergency exits to ensure that they are passable. This applies not only to hotels but also to apartment and even office buildings. In the August 2011 Casino Royale attack in Monterrey, Mexico, the attackers ordered the occupants out of the building before dousing it with gasoline and lighting it on fire, but 52 people died in the incident because they were trapped inside a building by a fire exit that had been chained and locked shut. 

While we recommend that travelers staying at hotels overseas should attempt to stay above the second floor for security reasons, we also recommend that they not stay above the sixth floor so that they will be within range of most fire department rescue ladders. We also recommend checking that functional and tested fire extinguishers and fire hoses are present.

In fires, smoke inhalation is a huge problem. According to studies, it is the primary cause of fire deaths and accounts for some 50-80 percent of all deaths from indoor fires. While this is somewhat obvious in confined spaces such as an aircraft fuselage or a subway tunnel, it also applies to buildings. Even buildings that are constructed of concrete or cinderblock and would therefore seem to be resistant to the effects of fire can serve to confine smoke to deadly levels. The U.S. office in Benghazi is a very good recent example. Video of the building after the attack showed that the fire had not badly damaged the building's structure itself; what killed Stevens and Smith was the smoke.

As Stratfor has noted for many years now, smoke hoods are a very important piece of safety equipment and should be part of everyone's personal safety plan. Smoke hoods can be carried in a purse or briefcase and can provide the wearer with 15-30 minutes of safe air to breathe. This period of time can make a world of difference to a person caught in a burning building, subway tunnel or aircraft and attempting to escape to fresh air. 

Due to past fire incidents on aircraft, the Federal Aviation Administration mandates that airlines furnish a smoke hood for each crew member on commercial flights. They do not provide smoke hoods for each passenger, although high-end executive aircraft normally do. Commercial passengers who would like access to a smoke hood in the case of a fire need to carry their own. Another useful tool in such situations is a small, high-intensity flashlight that can help you find your way through the smoke or dark once you have donned your smoke hood.

Fire is a potentially deadly weapon, one that should not be forgotten, but steps can be taken to mitigate the danger it poses.

Font: Scott Stewart

"Fire: The Overlooked Threat is republished with permission of Stratfor."

NATO and Russian Federation in Counter Piracy Exercise At Sea.

A boarding team comprising Italian marines from the NATO flagship ITS SAN MARCO, in charge of Operation Ocean Shield, and assault forces of the Russian Federation ship SEVEROMORSK trained together in counter-piracy activities as part of a bilateral exercise between NATO and Russia in the Gulf of Aden on 26 February.

A boarding team comprising Italian marines from the NATO flagship ITS SAN MARCO, in charge of Operation Ocean Shield, and assault forces of the Russian Federation ship SEVEROMORSK trained together in counter-piracy activities as part of a bilateral exercise between NATO and Russia in the Gulf of Aden on 26 February.

The event was organised in the context of counter-piracy cooperation agreed by the NATO-Russia Council (NRC). It was planned as a result of recent meetings at sea between the two naval forces, and represents a significant step forward towards NATO-Russia interoperability in counter-piracy activities in the Indian Ocean.

"This day will be a milestone in the cooperation between the Russian Federation and NATO and, I'm sure, its effects will not only be limited to counter-piracy activities but offers the prospect of other types of constructive engagement in future." said Rear Admiral Antonio Natale at the end of the exercise.

The exercise was conducted in two main phases; during the first phase, SAN MARCO played the part of a hijacked vessel with SEVEROMORSK taking the role of a counter piracy vessel which sent an assault team to free her. In the second phase, SEVEROMORSK played the role of a vessel involved in illegal weapons trafficking and SAN MARCO was a naval vessel looking for evidence of illegal activity and sent a boarding team to inspect the vessel.

Background Information:

NATO has contributed to the international counter piracy effort off the Horn of Africa since December 2008. The mission has expanded from escorting UN and World Food Programme Shipping under Operation Allied Provider and protecting merchant traffic in the Gulf of Aden under Operation Allied Protector. In addition to these activities and as part of the latest mission, Operation Ocean Shield, NATO is working with other international bodies to help develop capacity of countries in the region to tackle piracy on their own.

NATO Forces currently in Operation Ocean Shield:

 ITS SAN MARCO – Flag Ship (ITALY)

 HDMS IVER HUITFELDT (DENMARK)

 TCG GOKOVA (TURKEY)

 USS NICHOLAS (U.S.A.)

Font: (Story courtesy of Maritime Command Northwood)

China Tests Japanese and U.S. Patience

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has warned Beijing that Tokyo is losing patience with China's assertive maritime behavior in the East and South China seas, suggesting China consider the economic and military consequences of its actions. His warning followed similar statements from Washington that its patience with China is wearing thin, in this case over continued Chinese cyberespionage and the likelihood that Beijing is developing and testing cybersabotage and cyberwarfare capabilities. Together, the warnings are meant to signal to China that the thus-far relatively passive response to China's military actions may be nearing an end.

In an interview The Washington Post published just prior to Abe's meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington, Abe said China's actions around the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and its overall increasing military assertiveness have already resulted in a major increase in funding for the Japan Self-Defense Forces and coast guard. He also reiterated the centrality of the Japan-U.S. alliance for Asian security and warned that China could lose Japanese and other foreign investment if it continued to use "coercion or intimidation" toward its neighbors along the East and South China seas.

Abe's interview came amid warnings on Chinese cyberactivity from Washington. Though not mentioning China by name in his 2013 State of the Union address, Obama said, "We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air traffic control systems." Obama's comments, and the subsequent release of a new strategy on mitigating cybertheft of trade secrets, coincided with a series of reports highlighting China's People's Liberation Army backing for hacking activities in the United States, including a report by Mandiant that traced the activities to a specific People's Liberation Army unit and facility. The timing of the private sector reports and Obama's announcement were not coincidental.

Although Washington has taken a slightly more restrained stance on the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute, reportedly urging Tokyo not to release proof that a Chinese ship locked its fire-control radar on a Japanese naval vessel, clearly Washington and Tokyo hold the common view that China's actions are nearing the limits of tolerance. Given its proximity to China, Japan is focusing on Chinese maritime activity, which has accelerated in the past two to three years around the disputed islands, in the South China Sea and in the Western Pacific east of Japan. The United States in turn is highlighting cyberespionage and the potential for cyberwarfare. Both are drawing attention to well-known Chinese behavior and warning that it is nearing a point where it can no longer be tolerated. The message is clear: China can alter its behavior or begin to face the consequences from the United States and Japan.


Abe drew a sharp response from Beijing, though less from his interview than from another Washington Post article based on the interview that interpreted Abe as saying, "China has a 'deeply ingrained' need to spar with Japan and other Asian neighbors over territory, because the ruling Communist Party uses the disputes to maintain strong domestic support." Tokyo responded to China's complaints by saying the second Post article was misleading but that the transcript of Abe's interview was accurate.

Although the Japanese government did not elaborate on this point, by "ingrained" Abe did not mean Chinese behavior per se, but rather the anti-Japanese undercurrents of China's education system and the use of anti-Japanese sentiment as the basis of Chinese patriotism. 
In addition to being Beijing's standard knee-jerk reaction to any less-than-flattering comments by a foreign leader, the Chinese government and media response represented an attempt to shift attention from Chinese actions toward the "hawkish" Abe as the source of rising tensions in East Asia. A follow-up Xinhua article published after the Abe-Obama meeting cautioned the United States to be "vigilant against the rightist tendency in Tokyo" and said the first- and second-largest economies, the United States and China, should work together "to safeguard the peace and prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region and contribute to global development." Other Chinese media reports suggested that Abe failed to gain support from Obama during the visit for his Senkaku/Diaoyu policies or for a unified stance against China. The undertones of China's response, however, reflect less confidence.



The Economic Threat

What Abe said in his interview apart from the Chinese media spin is instructive. According to Abe, relations between China and Japan have been suffering due to unintended consequences of moves by the Communist Party of China to retain its legitimacy. China's economic opening led to unequal prosperity, eliminating the Party's main pillar of support, equality. To counter that, the Chinese government pursued a two-prong strategy of economic growth and patriotism. Economic growth required Beijing to expand its sourcing of commodities, moving China naturally onto the sea. Meanwhile, patriotism, tinged with anti-Japanese teaching, has come to pervade the educational system and society.



Abe argued that China is pursuing a path of coercion or intimidation, particularly in the East and South China seas, as part of its resource-acquisition strategy. Anti-Japanese undercurrents in Chinese society due to the inculcation of patriotism have won domestic support for the assertive Chinese actions. But this has strained Japanese-Chinese economic relations, thus undercutting China's own rapid economic growth. And without continued economic growth, Abe cautioned, China's single-party leadership would be unable to control its population of 1.3 billion.

Within this context, Abe cautioned that it is important to make Beijing realize it cannot take another country's territory or territorial water or change the rules of international engagement. He raised the defense budget and emphasized that the Japanese-U.S. alliance is critical for regional security, as is a continued U.S. presence in the region. He also warned that China's assertive behavior would have economic consequences and that although Japanese companies profit in China, they are responsible for 10 million Chinese jobs. If the risk of doing business in China rises, then "Japanese investments will start to drop sharply," he added.

Abe's warnings were designed to strike at the core Chinese government fears of economic and social instability and military encroachment by the United States and a reinvigorated Japan. On the economic front, Japan is one of the top sources of actual foreign direct investment in China and a major trading partner. Although it is difficult to verify Abe's claims of 10 million Chinese employed due to Japanese investments, the implications of Chinese actions on bilateral economic cooperation are more easily observable. In 2012, a year when tensions ran high due to Japan's decision regarding what it called the "purchase" of some of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands from a private Japanese citizen, anti-Japanese protests flared in China, as did unofficial boycotts of Japanese goods. Total trade between China and Japan fell 3.9 percent year on year, the first drop since the major financial crisis of 2009, with exports falling more than 10 percent. Japanese foreign direct investment, although rising slightly for the year, saw a major falloff in the summer when tensions between the two countries ran high.

Other factors played a role in the decline of trade and investment, including reduced overall Japanese demand and shifts in suppliers for certain key resources (and adjustments in Japan's export markets). And Japan itself would suffer from a major break in trade relations, though Tokyo may be taking steps to cushion against fallout from economic disputes with China. Japanese firms in fact already are beginning to show an interest is shifting some of their manufacturing bases out of China even without the added incentive of anti-Japanese sentiment-driven protests and boycotts. In 2012, the gap between China and the United States as the top destination for Japanese exports narrowed further to just 0.6 percent. Abe also hinted strongly that Japan has finally decided to pursue talks with the United States over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trading bloc (unofficially) designed to exclude China.

Although Japanese companies are unlikely to flee China en masse, the threat of a slow reorientation toward stronger trade ties with the United States and softening investment in China strikes at one of the Communist Party's major concerns, namely maintaining social stability through employment. Like that of Japan, exports and growth have driven China's economy. This does not necessarily mean profits or efficiency; on the contrary, Beijing has harnessed the constant growth to maintain employment and provide loans to keep businesses operating, even when they operate with razor-thin profit margins or at a loss.

Employment represents China's preferred tool to maintain social stability, and the Party sees stability as paramount to retaining its legitimacy as the unchallengeable and unopposable leader of China. Both the Chinese government and Abe know this, and now Abe is threatening to target Chinese growth, upending the whole system of stability. The Japanese may not really be able to effect or afford any drastic change in economic relations with China, but with the activation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and with a possible Japanese government emphasis on investment to Southeast Asia and Africa (with private investment likely to follow), the economic pressure on China could slowly build.

The Military Warning

The military warning is therefore more immediately troubling to Beijing. Both Tokyo and Washington are reaching their limits for tolerating aggressive Chinese behavior. The United States is pivoting toward Asia, seen by China as a constraining action. Japan is strengthening ties with Russia, Australia, India and Southeast Asia, something China regards as containment. China's emergence as a big power has not been entirely smooth. Any time a nation seeks to alter the status quo between other powers, disruption and resistance are inevitable. China's maritime expansion and its cyberespionage and emerging cyberwar capabilities are closely linked to its economic and social policies. The former is a more obvious concrete action, but one that raises the risk of creating the appearance of being ready for peer competition long before China actually is. The latter at least offers some opportunities for plausible deniability (though Washington is now removing that already-translucent veil), and reflects an attempt to exploit an area where China's overall vulnerabilities are less of a liability; it is the weak taking its best available action against the strong.

For Japan, maritime activity around the disputed islands is manageable so long as it remains in the civilian realm, but the use of fire control radar on Japanese ships and overflights by Chinese aircraft are unacceptable. (Japanese aircraft are shadowing Chinese overflights. In a recently reported case, a Chinese Y-8 surveillance aircraft and the Japanese F-15 interceptor came within 5 meters, or 16 feet, of one another, creating the potential for a collision like the one between a U.S. and Chinese aircraft in 2001.) And while the United States may have tolerated the occasional case of cybertheft and cyberespionage, as Obama noted, such activities become unacceptable in scale and when it shifts to targeting U.S. infrastructure, where it has the potential to disrupt electricity grids, communications systems and other industrial processes.

Japan and the United States have both called their defense alliance the cornerstone of their regional policies and relations. Japan continues to evolve its interpretation of its constitutional limit on military activity, and Tokyo has pledged to Washington to take a greater role in ensuring regional security. The escalation of Chinese naval activity has given the impression of a confident and capable Beijing on its way to changing the balance of naval power in the region. China has built the impression of a strong modern navy backed by land-based missiles, with modern ships and technology and an emerging international reach. China's anti-access area denial strategy is an increasing point of contention in Japan and the United States, where there are warnings that the Chinese navy will soon outpace the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, limiting U.S. naval capabilities with its "carrier-killer" missiles and quantitatively superior fleet.



The Chinese navy has undergone a significant modernization program over the past decade. Still, it is far from ready to compete head to head with the Japanese navy, much less with Japan's treaty ally, the United States. Modernization efforts and the fleet-building program have yet to make for a superb Chinese navy, nor would having superb sailors. A superb navy requires organization, doctrine, principles and most of all experience. The main problem constraining China's navy is not its shipbuilding or recruitment, but its limited ability to truly integrate its forces for war fighting and fleet operations. This requires substantial knowledge and training in logistics, cooperative air defense and myriad other complex factors.

There really is only one real measurement for a navy: Its ability to win against its likely rival. Part of determining the quality of a navy depends upon its technology and part on doctrine, but a substantial part is actual experience. China's navy has little war-fighting experience, even in the past. This has substantially limited the number of individuals within the officer corps knowledgeable or capable of effective operations in the highly complex world of modern military engagements. The Chinese navy may have new technology and be building toward numerical superiority, but it faces off against a U.S. Navy with centuries of experience and generations of admirals schooled in combat. Even the Japanese navy has more than a century of experience and a tradition of maritime warfare. The lack of combat experience significantly limits China's naval capability.

The Chinese government officially downplays these capabilities and any talk of a potentially aggressive nature of the Chinese military. But Beijing does little to dissuade such speculation, allowing a steady stream of images and commentaries in the Chinese popular media and the strategic leaking of imagery in China's social media. Beijing likes to appear fierce while saying it is not. But the problem with this strategy is exactly what Abe has pointed out: In appearing threatening, concrete steps are taken to counter China's maritime expansion. Abe is calling China's bluff, exhorting Beijing to reassess the correlation of forces in the region before continuing its aggressive pattern.

Font: By Rodger Baker

A Hezbollah operative to collect information about sites by Cyprus.

Admission of a Hezbollah operative asked to collect information about sites frequented by Israeli tourists and their transportation made public by Cyprus.

The Golden Arches hotel in Limassol,
one of the sites about which the Hezbollah operative gathered information
(Picture from the Golden Arches website)

Overview

1. On February 20, 2013, Cyprus made public the written admission of Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, read into the court record at his trial in Limassol. Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, 24, a Lebanese man with Swedish citizenship detained in Cyprus on July 7, 2012, collected information about tourist sites frequented by Israelis with the objective of carrying out a terrorist attack against them. He was tried on eight counts, among them conspiracy to commit a crime, participation in a criminal organization, intent to commit a crime and obstruction of justice (Cyprus Mail, February 21, 2013).

2. The following information was also made public (New York Times ,^[1] Cyprus Mail, February 21, 2013):

1) Activity for Hezbollah – Hossam Taleb Yaacoub has been a member of Hezbollah since 2007. He used the code name "Wael" and was handled by an operative named "Ayman," who wore a mask to the meetings he held with Yaacoub. Yaacoub admitted to having been trained in the use of weapons. He also admitted to delivering packages for Hezbollah in Attalya (Turkey), Lyon and Amsterdam. He was asked to pick up a couple of bags in Lyon, and to take a cell phone, two SIM cards, and a "mysterious package" to Lebanon.

2) Activity in Cyprus – Yaacoub went to Cyprus for the first time in 2008, and again in December 2011. He claimed that both visits were business-related. On June 26, 2012, he went to Sweden to renew his passport and from there flew via Britain to Cyprus. His Hezbollah handler asked him to conduct surveillance of a number of tourist sites frequented by Israelis. They included a parking lot behind a hospital and the Golden Arches Hotel in Limassol. He was also asked to collect information about various hotels in Ayia Napa (on the southeastern coast of Cyprus) and the price of renting a warehouse. In addition, he was asked to locate Kosher restaurants but was unable to find any.

3) Collecting information in July 2012 – According to the Cypriote authorities, Yaacoub went to the Limassol airport at the beginning of July 2012 and wrote down the license plate number of buses used to carry Israeli tourists. He admitted that all his travel expenses were paid by Hezbollah.

3. Yaacoub's initial admissions indicate that like Bulgaria, locations in Cyprus frequented by Israelis were preferred targets for Hezbollah terrorist attack. The information released in Cyprus, like the information made public by the Bulgarian authorities, revealed the extent and scope of Hezbollah's terrorist activity in European Union countries as well as Hezbollah's determination to continue even after its failures (the terrorist attack in Burgas, Bulgaria, was carried out two weeks after an attack in Cyprus was prevented). Nevertheless, the European Union still hesitates to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and impose sanctions on it.

Appendix

Preventing the Terrorist Attack in Cyprus, 2012

1. On July 7, 2012, the Cypriote authorities in Limassol detained a 24-year-old Lebanese man. According to Cypriote police sources, he was there to collect information about Israeli tourists flying to Cyprus. He was carrying both Lebanese and Swedish passports,^[2] as well as documents and pictures indicating that he had been following Israeli tourists around the island (Agence France-Presse and AP, July 14, 2012). The information was collected in preparation for carrying out a terrorist attack against Israeli tourists vacationing in Cyprus .

 

2. The terrorist attack planned for Cyprus was part of the terrorist campaign Iran is waging against Israel. After the detention of the Hezbollah operative in Limassol, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu said that Iran was behind the affair. He said that as Iran had sent its operatives to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador on American soil and carry out terrorist attacks in Azerbaijan, Bangkok, Tbilisi, New Delhi and Kenya, it had done the same in Cyprus. He called on the international community to oppose Iran, the largest exporter of terrorism in the world (Website of the Israeli Prime Minister, July 14, 2012).

 

3. Two weeks after Yaacoub was detained in Cyprus, the attack on the Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, was carried out. A comparison of the information revealed by his admission and the information revealed by the authorities in Bulgaria about the attack in Burgas shows that the attack in Limassol was planned the same way: information was gathered about buses used to transport Israelis and SIM cards were purchased, probably for use in detonating IEDs.^[3]

^[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/world/europe/in-cyprus-trial-man-says-hezbollah-scouted-israeli-targets-in-europe.html?pagewanted=all
^[2] It was not the first time a Hezbollah operative used a Swedish passport. The Hezbollah operative involved in the terrorist attack in Thailand had a Swedish passport, as did the operatives who carried out the terrorist attack in Burgas.
^[3] For further information about the attack in Burgas, see the February 7, 2013 bulletin “The report issued by Bulgaria about the terrorist attack in Burgas clearly indicates that Hezbollah was involved in its planning and execution.”

Chinese cyberspies have hacked most Washington institutions, experts say.

Government and business leaders in the United States and around the world are rushing to build better defenses - and prepare for the coming battles in the digital universe. To succeed, they must understand one of the most complex, man-made environments on Earth: cyberspace.

Start asking security experts which powerful Washington institutions have been penetrated by Chinese cyberspies, and this is the usual answer: almost all of them.

The list of those hacked in recent years includes law firms, think tanks, news organizations, human rights groups, contractors, congressional offices, embassies and federal agencies.

The information compromised by such intrusions, security experts say, would be enough to map how power is exercised in Washington to a remarkably nuanced degree. The only question, they say, is whether the Chinese have the analytical resources to sort through the massive troves of data they steal every day.


READ: Zero Day — A special report on the threat in cyberspace

“The dark secret is there is no such thing as a secure unclassified network,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has been hacked in the past. “Law firms, think tanks, newspapers — if there’s something of interest, you should assume you’ve been penetrated.”

The rising wave of cyber-espionage has produced diplomatic backlash and talk of action against the Chinese, who have steadfastly denied involvement in hacking campaigns. A strategy paper released by the Obama administration Wednesday outlined new efforts to fight the theft of trade secrets.

Cyberspying against what could be called the “information industry” differs from hacks against traditional economic targets such as Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola and Apple, whose computer systems contain valuable intellectual property that could assist Chinese industrial or military capabilities.

Instead, journalists, lawyers and human rights workers often have access to political actors whose communications could offer insight to Chinese intelligence services eager to understand how Washington works. Hackers often are searching for the unseen forces that might explain how the administration approaches an issue, experts say, with many Chinese officials presuming that reports by think tanks or news organizations are secretly the work of government officials — much as they would be in Beijing.

“They’re trying to make connections between prominent people who work at think tanks, prominent donors that they’ve heard of and how the government makes decisions,” said Dan Blumenthal, director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, which also has been hacked. “It’s a sophisticated intelligence-gathering effort at trying to make human-network linkages of people in power, whether they be in Congress or the executive branch.”


China’s aggressive effort

Russia and some other nations also are said to engage in cyber-
espionage against private companies and institutions, but security experts and U.S. officials say China’s effort is the most aggressive and comprehensive. The infor­mation-technology staffs of private groups have scrambled to neutralize the intrusions, often hiring outside specialists to expel hackers and installing monitoring systems to keep them out.

Yet such efforts do not always succeed, security experts say. Hackers often build secret “back door” access to computer systems or redouble their efforts to penetrate again once they’ve been purged.

Not long after the Wall Street Journal reported last month that its systems had been infiltrated, the chief executive of its parent company, Rupert Murdoch, tweeted, “Chinese still hacking us, or were over the weekend.” The New York Times and The Washington Post have also reported being victims of cyber-intrusions probably conducted by the Chinese.

The former head of cybersecurity investigations for the FBI, Shawn Henry, said his agents used to alert dozens of companies and private institutions about breaches every week, with Chinese hackers the most common suspects.

“I’ve yet to come across a network that hasn’t been breached,” said Henry, president of CrowdStrike Services, a security company. “It’s like having an invisible man in your room, going through your filing cabinets.”

The rise of pervasive cyber-espionage has followed broader technological shifts: More and more information is gathered and conveyed online. Rising computing power, meanwhile, has made more of it vulnerable to hackers almost anywhere in the world. This has dramatically lowered the cost of spying — traditionally a labor-intensive pursuit that carries the risk of arrest or worse — and made more institutions viable targets.

The Chinese government has consistently denied having the kind of aggressive cyber-espionage campaign often described by Western officials and security experts, calling such allegations ­irresponsible and unsupported by evidence.

This week, Chinese officials disputed a report by Mandiant, an Alexandria-based security company, detailing the Chinese military unit allegedly responsible for stealing hundreds of terabytes of data from 141 organizations in 20 industries in the United States and around the world.

But official Washington expresses little doubt about the source of the problem. “The Chinese government’s direct role in cybertheft is rampant, and the problems have grown exponentially,” said Rep Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “It is crucial that the administration begin bilateral discussions to ensure that Beijing understands that there are consequences for state-sponsored economic espionage.”

‘Spearphishing’ at The Post
The reported hack into The Post’s computer systems happened in a typical way: An employee fell for what experts call a “spearphishing” scam, hitting a bogus link that downloaded a ­malicious program, infecting the company’s information-technology server, said people familiar with the incident who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details not released publicly by the company. (Post Co. officials have confirmed the hack only in general terms.)

That initial intrusion, which happened in 2009, allowed the hackers to gain access to The Post’s directory of user names, passwords and computers that use Windows-based operating systems. People with knowledge of the infiltration said the company learned of it when Mandiant discovered the breach in 2011.

The Post hired Mandiant to expel the hackers and installed advanced monitoring systems to prevent a recurrence. Experts say it’s difficult for any company to know definitively what information hackers steal while they have access to computer systems — especially if the theft happened months or years before it was discovered.

News of The Post’s infiltration, first revealed this month, alarmed Texas-based religious rights activist Bob Fu. As recently as December, he had obtained a sensitive Chinese document and passed it along by e-mail to a Post correspondent in Beijing. The resulting story named Fu but not the document’s original source within China, who Fu said could have been arrested if discovered.

An associate working for China Aid was briefly detained after the story appeared and was questioned about the document. It’s not clear if any information was gleaned from Fu’s e-mail exchange with the Post correspondent, which took place after the company’s computer system was secured.

“Oh, my goodness, that makes me a little sweaty,” Fu said, recalling the incident. “The consequences could be so unbearable.”

Dissidents have long engaged in cat-and-mouse games with Chinese authorities, accepting that many of their phone calls and e-mails are monitored while still attempting to protect their most sensitive communications from interception.

Canadian researchers in 2009 uncovered a vast global cyber-espionage network controlled largely by servers in China. The military and political targets whose networks were monitored — including the Tibetan government in exile and the office of the Dalai Lama — strongly suggested a Chinese role in the operation. Among the 1,295 computers infected in 103 countries were several belonging to the Associated Press bureau in London, according to the researchers, who were with the SecDev Group and the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto.

Such infiltrations have unnerved the Chinese dissident community, where accusations of spying are common, said Andrew Nathan, a Columbia University professor active in several human rights groups that do work related to China. “There’s a paranoia that sets in,” he said. “That may be one of the functions of this surveillance.”

Security experts say that, while defenses are becoming more sophisticated against cyber-espionage, hackers continue to improve their skills as well. But even if foreign agents manage to gain access to mounting piles of data, they face a problem familiar to intelligence agencies everywhere: what to do with it.

“Most of us aren’t very interesting most of the time,” said Thomas Fingar, a China expert and former chairman of the National Intelligence Council. “You can waste an enormous amount of time and effort puzzling over something that is totally meaningless.”


Font: By Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima,
William Wan in Beijing contributed to this report.

Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do.

U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo

monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq.

In the first study of its kind, researchers with the Defense Department have found that pilots of drone aircraft experience mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.
      

“Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.

That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.
      

But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.

      

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

      

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

      

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

      

Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

      

The Pentagon has begun taking steps to keep pace with the rapid expansion of drone operations. It recently created a new medal to honor troops involved in both drone warfare and cyberwarfare. And the Air Force has expanded access to chaplains and therapists for drone operators, said Col. William M. Tart, who commanded remotely piloted aircraft crews at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Air Force has also conducted research into the health issues of drone crew members. In a 2011 survey of nearly 840 drone operators, it found that 46 percent of Reaper and Predator pilots, and 48 percent of Global Hawk sensor operators, reported “high operational stress.” Those crews cited long hours and frequent shift changes as major causes.
      

That study found the stress among drone operators to be much higher than that reported by Air Force members in logistics or support jobs. But it did not compare the stress levels of the drone operators with those of traditional pilots.

      

The new study looked at the electronic health records of 709 drone pilots and 5,256 manned aircraft pilots between October 2003 and December 2011. Those records included information about clinical diagnoses by medical professionals and not just self-reported symptoms.

      

After analyzing diagnosis and treatment records, the researchers initially found that the drone pilots had higher incidence rates for 12 conditions, including anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

      

But after the data were adjusted for age, number of deployments, time in service and history of previous mental health problems, the rates were similar, said Dr. Otto, who was scheduled to present her findings in Arizona on Saturday at a conference of the American College of Preventive Medicine.

       

The study also found that the incidence rates of mental heath problems among drone pilots spiked in 2009. Dr. Otto speculated that the increase might have been the result of intense pressure on pilots during the Iraq surge in the preceding years.

The study found that pilots of both manned and unmanned aircraft had lower rates of mental health problems than other Air Force personnel. But Dr. Otto conceded that her study might underestimate problems among both manned and unmanned aircraft pilots, who may feel pressure not to report mental health symptoms to doctors out of fears that they will be grounded.
      

She said she planned to conduct two follow-up studies: one that tries to compensate for possible underreporting of mental health problems by pilots and another that analyzes mental health issues among sensor operators, who control drone cameras while sitting next to the pilots.

      

“The increasing use of remotely piloted aircraft for war fighting as well as humanitarian relief should prompt increased surveillance,” she said.

Font: By JAMES DAO

Chinese army hackers are just the tip of cyberwarfare risk that threatens world.

A US security company last week traced a series of cyberattacks to a tower block in Shanghai – which also houses a unit of the Chinese army. In 2013, transnational attacks come via a click.

Motorcyclists ride past the building housing Unit 61398 in
Shanghai. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

China is awash with nondescript new office buildings so the 12-storey tower on the outskirts of Shanghai's Pudong area hardly looked likely to cause global headlines. Not even propaganda posters on walls surrounding it or People's Liberation Army guards standing at the gates made the building stand out.

Yet last week an American private security firm, Mandiant, based in Virginia, identified it as the headquarters of Unit 61398, a PLA army grouping suspected of waging cyberwarfare. The study revealed that 150 highly sophisticated cyber attacks against targets in the US had originated from inside. Last week international journalists and TV crews suddenly descending on Unit 61398 were chased away, even as an angry Beijing government denied the allegations. One BBC team was briefly detained.

But the real story was not the existence of the building or the hackers inside. It was that it was merely the tip of an iceberg of cyberwarfare that is now rising dramatically into view. For years experts have warned of a global epidemic of hacking. But now those dire predictions have come true. It is clear that the world's emerging superpower, China, is now engaged in a battle with an older superpower, the United States. It is a fight raging across the internet in a proxy for the old spy versus spy games of the Cold War: except that it drops honey traps and prisoner exchanges at Checkpoint Charlie in favour of the planting of malware, beating firewalls and hijacking servers.

But this new world is not just about rivalries between Beijing and Washington. Other governments or those acting on their behalf, such as India and Russia, are also big players. Huge corporations are being dragged in, trying to defend themselves against a legion of hackers, or as unscrupulous firms poaching the valuable secrets of rivals. And instead of hiding it, they are now speaking out and the cyber-underworld is hoving into view.

"It is a change of perception. There has been a shift in willingness to make a public disclosure," said Kurt Baumgartner, a senior security researcher at the Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab.

Crime has moved online. From hacking into private computers to access bank details, to scams aimed at the naive promising instant riches, to all-out identity theft, the PC sitting in your house is no longer an innocent device. It is a trapdoor that can lead straight to the darkest corners of the web. "There is black ice on the internet. There are things out there where there is a tremendous risk to being attacked," said John Strand, a senior instructor at American cyber-security firm Sans, based in Maryland.

Where criminals have gone, some fear terrorists might follow. Already the world of cyberwarfare has seen the emergence of powerful "non-state actors" such as WikiLeaks and the "hacktivist" collective known as Anonymous. Both groups fight for their beliefs, using the internet to spread information or act against those that have offended them. But coming behind them might lie other groups with agendas of nationalism or religious extremism that might plot to replace old-fashioned bombs with devastating acts of internet sabotage.

This is what Unit 61398 really represents: not just the ambitions of a stirring China but the growing to maturity of a new ecosystem of warfare, espionage, activism and criminality. Last week a retired CIA director, Michael Hayden, compared it to the dawning of the atomic age at Hiroshima, saying: "This has the whiff of August, 1945."

As a result of the Mandiant report, published by its founder and chief executive, Kevin Mandia, a retired military cybercrime investigator, we now know about some of the players in this strange new world. The firm built up a portrait of a few of the Chinese hackers it believes work in the Shanghai complex. One was revealed as a retired PLA rear admiral whose online nom de guerre is UglyGorilla. Another had a fondness for the works of JK Rowling as their answers to a security question featured the (misspelled) name Harry Poter. A third was called SuperHard – perhaps showing that frustrated machismo is universal among geeks whether you are in Shanghai or San Francisco.

But such hackers and Unit 61398 are only a tiny part of the action. In recent weeks revelation after revelation has emerged about how prevalent Chinese hacking has become. After publishing details about the wealth of the family of a powerful Chinese politician, the New York Times was targeted for infiltration. The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal said that they too had come under attack, while on Friday Microsoft revealed that its servers had also been hacked – as fellow technology giants Facebook and Twitter have also been this year.

The problem does not stop at spying on pesky media outlets. Chinese hackers have relentlessly watched all aspects of Washington. Thinktanks, government agencies, human rights groups and law firms have all been penetrated. The Post reported the astonishing extent of the activity last week under the headline: "Chinese cyber-spies have hacked most Washington institutions, experts say."

The problem is, many experts agree, that is still very easy. Nor does one need to be commanded by Beijing officials to do it. Chinese denials of much hacking activity often have an air of plausibility due to the lack of sophisticated security for many organisations' networks and the fact that individual hackers, motivated by patriotism or simple mischief, can do it. In 2011 one assault was traced to Chinese academic bodies.

Of course, China is not the world's only hacker. Few people doubt American spies and companies give as good as they get. Even though Beijing lurks behind the Great Firewall of China and strictly regulates its internet, the country in 2011 suffered some 500,000 cyber-attacks – with around 15% of them from the US. The most dramatic act of cyber-espionage is believed to have been a joint project by the US and Israel in which the Stuxnet computer virus was used against Iran's nuclear programme. One report claimed the code damaged up to 1,000 centrifuges at Iran's Natanz Enrichment Plant that many suspect is key to developing nuclear weapons.

Other countries are in on the act too. A report released by the White House last week identified Russia as a major source of hacking. It warned that other countries were also likely to emerge. "One or more fast-growing regional powers may judge that changes in its economic and political interests merit the risk of an aggressive programme of espionage," the report said.

In private industry it appears cyber-espionage – whether by rivals or criminals – is already the norm. Every year tens of thousands of hacks hit companies, trying to steal secrets or access data. In one report, Dmitri Alperovitch of security firm McAfee, based in California, wrote: "I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly)."

But the real new frontiers of this emerging shadow world lie away from big companies and sovereign states. In the parlance of espionage they are "non-state actors". Their most famous grouping is perhaps Anonymous, the amorphous grouping of hackers that has adopted a range of causes, attacking websites, individuals and organisations as it sees fit.

Some causes are small. Members have leapt to the defence of people being bullied at school, attacking tormentors online and forcing them to apologise. In a recent high profile case of alleged rape by members of the football team in the Ohio town of Steubenville, the group published claims culled from social media accounts and vowed retribution against the accused and local officials it accuses of covering up a crime.

Anonymous has also tangled with huge corporations and law enforcement, launching hacks on their websites. "It has become a global phenomenon," said Fruzsina Eordogh, a freelance technology writer who has covered the activities of the group. "It is becoming more and more mainstream. It won't be called Anonymous any more."

Perhaps the scariest aspect of cyber-espionage is how far some might go. Whether a country, a terrorist group or an individual, one possibility looms above all else: an attack on critical infrastructure, such as the power network. That could cause planes to fall out of the sky, cars to crash or power stations to explode. "That is an act of war. It is beyond civilisation," said Professor John Steinbruner from the University of Maryland.

Beyond civilisation perhaps. But no longer beyond belief. Steinbruner believes America, China and other nations should draw up a sort of Geneva Conventions of the cyber-sphere, taking certain acts off the table and allowing co-operation to ensure they never happen. But he is pessimistic on the chances of that happening before some sort of catastrophic event forces the issue. "We ought to be doing that. But at the moment we are just waiting for something godawful to happen," he said.


Font: Paul Harris

Vatican denies scandal ahead of pope's exit

Spokesman condemns allegations in Italian media that Pope Benedict XVI's resignation linked to secret cardinals' report.

The pope appointed three retired cardinals in 2010 to investigate alleged
corruption within the Vatican [AFP]

The Vatican has condemned Italian media reports of intrigue, corruption and blackmail among senior prelates, saying these could be a form of pressure to sway voting in next month's conclave to elect Pope Benedict XVI's successor.

Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, on Saturday dismissed as "gossip, disinformation and sometimes calumny" the reports, which are linked to an investigation by a committee of cardinals last year over a series of damaging leaks of confidential papal documents.

"There are people who are trying to take advantage of this moment of surprise and disorientation of weak spirits to sow confusion and discredit the Church and its government," Lombardi said in a statement on Vatican radio's website.

Earlier, The Panorama weekly and The Repubblica daily newspapers reported that Benedict's decision to resign was triggered by the secret report compiled by three retired cardinals.

The report allegedly contained details of corruption and of blackmail attempts against gay Vatican clergymen, as well as favouritism based on gay relationships.

Both publications quoted a source with knowledge of the investigation as saying that the cardinals' conclusions "revolve around the sixth and seventh commandments," namely "Thou shall not commit adultery" and "Thou shall not steal."

Referring to the upcoming papal election, Lombardi said there was "unacceptable pressure to condition the vote of one or other member of the college of cardinals, who might be disliked for one reason or another".

"People who think in terms of money, sex and power and see different realities through this prism cannot see the Church any differently," he said.


'Religious hypocrisy'

Last year, Benedict appointed the three retired cardinals to investigate, in parallel with a police inquiry, a scandal known as "Vatileaks", which led to the conviction and later pardoning of the pope's former butler Paolo Gabriele.

The secret report was to be for the pope's eyes only, but Italian media reported they will also share their conclusions with the cardinals who will elect the next pope, ahead of the pontiff's resignation next week.

At his final public mass last week, Benedict himself condemned "religious hypocrisy" and urged an end to "individualism and rivalry".

"The face of the church ... is at times disfigured. I am thinking in particular of the sins against the unity of the church," he said, without elaborating.

The run-up to conclaves to elect a new pope are often accompanied by rumours and gossip in Italian media, as rival factions battle for influence.

There was a twist on Friday when Benedict replaced Monsignor Ettore Balestrero, a powerful behind-the-scenes figure in the Secretariat of State with a highly influential role in Vatican diplomacy and the Vatican bank's foreign relations.

The 47-year-old is being sent as Vatican envoy to Colombia - which could be seen as a demotion.

Lombardi said the suggestion that the pope had made the appointment to get Balestrero out of the Vatican was "absurd, totally without foundation".

He said the appointment had been decided weeks ago and that the Vatican had waited for the Colombian government's official agreement before announcing it.

 

Font: Al Jazeera English

 

German arms exports to Persian Gulf states hit $1.88bn in 2012

A file photo of German-made Heckler and Koch G36 Assault rifle

A report says that Germany's weapons exports to the Arab states of the Persian Gulf have reached 1.42 billion euros (USD 1.88 billion) in 2012.

The report published by the Munich-based Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Friday also added that Saudi Arabia was the biggest purchaser among the states including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

German firms sold 1.24 billion euros worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the report added.

This comes after German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave the green light in principle for a multi-million-dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia in December 2012.

This is while, German opposition parties and peace activists sharply condemned Berlin’s plan to sell advanced weapons to Persian Gulf countries, saying it would not comply with export regulations.

German arms exports remain a controversial issue because Berlin cannot guarantee that its exported weapons remain in the countries to which they were sold.

In July 2012, Lawmakers from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Greens and The Left party (Die Linke) voiced outrage over Berlin's decision to sell up to 200 advanced Leopard tanks to Qatar.

They said the decision showed Merkel’s “Moral bankruptcy” and Berlin’s support for the dictators and torturers.

The European country is the world’s third largest exporter of weapons after the US and Russia.

According to a report published by the London-based Amnesty International (AI), German weaponry including small firearms, ammunition and military vehicles have been massively deployed in the Middle East and North Africa to suppress peaceful protests.


font: PressTV

Berlusconi targeted, overthrown by CIA?

Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano speaks at the Quirinale palace in Rome, after meeting Italian political leaders on December 22, 2012. Napolitano dissolved parliament, opening way for election following the resignation of Prime Minister Mario Monti.

This coming Sunday and Monday, Italians will go to the polls to choose a new parliament and thus a new prime minister, while setting the stage for the election of a new president of the republic shortly thereafter.

Most indications are that the most numerous faction in the coming parliament, with just over one third of the votes, will be the Common Good coalition, composed of the Democratic Party (the remains of the old Italian Communist Party), the Left Ecology Freedom movement of Nichi Vendola, which includes various paleocommunists, and some smaller forces. This coalition is led by Pier Luigi Bersani, a colorless bureaucrat. Ironically, despite its leftist rhetoric, the Common Good is the formation most likely to continue the austerity policies which are currently tearing Italy apart.

Coming in second with almost 30% should be the center-right coalition around the People of Freedom, the party of the irrepressible former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, joined by the Northern League of Umberto Bossi, a xenophobic group which also articulates the resentments of northern Italy against the south, the Mezzogiorno.

Another important leader is Giulio Tremonti, the former Minister of Economics and Finance. Berlusconi, a wealthy businessman and three-time prime minister, was most recently in power from 2008 to November 2011. Berlusconi’s fall had been prepared through a series of lurid revelations about his personal life, including an attack by the CIA document dump known as Wikileaks. Berlusconi’s second-place status represents a remarkable comeback, and the last polls show him closing on Bersani.

Third place with almost 20% is likely to belong to a new and unorthodox political formation, the Five Star Movement (5SM), where the dominant personality is the former Genoese comedian Beppe Grillo, a colorful and talented demagogue. The 5SM is anti-politician, anti-euro, anti-infrastructure, anti-tax, and anti-mainstream media. Like the GOP, they want to reduce the public debt, meaning they want deflation. Grillo proposes a guaranteed annual income for all Italians, a 30-hour work week, and a drastic reduction of energy consumption and of production. He demands free Wi-Fi for all. Without modern production, how can these benefits be provided?

Grillo wants to abort the infrastructure projects - like the new high-speed train tunnel between Turin and France and the bridge between Calabria and Sicily - upon which Italy’s economic future depends. He is long on petty bourgeois process reforms like term limits, media reform, corporate governance, and banning convicted felons from parliament, but short on defending the standard of living for working people. On a bizarre note, he has praised the British response to the 2008 banking crisis. As many as 100 members of the 5SM, many of them total political novices, and more than a few adventurers who have jumped on board Grillo’s bandwagon, may now enter parliament, with predictably destabilizing consequences. Grillo could be the vehicle for an Italian color revolution along the lines of Ukraine or Georgia.

In fourth place, with less than 10%, is expected to be the current prime minister of Italy, Mario Monti, a former eurocrat of the Brussels Commission who has led a brutal technocratic austerity regime since coming to power in November 2011 through a coup d’état sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank, and executed by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano with help from Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank.

Both Monti and Draghi are former employees of Goldman Sachs, the widely hated zombie bank. When Monti seized power, he was widely acclaimed as a savior and enjoyed an approval rating of 70%; his approval has now fallen to about 30%. Like Gorbachev, he is unpopular at home but remains the darling of foreign leaders. Even the London Financial Times is bearish on Monti, accusing him of starting his austerity regime when Italy was already in recession

Among the also-rans are Civic Revolution of Antonio Ingroia, a merger of the Greens with Antonio Di Pietro’s anti-corruption forces left over from the “Clean Hands” movement of the early 1990s, which targeted politicians but did very little to attack the larger corruption of the Bank of Italy and the big banks.

Another smaller list is Stop the Decline, led by the strange Oscar Giannino, backed up by a clique of US-educated professors of neo-liberal austerity economics. This list was paid to poach votes from Berlusconi. But now Giannino has been hit with a scandal based on his false claim of holding a master’s degree from a Chicago university.

The Italian political landscape is extremely fragmented, so public opinion polls - which cannot by law be published after February 8 - are more than usually unreliable. Under the Italian system, the political force which comes in first gets 54% of the seats in the lower house. Multi-party coalitions must get 10% to enter parliament. If the 10% is not achieved, the individual parties fall back under the rule which prescribes that parties not in a coalition must get 4% to win seats.

Italian politics, which for many decades after World War II had eight parties, has undergone massive Weimarization, especially since Monti’s coup. There are now no fewer than 25 political parties or organizations. This time around, there are four new parties, including those of Monti and Grillo. Two parties, including one led by Gianfranco Fini, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, and another by former Defense Minister Ignazio LaRussa, have split from Berlusconi. Two parties have also split from the Democratic Party, including the libertarian Radicals of Marco Panella and Emma Bonino.


Banks hope for Bersani-Monti regime to continue austerityThe banking community, as represented by Mediobanca and others, is hoping for a Bersani-Monti coalition government to continue the savage austerity policies that Monti’s technocratic ministers have been imposing over the last 15 months. Bersani’s party and its predecessors have always seen their business model as begging the big banks to let them join the government, in exchange for which they will break the labor movement, suppress strikes, and impose budget austerity across the board. Incredibly, Bersani has been one of Monti’s warmest admirers. Bersani has not learned the lesson of Weimar Germany, when the Social Democrats (SPD) supported Hunger Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s austerity program, wrecking the economy and the political system, and opening the door to National Socialism.

Mediobanca concedes that a Bersani-Monti tandem will be weak, and might need more support from smaller parties, leading to instability with early elections likely in the short term. Although the Common Good will have a majority in the Chamber of Deputies due to the majority bonus, there is no bonus in the Senate, where most members are directly elected by winning their districts. This is where the Common Good plus Monti may fall short.

Some might say that Italians can choose among a genocidal professor, a party hack, a genial satyr, and a scurrilous clown. How did the current situation arise?

During the Obama years, the first goal of the US intelligence community has been to destroy the Berlusconi government, for geopolitical reasons. Based on Berlusconi’s close personal relationship with Putin, he had secured for Italy an important role in the construction of the Nordstream pipeline, and an even more important participation in the Southstream pipeline -- both projects which Washington wanted to sabotage.

Berlusconi also made overtures to President Lukashenko of Belarus, much demonized in Foggy Bottom. The State Department wants to turn the European Union against Putin’s Russia, but the pro-US eurocrats and eurogarchs complained that Italy was becoming an advocate for Moscow within the Brussels bureaucracy. Lucia Annunziata wrote in La Stampa of May 25, 2009 under the title “The Shadow of a Plot” that center-right circles believed US-Italian relations were being hurt by “the excessive closeness of premier Silvio Berlusconi to the Russian Prime Minister Putin.”

The London Economist commented: Italy is one of the countries which have gotten much closer to Moscow than Washington desires, starting from the [August 2008] crisis in Georgia. By 2010 at the latest, US agencies were fully mobilized to overthrow Berlusconi.


State Department campaign to topple Berlusconi, 2008-2011

One part of this effort involved Gianfranco Fini, the former neofascist whom Berlusconi had made President of the Chamber of Deputies in 2008. Fini had been a member of the official neofascist party. In July 2010, after a faction fight, Fini was expelled from Berlusconi’s party, managing to take with him 34 deputies and 10 senators in a move which weakened, but did not destroy, Berlusconi’s governing majority. It was later revealed that Fini’s actions had been closely coordinated with the US embassy in Rome.

During 2009, David Thorne took over as US ambassador to Italy. Thorne was a Yale roommate of John Kerry, who has just become US Secretary of State. Thorne, like Kerry and the Bushes, is a member of the infamous Skull and Bones secret society, and is the twin brother of Kerry’s ex-wife. Thorne’s first meeting on becoming ambassador was with Fini, and not with Berlusconi. Fini is also reported to be a close personal friend of Nancy Pelosi, when Speaker of the House had the same job as Fini. (Il Fatto Quotidiano, September 15, 2010)

Fini, true to form, is now a part of the pro-austerity With Monti For Italy coalition. Bur despite his US backing, Fini may be close to the last hurrah. He had rented a theater in Agrigento, Sicily for a major appearance, but found the premises empty except for a few dozen supporters.

When the Fini operation failed, the CIA turned to exposés of the wild parties at Berlusconi’s mansion in Arcore, near Milan, feeding an immense international propaganda campaign. In December 2009, Berlusconi was struck on the face and seriously injured by an alabaster model of the Milan Cathedral. Italian judges, some of them politically motivated, pursued scores of legal actions against Berlusconi. One of these judges, Ilda Boccassini, was a sympathizer of the left countergang Lotta Continua well into the 1980s. Wikileaks documents made public in December 2010 confirmed the deep hostility of the State Department to Berlusconi.


Giorgio Napolitano, Henry Kissinger’s favorite communist

The coup that finally ousted Berlusconi in November 2011 was managed by Giorgio Napolitano, the president of the Italian Republic and thus the head of state. The Italian presidency has often been almost a ceremonial office, but it acquires significant powers when governments fall, which is frequently. Napolitano has vastly expanded these powers.

For most of his life, Napolitano has been an active member of the Italian Communist Party. He belonged to the right-wing faction around Giorgio Amendola - Napolitano was known as Skinny Giorgio, and Amendola as Fat Giorgio. It has recently been revealed that between 1977 and 1981, Napolitano conducted secret meetings with the Carter administration’s ambassador to Rome, Richard Gardner of the Trilateral Commission. These meetings only became public knowledge in 2005, with the publication of Gardner’s memoirs, Mission Italy. This puts Napolitano in contact with the US embassy during the kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, in whose death US intelligence agencies played an important role.

Henry Kissinger once called Napolitano “my favorite communist.” Business Week referred to him as the point man in Italy for the New York Council on Foreign Relations. The Italian press has dubbed him King George. But thanks in large part to Putin’s support for the Italian prime minister, it took the CIA two years to overthrow Berlusconi. In the end, only economic and financial warfare, plus Napolitano’s treachery, would prove decisive.


Mario Monti: Bilderberg, trilateral, Goldman Sachs

In October 2011, the Yale-educated economist Mario Monti, a eurogarch of the Brussels Commission from 1994 to 1999, was president of the Bocconi University of Milan, a business school. He had worked on the Santer, Prodi, and Barroso commissions in Brussels. He was and remains the European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller, as well as a member of the secretive Bilderberg group. He was also a consultant for Goldman Sachs and Coca-Cola.

While Berlusconi was under siege by the Anglo-Americans, Napolitano plotted for months to make Monti the kingpin of a regime of technocrats - supposedly nonpartisan experts who did not represent any political party and could therefore more readily impose pitiless austerity. This was a formula the International Monetary Fund had been trying to force on Italy for 30 years and more.


A modern coup d’état using spreads, not tanks

The indispensable ingredient in the Napolitano-Monti coup was a broad-based and coordinated attack on Italian government bonds by Wall Street, the City of London, and their European satellites. This attack involved threats by ratings agencies to downgrade Italian debt, backed up by massive derivatives speculation against the bonds using credit default swaps (CDS) to increase the interest-rate premium - or spread - paid by Italy compared to Germany in borrowing. (The agencies were later investigated for fraud by Judge Michele Ruggiero of Trani.) Of course, the European Central Bank could at any time have wiped out the speculators by purchasing large quantities of Italian bonds in the open market and driving up the price.

But Napolitano and Monti knew that they could count on the new boss of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi to sabotage the Italian bonds. Draghi took over from the Frenchman Trichet in the night of Halloween 2011, and the attack on Italy began immediately on November 1.

During the summer of 2011, Berlusconi had resisted demands for draconian austerity, perhaps because he knew that Italy was too big to fail and that sooner or later Wall Street and London would have to back off. He was vilified for a lack of civic virtue. During the final attack on Berlusconi, Italian bond yields reached 7%, and the famous spread peaked at 575 basis points over the rate on German bonds. The New York Times cited reports that Draghi “had restricted… purchases of Italian bonds to put more pressure on Mr. Berlusconi to quit” and to extort more austerity from Italy. “If so, the pressure worked.” (NYT, November 9, 2011) The parliament was in panic.

On November 8, 2011 Napolitano appointed Monti, who had never been elected to any public office, as senator for life. This also meant immunity from prosecution for life, unless and until the Italian Senate voted to take this parliamentary immunity away. Also on November 8, Berlusconi concluded that he had lost his parliamentary majority. On November 10, 2011, the new senator for life Monti met with Napolitano at the Quirinal Palace for a two-hour discussion of economic “growth” by means of “structural reforms.” Napolitano still ridiculed rumors that he would make Monti the next prime minister. On the same day, Obama called Napolitano to assure him of US support in his management of the post-Berlusconi crisis. Just this month, Napolitano visited Obama with the obvious goal of getting more US support for Monti.

Berlusconi and other politicians like the anti-corruption activist Di Pietro were pressing for early elections to let the Italian people show what they wanted. But Napolitano was intent on carrying out his cold coup: “markets trumped traditional democratic processes,” wrote the New York Times on December 2, 2011. On November 13, Napolitano officially charged Monti with forming a government of non-party austerity technocrats, and Monti won a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies by 556 to 61. Only the Northern League opposed Monti. This lopsided vote recalled a similar one carried out in the resort town of Vichy, France on July 10,1940 in which the National Assembly voted dictatorial powers for Marshal Pétain, effectively replacing the Third French Republic with a fascist regime. On that day, the vote -- managed by the infamous Pierre Laval -- had been 569 in favor, 80 against, and 18 abstentions.

Monti’s cabinet was composed of little-known figures, mainly from northern Italy, with Catholic, academic, or military backgrounds. One who has become infamous is Labor Minister Elsa Fornero, a professor who cried in public over her own cruelty when she presented her anti-retiree measures. There was the impression that the Monti cabinet were bit players reading lines that had been written by the IMF and the ECB.


Presidential powers from von Hindenburg to Napolitano

Napolitano was following in the footsteps of German Reich President Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who pushed aside the Reichstag (parliament) as the maker of governments when he named the austerity enforcer Heinrich Brüning as chancellor in March, 1930. After this point, no German government could obtain a governing majority, and all relied on Hindenburg’s emergency powers to stay in office -- including von Papen, von Schleicher, and finally Hitler in the first weeks of 1933. These were all called presidential governments, as Monti’s has been. By relegating the parliament to irrelevance, von Hindenburg contributed mightily to the atrophy and death of German democracy.

At the time, I called attention to the obvious coup d’état by Goldman Sachs and its allies, with a similar operation in Greece around the same time. Paolo Becchi, Professor of the Philosophy of Jurisprudence at the University of Genoa, noted that Napolitano “telling a technocrat from Brussels to form a government is nothing but a coup d’état ordered by powerful forces, partly from outside Italy, and managed by the President of the Republic.” Up until now, the bankers had been willing to govern indirectly, masking their power with the faces of politicians.

Now, the bankers wanted to seize power directly: “But it was necessary at least to keep up appearances. With an attitude which is typical of all the followers of Cataline [who attempted a coup against the Roman Republic in the time of Cicero], Monti’s main concern was to seize power with legal means.” Becchi added: “In the moment when political power is brought down to the level of financial power, a coup d’état is always possible, and so easy to carry out that almost nobody realizes it.” (Libero, December 1, 2011)

Monti’s economic measures aimed at shifting an initial €24 billion over three years of the cost of the economic depression away from bankers and speculators and onto the shoulders of working people. The minimum of years on the job to obtain a pension was raised from 40 years to 42 years and one month for men. The minimum age for old-age pensions was raised from 60 years to 62 and then to 66 in 2018. Increases in pension payments would generally be frozen. The property tax (IMU) was increased by 30% and extended to resident homeowners, who had previously been exempt. The value added tax (IVA) was raised from 21% to 23%. As camouflage, a luxury tax on yachts, private planes, and Ferraris was introduced. Only the Northern League and Di Pietro voted against these measures.

Then came a push to make Italy a hire and fire society on the American model, striking down protections that had been in place for decades. Taxi drivers, pharmacists, doctors, lawyers, and notaries were deprived of minimum fees for their services, and their professions were deregulated.

Thanks to Monti’s measures, the Italian unemployment rate has risen from 8.5% in November 2011 to 11.2% in February 2013, the worst in 13 years. Almost 3 million Italians are out of work, with 644,000 or 29% of them laid off on Monti’s watch. Youth unemployment is now at an all-time record of 37%. By December of 2012, industrial production, after falling every months since Monti took power, was down by 7% compared to December 2011.


Grillo: Endless referendums, endless instability

The early Northern League told Italians and foreigners and southerners were responsible for their problems. Grillo blames politicians and political parties. Bersani’s support for Monti’s austerity, combined with Berlusconi’s personal excesses, has focused new attention on the comedian Beppe Grillo and his 5SM. Grillo may well emerge as the big winner of these elections. Grillo has a recent precedent: the comedian Guglielmo Giannini, who in 1944 founded the Man In the Street (uomo qualunque) movement, an Italian precursor of French poujadisme.

Giannini appealed to the angry postwar petty bourgeoisie with populist themes of anti-politics, anti-politicians, anti-corruption, anti-government, deregulation, and anti-taxes. Grillo uses many of the techniques of Giannini, such as obscene and abusive slogans, or mocking the names of his opponents: for Grillo, Monti becomes Rigor Montis.

Grillo, ignoring the lessons of the Weimar Republic, recommends hyper-democracy as a method of governing. The basic approach to all controversies is to organize a referendum. This can work at the level of local government, where some of Grillo’s supporters started, but might lead to chaos if applied nationwide. Grillo wants a referendum on whether Italy should stay in the euro, an idea which appeals in Italy to a few ultra-lefts, but mainly to reactionaries. Grillo (like the framers of Weimar) focuses on the need of government to make sure that all voices receive representation, but neglects the equally imperative need on to promote majorities capable of deciding issues and exercising power.

Grillo mayor fails to solve pre-school issue in Parma

The first big success for Grillo came in Parma, traditionally the turf of the PCI/Democratic Party. Here Grillo’s candidate took over as mayor early in 2012. Within less than a year, Grillo was greeted by protests over the rising cost of living, especially for the mayor’s raising of the price of pre-school for working families, while eliminating multi-child discounts. Up to this point, Grillo had enjoyed all the advantages of the Muslim Brotherhood under Mubarak, or of Jesse Ventura running for governor of Minnesota, meaning the ability to criticize without any responsibility.

When confronted with an attack on his own record, Grillo responded with petulance, suggesting he cannot take criticism. Grillo has been declining television interviews, preferring to give speeches to large crowds in the piazza of many cities. But observers note that this is also a way to avoid probing questions from hostile journalists. In any case, big crowds do not necessarily indicate election majorities. Grillo portrays himself as a victim of the mass media, even though enjoys extensive coverage in the current phase. He is rich, but campaigns in a mini-van to increase his populist appeal.

According to Elisabetta Gualmini and Piergiorgio Corbetta in their survey of the Grillo movement entitled Il Partito del Grillo (Bologna: Il Mulino/Istituto Cattaneo, 2013), about 60% of Grillo’s support comes from angry, male, sometimes unemployed generation X technicians, IT and software personnel, and small businessmen born between 1969 and 1978, and thus aged between 35 and 44. There are few pensioners, few housewives, few women of any background. Over 50% describe themselves as extreme left, left, or center-left, while about 30% self-described as center-right to right. Grillo represents a protest movement that cuts across the other political parties.

An ominous symptom is the dictatorship of Grillo inside the party. In recent weeks, Grillo has ousted a regional councilor from Emilia-Romagna for complaining on television of the lack of democracy inside the 5SM. He also expelled a Bologna city councilwoman for taking part in Ballaró, a widely viewed television talk show, after Grillo banned such appearances, presumably to keep the spotlight on himself. Previously, he had expelled three candidates from Bologna and a member of the Ferrara city council. Grillo considers the 5SM is a trademark which he owns. The dissidents are generally excommunicated by means of a tweet. Does Grillo write the tweets, blog, scripts, and speeches by himself, or is he controlled and supported by a syndicate?


Grillo’s Svengalis: Casaleggio associates

Some say Grillo is a synthetic candidate. According to published accounts, Grillo’s Svengali and teleprompter is political consultant Gianroberto Casaleggio, 58, of Casaleggio Associates, a company specialized in political and media consulting and strategies for Internet marketing - more or less the methods which have put Grillo where he is today.

Casaleggio and Grillo confer by telephone on average three times a day. Casaleggio, like Grillo, sports the hair style of an aging freak, trying to look like John Lennon, but unlike Grillo usually wears a suit. (Tommaso Caldarelli, Giornalettismo, May 25, 2012) Casaleggio’s office is near Piazza Scala in Milan. The dominant partner at Casaleggio Associates is Enrico Sassoon, currently the director of the Italian edition of the Harvard Business Review.

Sassoon has worked for Pirelli, and is currently a leading light of the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy. Sassoon is also on the board of the Italian branch of the Aspen Institute, where his colleagues are mostly members of the Bilderberg group. Giampietro Zanetti, a Berlusconi backer, writes in his blog: “Who is behind Grillo? Bilderberg and the Aspen Institute!”

Casaleggio, who once advised Di Pietro and Olivetti, believes that “by 2018 the world will be divided into: the West with direct democracy and free access to the Internet, and the enemies of freedom like China-Russia-Middle East.” In 2020 there will be a new world war, with the population reduced by a billion, then catharsis, and finally rebirth in the name of Gaia, and world government.” (Marco Alfieri, La Stampa, May 26, 2012) Is this really what Grillo’s voters want?

Grillo and Casaleggio are the authors of a book called We Are At War - meaning that Grillo is the Guy Fawkes or Ludendorff of a war against political parties as such. The need to destroy political parties is one of the favorite themes of various disinformation channels of the US intelligence community, who see this as part of the effort to smash the national states and impose the Empire. A coincidence?

In 2012, the big political news from Europe was the emergence of Alexis Tsipras and Syriza to fight austerity in Greece with program, leadership, organization, and strategy, and not with utopias of participatory democracy. Grillo is the opposite of Syriza on most points, meaning that Italy now risks a new round of destabilization. Which method will prevail?

Font: Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley