TBR News July 7, 2017

Jul 07 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., July 7, 2017:” Historical events are very much like a child’s kaleidoscope. It is possible to identify all of the shapes and colors of the bits of glass contained in the toy, but when they are placed in a mirrored tube, no one can accurately predict the exact patterns that will emerge when the tube is rotated. Historians can recognize the factors and forces that create change but can never predict exactly when or how they will combine, or what the effect of these combinations will be.

The coup, a seizure of power, has been a part of history for as long as man has been an organized social animal. The determined will attack the complacent, sometimes with success, and as often with failure. That which was successful in a disorganized and demoralized Imperial Russia might not be at all successful in another country at another time.

No coup or popular rising has taken place in times of relative stability. It is only when the great middle-class awakens to find itself and its institutions under attack and undefended that the thought of self-defense becomes valid. Violent upheavals do not begin without warning. Before a volcano erupts, there are nearly always ominous signs of the impending disaster and very often, clear though these indications may be, they are ignored out of the fear of radical change found in the complacent throughout history.

Trotsky very clearly recognized this fear of change and took swift advantage of it when he seized power in Russia. By the time the public was aware of what had happened, it was almost too late to react, and by the time the population, most of whom were only interested in survival and creature comforts might have reacted, the militants were in power and increasing their control on a daily basis.

A conservative government might be dull but it does not, in general, attempt to exert control over its citizens, other than to maintain law and order. A radical government, on the other hand, cannot feel safe in its power until it has established an ever-intrusive control over its people. Control of weapons is certainly a prime goal for such an entity and this would work in tandem with discrediting, and eventually destroying, any institution that might be able to mount an attack on it. The first target would be any religious group who might find a moral, and hence religious, fault with its goals or techniques. The second target would be any other organization that could conceivably organize against it.

In a monarchy, the people have little choice over the succession of rulers and a good king with a short reign can easily be replaced by a bad one with a long reign. In a republic, malfunction and mendacity are correctable at the ballot box. If this safety valve is shut down, an explosion will certainly result. Thus, Müller’s discussion of the importance of the press, or media, as a means of public control has complete validity.

News can easily be controlled by those with the desire and ability to do so. Governments can exert great influence over nearly any media entity through their power in the granting of licenses or their control over entree to official information. By a de facto control over the reporting of news, an administration bent on complete domination can accomplish the implementation of their goals with relative ease, given a receptive and passive audience.

Faked opinion polls and heavily slanted pro-administration reportage might have had a strong effect on this audience when there were no other sources of information. But, with the advent of alternative information sources, such as the computer, the photocopier and the facsimile machine, propaganda is far less able to influence, dominate, and control public perceptions.

The concept of civil unrest is always abhorrent to the entrenched entities which comprise the leadership of the political and business factors of an urbanized and stable society. These individuals belong to the Order of St. Precedent whose motto is “Look Backwards,” and whose watchword is “That Which Has Not Been, Cannot Be.” Trotsky and his ilk knew how to utilize such blindness.”

Table of Contents

  • SECRECY NEWS
  • Sikkim Stand-Off: China and India Collide in the Himalayas
  • Netherlands: Turkish deputy PM not welcome for rally
  • The G-20’s Most Important Meeting
  • NYPD Attempts to Block Surveillance Transparency Law With Misinformation
  • The Enemy of My Enemy Is My…?
  • The Israeli Military is Buying Copter Drones With Machine Guns

 

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2017, Issue No. 52

July 7, 2017

SHARING INTELLIGENCE WITH NON-INTEL AGENCIES

Executive branch agencies that are not part of the US Intelligence Community (IC) can still get access to classified intelligence and to IC information technology systems under certain conditions.

But they must follow procedures that were spelled out last month in new policy guidance from Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats.

In a nutshell, the non-IC agency must have an identifiable need for access to intelligence information and must be able to meet required physical security standards for safeguarding the information.

“The originating [IC] element must receive confirmation from the [non-IC] Federal Partner that all applicable safeguarding requirements in law and policy are met prior to gaining access to the data.”

See Federal Partner Access to Intelligence Community Information Technology Systems, Intelligence Community Policy Guidance 404.1, June 16, 2017.

The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency is responsible for monitoring the activities of non-IC personnel who are present on IC networks “to ensure access is consistent with U.S. legal and policy requirements, and report any variance.”

CAN STATES UPHOLD PARIS ACCORD?, & MORE FROM CRS

Some American cities and states are committing to pursue the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change despite President Trump’s repudiation of that policy.

But a new brief from the Congressional Research Service said the US Constitution may limit the ability of states to formally adopt such a course. In particular, the Constitution appears to bar states from making legally binding agreements with foreign nations. And the Supreme Court has often stated that the federal government preempts states in matters of foreign affairs.

See Constitutional Limits on States’ Efforts to “Uphold” the Paris Agreement, CRS Legal Sidebar, June 27, 2017.

Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

Climate Change: Frequently Asked Questions about the 2015 Paris Agreement, updated Jun

Help Wanted: Supreme Court Holds Vacancies Act Prohibits Nominees from Serving as Acting Officers, CRS Legal Sidebar, June 28, 2017

Comparison of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) and the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), July 3, 2017

Foreign Direct Investment in the United States: An Economic Analysis, updated June 29, 2017

U.S. Direct Investment Abroad: Trends and Current Issues, updated June 29, 2017

The Federal Budget: Overview and Issues for FY2018 and Beyond, June 30, 2017

No Bivens for You?, CRS Legal Sidebar, July 5, 2017

Qatar: Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy, updated June 29, 2017

The United Arab Emirates (UAE): Issues for U.S. Policy, updated June 28, 2017

The Coast Guard’s Role in Safeguarding Maritime Transportation: Selected Issues, updated June 28, 2017

The Legal and Practical Effects of Private Immigration Legislation and Recent Policy Changes, CRS Legal Sidebar, June 30, 2017

THE DARKENING WEB

Cyberspace has increasingly become an arena of national self-assertion and international conflict instead of the transnational global commons it once seemed to be. Preserving the vision and the possibility of a free internet is an urgent task.

That is the basic thrust of a new book called The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace by Alexander Klimburg (Penguin Press, July 2017).

For my review of the book, see Cybersecurity: The cold war online, Nature 547, 30–31 (06 July 2017).

 

Sikkim Stand-Off: China and India Collide in the Himalayas

Indian hegemonism is on the march

July 7, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

India’s ultra-nationalist government under Prime Minister Nahendra Modi is engaged in an aggressive face-off with China that could end in a large-scale military conflict. Although the strip of land, called Donglang, that is at the center of the dispute has long been acknowledged as Chinese territory under an 1890 agreement between China and Great Britain, the Indian authorities are trying to block a road-building project initiated by the Chinese in the region. In June, Indian troops crossed the border into Donglang and confronted the Chinese, and the stand-off continues. New Delhi claims that the road, if constructed, would give the Chinese the ability to cut off India from its northeastern provinces, where various insurgencies against the central government have been ongoing for years.

Legally, the Chinese are in the right: the 1890 agreement clearly gives the Chinese sovereignty in this area. Furthermore, previous Indian governments have pledged to uphold this agreement. But the ultra-nationalist Modi, who rose to power on the strength of a “Hindutva” movement that invokes a vision of Indian supremacy, is playing to his domestic constituency: Indian troops have been rushed to the border, and Modi – perhaps emboldened by his recent talks with President Donald Trump – shows no signs of backing down.

The 1890 treaty was primarily about the fate of Sikkim, an ancient Himalayan kingdom lodged between China, India, and Indian-dominated Bhutan, directly adjacent to Donglang: ruled by a hereditary monarch, Sikkim was ceded to the British while the Donglang region was given to China, then ruled by the Qing dynasty. Although close to India, Sikkim was an independent country until 1975, when India annexed it by force. After Indian troops moved in, an “election” was held in which over 97 percent of the 59 percent of the population eligible to vote chose union with India. Altogether, a very dicey situation: indeed, in 1978 then Indian Prime Minster Moraji Desair “apologized” for the annexation, while maintaining that it is “irreversible.”

The Indians are trying to muddy the dispute by hiding behind Bhutan’s claim to Donglang: but Bhutan is yet another case where Indian imperialism has nearly nullified an ancient state’s sovereignty. Until 2007, when Bhutan’s absolute monarchy was transformed into a parliamentary system, India exercised a de facto protectorate over the country, controlling its foreign affairs. When the Bhutanese sought to establish closer relations with China, the Indians retaliated during the 2013 elections by cutting off subsidized energy exports: the result was the defeat of then Prime Minister Jigme Thinley. India accounts for 75 percent of Bhutan’s imports and is its biggest trading partner.

India has used the same bullying tactics against Nepal, another independent Himalayan country on the long Sino-Indian border. In 2016, after Nepal adopted a new constitution that favored native Nepalese over Indian immigrants, India initiated an informal blockade, cutting off the mountainous country from vital supplies. China moved quickly into the breach, rushing in oil, food, and other necessities. Chinese investment in Nepal now surpasses that of India.

If we step back, and look at the larger picture, what is happening is another episode in the ongoing encirclement of China by the US and its allies in the region. During a recent meeting between Modi and Trump, the latter affirmed a closer military relationship with New Delhi, and the Washington Post reported that the State Department “approved the $365 million sale of a C-17 military transport aircraft to India. The administration is also set to offer a $2 billion sale of U.S.-made unarmed drones to help in surveillance of the Indian Ocean.”

The movement that propelled Modi to power in New Delhi is no ordinary nationalist movement: it is a militant and militaristic cult with a mass following. As I wrote way back in 2002, warning of the danger represented by this trend:

“The rise of Hindu fundamentalism as a political force in India catapulted the Bharatiya Janata Party to power and sought to expunge the Gandhian pacifism of the old militantly secular Congress Party tradition, replacing it with a new martial spirit. The idea of Hindutva, which energizes the Hindu activists, sees India not only as a Hindu state, but as a militantly revanchist force in the region, a nation determined to recapture its old empire. As I explained in a previous column devoted to this fascinating subject, the Hindutva movement has created a whole mythology based on the idea of ethnic Indians as the first and only pure Aryans: the swastika is an ancient Hindu symbol, and has been revived by what I call the Hindu-fascist forces in India. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological center of Hindutva, has a provision in its constitution that its leader must be a blue-eyed Sarasvat Brahmin.

“I hesitate to use the term ‘neo-Nazi’ to describe a contemporary political movement, as it has become almost a ritualistic term of abuse. However, in this case, the label fits precisely.”

India, I would remind you, is a member of the nuclear club. We have to ask ourselves: would the Hindu fanatics now in charge in New Delhi hesitate to use nukes in a war with China? I’m frankly afraid to answer my own question.

As for the Chinese, they beat the Indians once before when ongoing border disputes escalated into violence – remember the Sino-Indian war of 1962? – and I have little doubt that they have the capacity to do so again. Indeed, they are evoking this memory to remind the Indians that they’re in for another beating if they don’t turn down the heat.

However, India didn’t have nukes until 1974, when it tested its first nuclear device. China tested its first nuclear weapons in 1964. This time around, in the event a large-scale Sino-Indian conflict breaks out, who plays the nuclear card first? With China’s military advantage, it is New Delhi that will have the incentive to put its nuclear ace on the table.

The world is revved up about North Korea’s nuclear testing, and the recent launching of an ICBM prototype, but that danger pales before what’s happening in the Himalayas.

The US must stop encouraging the Indians in their confrontation with China – especially if we’re expecting Beijing to intervene on our behalf with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. That arms deal with New Delhi should be nullified until and unless the Indians withdraw their forces from Donglang. And, finally, the state of Sikkim, unlawfully annexed by India, must be restored to full independence: India has no more claim to Donglang than it does to Sikkim proper. Contrary to former Prime Minister Desai, the annexation is indeed reversible – because injustice cannot be allowed to stand on the strength of brazen coercion.

Netherlands: Turkish deputy PM not welcome for rally

The Dutch government has said that Turkish politicians are not welcome at a ceremony commemorating last July’s failed coup attempt in Turkey. A similar dispute in March severely tested ties between the two countries

July 7, 2017

DW

The Netherlands’ foreign ministry said in a statement on Friday that Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Tugrul Turkes, would not be welcome at a rally marking one year since a failed coup attempt in Ankara and Istanbul.

The decision was made “given the current circumstance in bilateral relations between our countries,” the ministry statement said.

The move would apply  to any government minister, but Turkes was already scheduled to attend an event organized by a Turkish organization in Apeldoorn, east of Amsterdam, on July 11.

Military officers attempted to overthrow Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian government on the night of July 15 into 16, 2016. Turkey accused Western governments of failing to express support for Erdogan’s government quickly enough. Since then, Erdogan has launched an industrial-scale purge of the military, academia, the legal system and the press – while pushing through a series of contentious reforms expanding his powers as president.

The referendum precedent

Ties between the Netherlands and Turkey were particularly strained in March this year, in the run-up to Dutch elections and the Turkish referendum that narrowly approved Erdogan’s new executive role.

Erdogan’s victory relied in no small part on his supporters living in EU countries casting postal ballots supporting him. To this end, his Justice and Development P

The Netherlands declared that Turkish leaders would not be welcome to campaign, and later expelled one who tried to defy the ban.

This prompted public protests centered around the port city of Rotterdam, where Family Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya was refused entry to the Turkish consulate. Hundreds of Turkish protesters surrounded the building in response, a demonstration that culminated in 12 arrests for public order offenses.

Both President Erdogan and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte are currently in Hamburg for the G20 summit.

“There are more than 3 million Turkish citizens living in Germany. Why do German officials prevent me, as president of Turkey, from meeting with them and speaking to them? Why don’t they allow it,” Erdogan asked in an interview with the Die Zeit weekly, his first in years with any German newspaper. “Where is the freedom of opinion, the freedom of thought? And while you deny a country’s head of state the right to speak, PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] members can speak and demonstrate quite comfortably – and we can’t even speak by video link, which has been banned by the Constitutional Court.”

Turkey’s ties with Europe in general have been tense in recent years, especially since Erdogan’s transition to the presidency after a decade as prime minister. On Thursday, the European Parliament voted to formally suspend talks on Turkey’s long-stalled bid to join the EU.

The G-20’s Most Important Meeting

Why We Need Trump and Putin To Get Along

On the eve of his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump blasted the Russian president’s “destabilizing behavior.” Yet history shows that global stability improves when Moscow and Washington get along. And the recipe for doing so was on full display in Paris recently.

July 6, 2017

by Dietmar Pieper

Spiegel

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump had nothing but positive things to say about the Russian president. He called Vladimir Putin a “strong leader” and promised: “We’re going to have a great relationship with Putin and Russia.”

That wasn’t all that long ago, but the situation has changed dramatically since then. Little has done more to damage Trump’s White House than his team’s real or imagined connections with Russia, which were placed under investigation by a special counsel not long ago. And now, just one day before the two presidents’ highly anticipated first meeting, Trump has gone on the offensive. Speaking during his visit to Poland on Thursday, Trump accused Russia of “destabilizing behavior” — an allegation that the Kremlin immediately rejected.

Indeed, it would be a tremendous stretch to speak of a “great relationship” between the U.S. and Russia at the moment. And that is bad news for the rest of the world. Nor is it a particularly good omen for their Friday face-to-face on the sidelines of the G-20 (keep up with current developments with our rolling blog here).

It would certainly be a clever bit of diplomacy were Trump to engage in a modicum of flattery with his Russian counterpart. Moscow still hasn’t forgiven or forgotten Barack Obama’s derogatory remark about Russia being a “regional power.” The country’s age-old yearning for international respect hasn’t diminished.

The relationship between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev was even better. In 1986, the two met for tough negotiations in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. Although those initial talks ended without result, they paved the way for the crucial Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Signed in 1987, the INF deal led to the destruction of land-based mid-range nuclear-armed missiles of the kind that would have destroyed Central Europe in the event of war.

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Bill Clinton deployed his charm in discussions with Boris Yeltsin and helped support the democratization process in Russia, including the introduction of internationally accepted economic regulations. Indeed, at the behest of Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Russia was even invited in 1997 to join the group of the world’s largest economies, expanding the G-7 to the G-8. Moscow, it seemed at the time, was on the way to joining the West.

Respect and Clarity

That seems like ancient history today, now that relations between the West and Moscow, after several years of slow disintegration, have plunged over the edge due to a combination of competing geopolitical interests, Russian nostalgia, Western arrogance and hurt pride. And the result, most will agree, is a world that is more unstable than it has been in a long time

As such, there are good reasons to treat the Russian president with respect and consideration. That doesn’t mean agreeing with everything he says or ignoring the problems that exist. The example that should be followed is that of Reagan and Gorbachev.

Or that of new French President Emmanuel Macron. In late May, Macron invited Vladimir Putin to Paris and received him with great pomp in Versailles. But Macron didn’t just seek to charm his guest. He also spoke publicly and plainly about Russian missteps and overreach. It is a recipe that the U.S. president would be wise to emulate. And it is quite simple: respect and clear language.

Furthermore, history shows that a respectful relationship between the leaders in Moscow and Washington tends to coincide with greater international stability.

Paving the Way for Peace

The first meeting between a U.S. president and a Kremlin leader took place in 1943 during World War II. The trio of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Tehran to coordinate the fight against Nazi Germany. The two democratic politicians had feared that dealing with the Soviet dictator would be extremely difficult, but in Tehran, Stalin was as friendly as he could be and spoke openly and extensively about the Soviet Union’s strategy. The West’s cooperation with Stalin, despite his penchant for murdering millions of his countrymen, proved beneficial when it came to preventing the Nazis from winning the war.

The relationship didn’t last. But in the ensuing Cold War, the fact that U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had spoken to each other at length in Vienna the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis likely played a role in averting disaster in 1962. And the first nuclear arms control deal between the Americans and the Soviets came about in the 1970s following a meeting between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev.

NYPD Attempts to Block Surveillance Transparency Law With Misinformation

July 7 2017

by Ali Winston

The Intercept

Earlier this year, New York City Council members Vanessa Gibson and Daniel Garodnick introduced the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, which would require public disclosure and dialogue on the New York Police Department’s purchase and use of surveillance equipment. The bill is in the weaker vein of similar legislation passed or under consideration by lawmakers in 19 cities across the U.S., where elected officials hope to write use policies and approve or deny the purchase of surveillance gear.

Criminal justice reform and civil rights groups have praised the POST Act for the transparency it brings to NYPD spy equipment purchases, but the bill already faces a steep path to passage as law. Mayor Bill de Blasio opposes it, meaning the city council will need to approve the legislation with at least 34 votes to override the mayor’s veto.

The tough odds haven’t stopped the NYPD from throwing itself into a bare-knuckles publicity campaign to push back against the proposed legislation.

NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller laid into the POST Act during a public safety committee hearing on June 14, calling the proposed bill’s disclosure requirements “insane” and “an effective blueprint for those seeking to do us harm.”

“There is a habit now, a trend of calling documented, authorized investigations ‘police spying,’” Miller said at the hearing. “This is all balled up in some kind of paranoia — we operate under strict rules.”

In a June 16 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Deputy NYPD Commissioner for Legal Affairs Lawrence Byrne said, “This is not about transparency, this is about keeping New York City safe — this is about not revealing confidential law enforcement investigative techniques.” MSNBC did not invite any proponents of the bill to speak on the program, and the show’s hosts lobbed softball questions at Byrne and Miller when they weren’t busy working themselves into a lather about the perfidy of the Brennan Center, one of the prominent supporters of the POST Act.

During their recent testimonies at city council, Miller and Byrne made a number of statements that mischaracterized or omitted crucial details regarding the department’s record of transparency, its use of specific technologies like cell-site simulators, the surveillance of communities of color, and how such technologies are acquired by police. Here’s a rundown of those statements.

Transparency

The NYPD is notorious for flouting the New York State Freedom of Information Law for even the most routine requests about police activity, contracts, and policies. Regarding surveillance technology, the department has been or is being sued for refusing to release information about facial recognition software, its use of predictive policing software, controversial X-ray vans, and the “mosque raking” program that placed the city’s Muslim communities under mass surveillance. Most recently, the local news channel NY1 sued the NYPD for footage from officers’ body-worn cameras, which are being introduced to precincts throughout the city this year. The police demanded $36,000 to release the footage.

The NYPD also recently invoked the Glomar response — the FBI’s famous “we cannot confirm or deny” construction — in response to requests for public records. It represents a bold new frontier in opacity for New York state’s open records laws, which are supposed to require affirmative or negative responses

Addressing federal transparency requirements at the June hearing, Miller said that federal law doesn’t require the NYPD to release information on how technology is used for investigative or counterterrorism purposes. While Miller is correct about the exemptions to federal law for Privacy Impact Assessments, which were mandated by the E-Government Act of 2002, federal law enforcement nonetheless publishes highly descriptive documents for many sensitive databases on the open web. Federal authorities have released detailed documentation on the capabilities of ICEGangs, the now-discontinued gang database for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as LeadTrac and FALCON-SA, two of ICE’s data-analysis tools used to track and identify suspects in criminal and civil immigration investigations.

Mass surveillance and HandschuSince a 1985 settlement over the NYPD’s surveillance of left-wing organizations, the department’s intelligence operations on political activities have been subject to a federal consent decree known as the Handschu agreement. The nature, extent, and unconstitutionality of the NYPD’s spying on political groups first became public during the 1971 trial of 21 Black Panther members accused of attempting to bomb police stations and department stores. The agreement between the department and the federal government established strict guidelines for how the NYPD could monitor First Amendment activity — those are the “strict rules” Miller was referring to during the city council hearing.

The cops, however, chafed at the Handschu restrictions for years. In 2003, they successfully convinced the presiding federal judge to loosen the limits, under the premise that they impeded the NYPD’s counterterrorism operations.

The relaxed regulations on political surveillance manifested in the department’s undercover operations directed at anti-war protesters, transportation activists, left-wing political activists nationwide, and, most notoriously, Muslim Americans. The Demographics Unit, created by former Commissioner Ray Kelly in the mid-2000s, went about mapping Muslim and Middle Eastern communities in the city’s five boroughs. Meanwhile, undercover officers were sent to infiltrate religious congregations and student groups as far afield as Connecticut and New Jersey.

The Demographics Unit has been disbanded and the department’s “mosque-raking” operations led to a legal settlement and further operational restrictions last year, but activists and legal workers say the department’s surveillance in Middle Eastern and South Asian communities is still prevalent.

At the hearing, Byrne claimed the police were not “engaged in a surveillance program of any community” — a statement belied by the NYPD inspector general report that focused on the department’s surveillance operations of political activity involving people of Muslim origin. More than 50 percent of those investigations continued beyond their date of authorization, the report found.

Miller’s and Byrne’s assertions about the NYPD’s human intelligence operations received significant pushback from Queens council member Rory Lancman, who recalled past abuses despite court oversight. “The department has repeatedly over the years pushed the limits of what it can do in terms of intel gathering and surveillance,” Lancman said.

“There’s a reason,” Lancman added, “the Handschu agreement over time, on numerous occasions, has had to be modified and expanded.”

Funding and disclosure of surveillance equipment

For years, the NYPD has kept details of its purchase of surveillance equipment from public view, going so far as to redact even the most anodyne information about grant spending and rejecting my Freedom of Information Law requests about surveillance technology contracts on over 10 occasions since 2006.

There is supposed to be external oversight of the NYPD’s contracts by the independent city comptroller’s office, which registers agency procurements, and the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services. At the June hearing, Byrne explained the process.

“Every contract that the NYPD enters into, whether it’s for confidential technology or equipment or pens and pencils and legal pads, has to be approved by the mayor’s office of contracts and has to be registered by the comptroller,” Byrne said. “If the comptroller does not register the contract, we cannot go forward.”

Contracts for at least two of the NYPD’s major surveillance technologies — the department’s cell-site simulators, which collect information from nearby mobile phones, and the data-mining software from the security analytics firm Palantir — were not turned over by the comptroller’s office pursuant to a Freedom of Information Law request. According to a recent report by BuzzFeed, the NYPD paid Palantir $3.5 million annually for its services, which are reportedly being terminated. The Brennan Center has an ongoing FOIL lawsuit for documentation of Palantir’s work with the NYPD. The request unearthed contract records for the NYPD’s license-plate reader contractor ELSAG, Vigilant Solutions’ national database of billions of vehicle records, and ShotSpotter gunshot detectors that geolocate the sound of gunfire with permanently enabled microphones and issue automatic notifications for police.

There are multiple ways the police department can conceal contract information, aside from its intransigence on records laws. The city Law Department, which is a branch of the mayor’s office and handles most of the city’s legal affairs, can unilaterally declare a contract to be “registered” and not turn it over to the comptroller. The NYPD can also request that the comptroller review a contract in confidence and withhold that information from public disclosure. Or the department can channel the purchase of surveillance technology through the New York City Police Foundation, a private nonprofit organization that is not subject to public disclosure laws and receives major donations from firms like Axon, Palantir, and Microsoft, which sell technology to the NYPD.

The NYPD can also withhold contracts for sensitive technology pursuant to a nondisclosure agreement with the vendor, according to Byrne’s remarks at the council. “Many of these technologies, because they’re only effective if bad people don’t know how they work and how to defeat it, are given to us pursuant to very strict nondisclosure agreements,” he said.

“Every contract that the NYPD enters into, whether it’s for confidential technology or equipment or pens and pencils and legal pads, has to be approved by the mayor’s office of contracts and has to be registered by the comptroller,” Byrne said. “If the comptroller does not register the contract, we cannot go forward.”

Contracts for at least two of the NYPD’s major surveillance technologies — the department’s cell-site simulators, which collect information from nearby mobile phones, and the data-mining software from the security analytics firm Palantir — were not turned over by the comptroller’s office pursuant to a Freedom of Information Law request. According to a recent report by BuzzFeed, the NYPD paid Palantir $3.5 million annually for its services, which are reportedly being terminated. The Brennan Center has an ongoing FOIL lawsuit for documentation of Palantir’s work with the NYPD. The request unearthed contract records for the NYPD’s license-plate reader contractor ELSAG, Vigilant Solutions’ national database of billions of vehicle records, and ShotSpotter gunshot detectors that geolocate the sound of gunfire with permanently enabled microphones and issue automatic notifications for police.

There are multiple ways the police department can conceal contract information, aside from its intransigence on records laws. The city Law Department, which is a branch of the mayor’s office and handles most of the city’s legal affairs, can unilaterally declare a contract to be “registered” and not turn it over to the comptroller. The NYPD can also request that the comptroller review a contract in confidence and withhold that information from public disclosure. Or the department can channel the purchase of surveillance technology through the New York City Police Foundation, a private nonprofit organization that is not subject to public disclosure laws and receives major donations from firms like Axon, Palantir, and Microsoft, which sell technology to the NYPD.

The NYPD can also withhold contracts for sensitive technology pursuant to a nondisclosure agreement with the vendor, according to Byrne’s remarks at the council. “Many of these technologies, because they’re only effective if bad people don’t know how they work and how to defeat it, are given to us pursuant to very strict nondisclosure agreements,” he said.

“Every contract that the NYPD enters into, whether it’s for confidential technology or equipment or pens and pencils and legal pads, has to be approved by the mayor’s office of contracts and has to be registered by the comptroller,” Byrne said. “If the comptroller does not register the contract, we cannot go forward.”

Contracts for at least two of the NYPD’s major surveillance technologies — the department’s cell-site simulators, which collect information from nearby mobile phones, and the data-mining software from the security analytics firm Palantir — were not turned over by the comptroller’s office pursuant to a Freedom of Information Law request. According to a recent report by BuzzFeed, the NYPD paid Palantir $3.5 million annually for its services, which are reportedly being terminated. The Brennan Center has an ongoing FOIL lawsuit for documentation of Palantir’s work with the NYPD. The request unearthed contract records for the NYPD’s license-plate reader contractor ELSAG, Vigilant Solutions’ national database of billions of vehicle records, and ShotSpotter gunshot detectors that geolocate the sound of gunfire with permanently enabled microphones and issue automatic notifications for police.

There are multiple ways the police department can conceal contract information, aside from its intransigence on records laws. The city Law Department, which is a branch of the mayor’s office and handles most of the city’s legal affairs, can unilaterally declare a contract to be “registered” and not turn it over to the comptroller. The NYPD can also request that the comptroller review a contract in confidence and withhold that information from public disclosure. Or the department can channel the purchase of surveillance technology through the New York City Police Foundation, a private nonprofit organization that is not subject to public disclosure laws and receives major donations from firms like Axon, Palantir, and Microsoft, which sell technology to the NYPD.

The NYPD can also withhold contracts for sensitive technology pursuant to a nondisclosure agreement with the vendor, according to Byrne’s remarks at the council. “Many of these technologies, because they’re only effective if bad people don’t know how they work and how to defeat it, are given to us pursuant to very strict nondisclosure agreements,” he said.

How surveillance technology works

One of the few technologies the NYPD openly discussed at the city council hearings was cell-site simulators, which are devices that mimic cellphone towers to identify, locate, and in some cases, intercept communications from cellphones. Last year, the New York Civil Liberties Union released records documenting the NPYD’s use of cell-site simulators over 1,000 times from 2008 through May 2015.

Byrne characterized the department’s use of the devices as “pursuant to a court order supported by probable cause” and affirmed they were only used to track the location of target phones.

However, the NYPD did come under fire last year for using court orders that do not spell out that a cell-site stimulator will be used to track a cellphone. Both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have abandoned these orders in favor of warrants, which carry with them more privacy protections, for cell-site simulator use.

What’s more, Byrne’s assertion that the department’s cell-site simulators only gather data on target cellphones misrepresents how the devices actually work. They function by hoovering up signals from all cellphones within range, allowing searches through that pool of data for the target device’s identifying number.

Byrne’s remarks disturbed Michael Price, an attorney at the Brennan Center who testified in favor of the POST Act at the city council hearing. “NYPD literally believes that cell-site simulators work like PEN registers,” Price told The Intercept, referring to an older technology that tracks calls made and received by a target phone. “It is either a misunderstanding on Byrne’s part or a misrepresentation that underscores the need for the kind of disclosure outlined in the POST Act.” Price pointed out that both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security acknowledge the collection of nontarget data by cell-site simulators and require deletion within 30 days of collection.

No vote has been held yet on the POST Act. The NYPD campaign to oppose the bill in the court of public opinion has already won favorable coverage in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages. The department’s legendary intransigence on public disclosure and oversight, then, is likely to continue. And the city council, which has faced NYPD overreaches on issues like stop and frisk, will likely be stymied. If the POST Act represents the council’s last chance to shed some sunlight on the surveillance practices of the country’s largest police department, it may yield only a failed effort.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My…?

The Saudi-American-Iranian-Russian-Qatari-Syrian Conundrum

by Dilip Hiro

TomDispatch

The Middle East.  Could there be a more perilous place on Earth, including North Korea?  Not likely.  The planet’s two leading nuclear armed powers backing battling proxies amply supplied with conventional weapons; terror groups splitting and spreading; religious-sectarian wars threatening amid a plethora of ongoing armed hostilities stretching from Syria to Iraq to Yemen. And that was before Donald Trump and his team arrived on this chaotic scene. If there is one region where a single spark might start the fire that could engulf the globe, then welcome to the Middle East.

As for sparks, they are now in ample supply. At this moment, President Trump’s foreign policy agenda is a package of contradictions threatening to reach a boiling point in the region. He has allied himself firmly with Saudi Arabia even when his secretaries of state and defense seem equivocal on the subject. In the process, he’s come to view a region he clearly knows little about through the Saudi royal family’s paranoid eyes, believing staunchly that Shia Iran is hell-bent on controlling an Islamic world that is 85% Sunni.

Trump has never exactly been an admirer of Iran. His growing hostility toward Tehran (and that of the Iranophobic generals he’s appointed to key posts) has already led the U.S. military to shoot down two Iranian-made armed drones as well as a Syrian jet in 12 days.  This led Moscow to switch off the hotline between its operational center at the Khmeimim Air Base in Syria and al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the major American military facility in the region.  According to the Russian Defense Ministry, at the time the Syrian warplane was hit by the U.S. fighter, Russia’s Aerospace Forces were carrying out missions in Syria’s airspace. “However,” it added, “the coalition command did not use the existing communication line… to prevent incidents in Syria’s airspace.”

At the same time, the incorrigibly contradictory Trump has not abandoned his wish to cultivate friendly relations with Russia whose close economic and military ties with Iran date back to 1992. The danger inherent in the rich crop of contradictions in this muddle, and Trump’s fervent backing of the Saudis in their recent threats against neighboring Qatar, should be obvious to all except the narcissistic American president.

No one should be surprised by any of this once Trump inserted himself, tweets first, in the violent and crisis-ridden Middle East.  After all, he possesses an extraordinary capacity to create his own reality. He seems to instinctively block out his failures, and rushes headlong to embrace anything that puts him in a positive light. Always a winner, never a loser.  Such an approach seems to come easily to him, since he’s a man of tactics with a notoriously short attention span, which means he’s incapable of conceiving of an overarching strategy of a sort that would require concentration and the ability to hold diverse factors in mind simultaneously.

Given this, he has no problem contradicting himself or undermining aides working to find a more rational basis for his ever changing stances and desires on matters of import.  These problems are compounded by his inability to connect the dots in the very complex, volatile Middle East where wars are raging in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, or to assess how a move on one diplomatic or military front will impact a host of inter-connected issues.

The Iran Factor

Let’s examine how complicated and potentially treacherous all of this is.  In the early days of the Trump administration, an outline of its Middle Eastern strategy might have appeared something like this: the White House will pressure the Sunni Arab states to commit their cash and troops in a coordinated way to fighting the Islamic State (ISIS) under the leadership of the Pentagon. Along with this, the State Department and the Pentagon would explore ways to break Moscow’s military and diplomatic alliance with Tehran in a bid to end the Syrian conflict and bolster the fight against ISIS.

This reflected a lamentable ignorance of the growing strength of the ties between Russia and Iran, which share borders on the Caspian Sea.  This relationship dates back to August 1992 when Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s government signed a contract to construct and operate two nuclear reactors near the Iranian city of Bushehr. The two countries then inked an agreement to build two new reactors at the Bushehr site, with an option for constructing six more at other locations later. These were part of a partnership agreement signed in November 2014 and overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Military cooperation between the Kremlin and Tehran can be traced back to 2007 when Iran inked a $900 million contract for five Russian S-300 long-range missile batteries. Because of United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program in 2010, those missile deliveries were suspended. However, three months before Tehran signed its landmark nuclear deal with six world powers, including Russia and the U.S., in July 2015, Moscow started shipping an upgraded version of the S-300 missiles to Iran.

In September 2015, the Kremlin intervened militarily in Syria on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.  By then, Iran had long been aiding the Syrian government with weapons and armed volunteers in its five-year-old civil war. This led Moscow and Tehran to begin sharing military planning over Syria.

Two months later, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Tehran for a summit of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum and met with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who praised him for “neutralizing Washington’s plots.” Khamenei also suggested that economic relations between the two countries could “expand beyond the current level.” To the delight of Iranian leaders, Putin relaxed an export ban on nuclear equipment and technology to their country.

In August 2016, Tehran let the Kremlin use Hamadan Air Base in western Iran to launch air strikes on a wide range of targets in Syria, thereby enabling the Russian air force to cut flying time and increase payloads for its bombers and fighter jets. Just as Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, Moscow-based Sputnik News reported that Tehran was considering buying Russian fighter jets, while the two countries were discussing a joint venture that would allow Iran to manufacture Russian helicopters under license.

Next, let’s turn to Donald Trump.  In his 2016 campaign run, Trump’s animus toward Iran sharpened only after he imbibed the apocalyptic and Islamophobic views of retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn who would become his first national security adviser. In Flynn’s fixation on the threat of “radical Islam,” with Iran as his linchpin nation in plots against the West, he conflated Iranian-backed Shia radicalism with Sunni jihadism.  In the process, to fit his rabid thinking he ignored the theological and other differences between them.

Though Flynn was soon pushed out of the White House, President Trump mirrored his views in a speech at an anti-terrorism summit of 50 leaders from Arab and other Muslim countries during his May visit to Riyadh.  In it he went on to lump Iran and the Sunni jihadis together as part of the same “evil” of terrorism.

On June 7th, Trump’s claim visibly shattered.  On that day, six ISIS gunmen and suicide bombers, dressed as veiled women, attacked the Iranian Parliament complex and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, killing at least 17 people and injuring more than 50. These attacks were in line with a video ISIS operatives in eastern Iraq had posted in Persian on their social media networks three months earlier, containing the threat: “We will invade Iran and return it to Sunni control.”

Less than two weeks later, Iran fired six Zolfaghar ballistic missiles from its western provinces over Iraqi airspace at an ISIS command center and suicide car-bomb making facility near Syria’s eastern city of Deir el-Zour, 370 miles away. It coordinated the attack with Iraq, Syria, and Russia.

ISIS Targets Shias, Whether Iranian or Saudi

Within months of declaring its caliphate in Mosul, Iraq, in June 2014, ISIS sent operatives into Iran after gaining recruits among the predominantly Sunni ethnic Kurds of that country. And well before the Obama administration geared up to help the government in Baghdad fight ISIS, Iran had trained, funded, and armed Iraqi Shia militias to push back that group.

When it came to selecting targets in the Saudi kingdom, the ISIS branch there chose mosques of the Shia minority.  The first of these suicide bombings occurred in May 2015 in al-Qadeeh village in Eastern Province during Friday prayers, and left at least 21 people dead and more than 80 injured. In an online statement, ISIS took credit, claiming that “the soldiers of the Caliphate” were responsible and forecasting “dark days ahead” for the Shias.

Recently, Shias in Saudi Arabia have been alarmed by the incendiary speeches of the preachers of the Wahhabi version of Islam, the official faith of the kingdom. This sub-sect is named after Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab (1703-1792), who vehemently opposed the Shia practice of praying at the shrines of their saints and calling on such holy spirits to intercede on their behalf with Allah. He was convinced that there should be no intermediaries between the believer and Allah, and praying to a human being, dead or alive, however holy, was tantamount to polytheism, and therefore un-Islamic. He and his followers began demolishing Shia shrines. Today’s ISIS ideologues agree with Wahhab’s views on this and denounce Shias as apostates or heretics who deserve to be killed.

Within Shia Islam, there are four sub-sects, depending on how many of the 12 Imams — or religious leaders of the highest rank — a Shiite recognizes as such. Those who recognize only the first Imam Ali are called Alawis or Alevis (and live mainly in Syria and Turkey); those who do so for the first five Imams are known as Zaidis (and live mostly in Yemen). The ones who recognize seven Imams are called Seveners or Ismailis and are scattered across the Muslim world; and those who recognize all 12 Imams, labeled Twelvers, inhabit Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and Lebanon. Twelver Shias also believe that the last Imam, the infant Muhammad al-Qassim, who disappeared around 868 AD, will return someday as al-Mahdi, or the Messiah, to bring justice to the world.

It was this aspect of Iranian Shiism that the 29-year-old Saudi Defense Minister Prince Mohammad bin Salman, recently anointed Crown Prince and successor to his 81-year-old father King Salman, focused on in an interview with Dubai-based, Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV. When asked if he saw a possibility for direct talks with Iran, which he regards as the puppet-master of the Zaidi Houthi rebels in Yemen against whom he launched an American-backed war two years ago, he replied, “How can I come to an understanding with someone, or a regime, that has an anchoring belief built on an extremist ideology?”

Only a clueless person would bet on President Trump parsing Shia Islam or grasping the basic doctrine of Wahhabism.  By contrast, nobody would lose a bet on him instantly tweeting the latest thought that crosses his restless mind on any Middle Eastern subject.

The Saudis Target Qatar

To complicate regional matters further, the first crisis of the post-Trump visit involved not Iran or Shias but Qatar, a tiny Sunni emirate adjoining Saudi Arabia.  Its transgression in Saudi eyes? It has had the temerity to maintain normal relations with Iran across the Persian Gulf.  It is worth recalling that during his trip to Riyadh, President Trump had met with Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar.  And before that meeting, he had even proudly bragged: “One of the things that we will discuss is the purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment because nobody makes it like the US,” adding, “for us, that means jobs and it also means, frankly, great security back here, which we want.”

A couple of weeks later, the Saudis suddenly severed Qatari diplomatic and economic ties, with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt following suit. Saudi royals were clearly hoping to engineer a regime change in that country as a step toward the destabilization of Iran.  In response, Trump promptly rushed to tweet: “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar — Look!”

Soon after he accused Qatar of being a “funder of terror at a very high level” and, backing the Saudis to the hilt, demanded that the emirate should cut off that supposed cash flow.  A rejoinder came from none other than the American ambassador to Qatar, Dana Shell Smith, when she retweeted a U.S. Treasury Department statement praising Qatar for cracking down on extremist financing.

In the ensuing welter of statements and rebuttals, as the Trump administration fell into disarray over policy on Qatar, one thing remained solid: the sale of “beautiful military equipment” — up to 72 Boeing F-15 fighter jets to that emirate for $21.1 billion, a deal approved by the Obama administration in November 2016. On June 15th, Defense Secretary James Mattis signed off on a $12 billion deal for the sale of up to 36 of those fighter jets. “Our militaries are like brothers,” declared a senior Qatari official in response.  “America’s support for Qatar is deep-rooted and not easily influenced by political changes.”

In fact, military cooperation between Doha and Washington began in early 1992 in the wake of the First Gulf War. A decade later the Qatari-American military relationship received a dramatic upgrade when the Bush administration started preparing for its invasion of Iraq. Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler at the time, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, refused to let the Pentagon use the state-of-the-art operations facility at al-Kharj Air Base it had built up for air strikes against Iraq.

That was when Qatar’s emir came to Washington’s rescue.  He allowed the Pentagon to transfer all its equipment from al-Kharj to al-Udeid Air Base, 25 miles southwest of Doha, the Qatari capital.  It would become the U.S. military’s key facility in the region. At the time of the latest crisis, al-Udeid held no less than 10,000 American troops and 100 Royal Air Force service personnel from Great Britain, equipped with 100 warplanes and drones. Air strikes on ISIS targets in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq are launched from this base.

In his rashness, Trump has imperiled all this, despite mediation efforts by Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.  His enthusiastic backing of the Saudis in their perilous quest to take on Iran, which may end up destabilizing Saudi Arabia itself, also holds the possibility of armed conflict between the planet’s two leading nuclear powers.

The Saudis’ Big Problem With a Tiny Neighbor

Worse yet, policymakers in Washington failed to notice a fundamental flaw in the sectarian terms in which Saudi Arabia has framed its rivalry with Iran: a stark Sunni versus Shia clash. Tehran refuses to accept such a playbook. Unlike the Saudis, its leaders constantly emphasize the common faith of all Muslims. Every year, for instance, Iran observes Islamic Unity week, a holiday meant to bridge the gap between the two birthdays of Prophet Muhammad, one accepted by Sunni scholars and the other by Shia ones.

On this issue, Iran’s record speaks for itself. With cash and weapons, it has aided the Palestinian group Hamas, which is purely Sunni since there are no Shiites in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. It has maintained cordial relations with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic movement that originated in 1928 in overwhelmingly Sunni Egypt.  The Saudis, once its prime financial and ideological backer, fell out with the Brotherhood’s leadership in 1991 when they opposed the stationing of U.S. troops on Saudi soil on the eve of the First Gulf War.

Since then, the Brotherhood has renounced violence. In June 2012, its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the first free and fair presidential election in Egyptian history. His overthrow by Egypt’s generals a year later was applauded by Riyadh, which promptly announced a $12 billion rescue package for the military regime. By contrast, Tehran condemned the military coup against the popularly elected president.

In March 2014, Saudi Arabia declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, something the U.S. has not yet done (though the Trump administration is engaged in a debate on the subject). Riyadh’s hostility toward the Brotherhood stems largely from the fact that its followers are anti-monarchical, believing that ultimate power lies with the people, not a dynasty.  As a result, the Sunni Brotherhood has cordial relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which held parliamentary and presidential elections even during its eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s. In the latest presidential election, conducted on the eve of Trump’s arrival in Riyadh, the incumbent moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani won, decisively beating his conservative rival.

Riyadh has recently issued an aggressive list of demands on Qatar, including the closing of the influential Doha-based al-Jazeera media network, the limiting of its ties to Iran to trade alone, and the withdrawal of Turkish troops from a base on its territory. This ultimatum is set to fail on economic grounds alone. Qatar shares the North Dome-South Pars natural gas field with Iran. It is the largest field of its kind in the world.  Its South Pars section, about a third of the total, lies in Iran’s territorial waters. The aggregate recoverable gas reserves of this field are the equivalent of 230 billion barrels of oil, second only to Saudi Arabia’s reserves of conventional oil. Income from gas and oil provides Qatar with more than three-fifths of its gross domestic product (GDP) and most of its export income. With a population of 2.4 million, Qatar has a per capita GDP of $74,667, the highest in the world. Given all this, Doha cannot afford to be adversarial towards Tehran.

Qatar’s 12-year-old sovereign wealth fund, operating as the Qatar Investment Authority, has assets worth $335 billion.  A third of these are invested in the emirate, but the bulk is scattered around the globe. It owns the Santa Monica-based film production company Miramax. It’s the fourth largest investor in U.S. office space, mainly in New York and Los Angeles.  It also owns London’s tallest building, the famed Harrods stores, and a quarter of the properties in the upscale Mayfair neighborhood of London. Its Paris Saint-Germain Football Club has won four French soccer league titles and it’s the largest shareholder in Germany’s Volkswagen AG. Little wonder that, in response to the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, no Western leader, aside from Trump, has sided with Riyadh, which has been stunned by this diplomatic setback.

Tellingly, Riyadh failed to persuade even the neighboring smaller monarchies of Kuwait and Oman, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, to follow its lead in boycotting Qatar. In addition, no matter what Trump tweets, Riyadh has a problem increasing its pressure on Doha because of the massive American military presence in that country, a crucial element in the Pentagon’s campaign against ISIS, among other things.

A Formula for Disaster

In retrospect, it’s clear that the four members of the anti-Qatar axis rushed into their drastic action without assessing that tiny country’s strengths, including the soft power exercised by its pan-Arab al-Jazeera satellite TV network. Unsurprisingly, their governments banned al-Jazeera broadcasts and websites and closed down its bureaus. Elsewhere in the Arab world, however, that popular outlet remains easily accessible.

As a littoral state, Qatar has a large port on the Persian Gulf. Within a week of the Riyadh-led boycott of Qatar, three ships, carrying 350 tons of fruit and vegetables, were set to leave the Iranian port of Dayyer for Doha, while five cargo planes from Iran, loaded with 450 tons of vegetables, had already landed in the Qatari capital.

So far nothing has turned out as the Saudis (or Trump) anticipated.  Qatar is resisting and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has flatly refused to withdraw his troops from the emirate, increasing the Turkish military presence there instead.

From all this, an overarching picture emerges: that the impulsive Donald Trump has met his younger counterpart, Prince Muhammad bin Salman, equally impulsive and blind to even the medium-term consequences of his aggressive initiatives.  In addition, in an autocratic monarchy without free speech, elections, or representative government (and with an abominable record on human rights violations), he lacks all checks and balances.  The shared obsession of the prince and the president with Iran, which neither of them is able to comprehend in its complexity, has the potential for creating a true global crisis. If anything, the pressure on Trump in his imagined new world order is only increasing to do the Saudis one better and push a regime-change agenda in a big way when it comes to Iran.  It’s a formula for disaster on a breathtaking scale.

The Israeli Military is Buying Copter Drones With Machine Guns

July 5, 2017

by Patrick Tucker

Defense One

A breakthrough in drone design gives a glimpse into the future of urban warfare.

The Israeli military is buying small multi-rotor drones modified to carry a machine gun, a grenade launcher and variety of other weapons to fight tomorrow’s urban warfare battles. Their maker, Florida startup Duke Robotics, is pitching the TIKAD drone to the U.S military as well.

Lt. Col. Raziel “Razi” Atuar, a 20-year veteran of the Israeli military and a reservist in the Israeli Special Forces, co-founded the company in 2014 along with a paratrooper-turned-robotic engineer and another IDF buddy. He says he was tired of watching his comrades die in chaotic street battles that also, sometimes, took the lives of civilians.

“You have small groups [of adversaries] working within crowded civilian areas using civilians as shields. But you have to go in. Even to just get a couple of guys with a mortar, you have to send in a battalion and you lose guys. People get hurt. The operational challenge, it bothered us,” Atuar said.

A former battalion commander, Atuar fought in several Israeli urban warfare operations, including 2014’s Protective Edge operation in Gaza — the kind the U.S. military believes will typify fighting in the decades ahead.

TIKAD, the company’s first product, is remotely operated. So a human would do the flying, targeting, and trigger-pulling from afar, and, thus, under less stress to shoot to protect him- or herself.

In the decade ahead, more and more tactical operations squads will send not humans but robots into standoff situations. The Marines are already training to new concepts of operations where lethal robots take the place of human door-kickers.

Local police departments, too, are increasingly choosing to send weaponized robots in the place of tactical squads, as happened last year when police in Dallas rigged a tracked ground robot to take out a shooter.

Aerial drones like quadcopters can often maneuver more easily in small spaces than the tracked ground robots of the sort that the Dallas police used. But physics does not allow the easy integration of a machine gun on a small aerial drone that also has to hover.

When a gun fires, expanding gases eject the bullet from its barrel with great force — and exert an equal and opposite force on whatever is holding the weapon. Newton describes this conservation of momentum — more commonly known as kickback or recoil — in his third law. When a person fires a pistol, the backward momentum is transferred through the shooter’s body into the ground. But a low-mass object hovering in the air, like a quadcopter, has no mount. The physical forces that pushed the bullet out of the barrel are going to act on the drone, more than likely knocking it out of position.

You might be able to rig a pistol to a quadcopter, as illustrated in this video, but the drone will move chaotically with every shot.

Through a system of flexibly connected plates, the TIKAD distributes the backward momentum in a way that keeps the vehicle stationary in the air. A ten-pound robot gimbal allows six degrees of movement freedom and the ability to rapidly re-target the weapon and camera.

“Because it’s a robot, it’s agnostic to the payload. I can mount an M4, SR25, a 40-millimeter grenade launcher, no matter what. I can carry up to 22 pounds and [the plate system] will stabilize the drone and allow me to get an accurate shot,” Atuar said.

In 2015, Israeli Special Forces took out a target with a sniper rifle mounted on an off-the-shelf consumer drone supplied by Duke Robotics. The operation was a success, but Atuar and his colleagues weren’t entirely happy. Burdened with a 30-pound rifle, the drone was able to stay airborne for just five minutes. The sort of UAV you can buy on Amazon was not created to lug that kind of weight.

“From an operational point of view, I want to last much longer. You want to be able to reach the target and investigate it. I have to have time to gather information to be sure. That’s what the Israeli military has ordered from us,” Atuar said.

Defense One was able to confirm independently that the Israeli military is buying an unspecified number of the units. At press time, the Israeli Ministry of Defense had yet to respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. military has shown interest as well. Last year, the drone won accolades from the Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office during a conference. The company is now based in Florida, not far from U.S. Special Operations Command and U.S. Central Command.

 

 

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