Antiwar.com Blog

As pointed out in this post by Rasmus Christian Elling of the University of Copenhagen, the U.S. Treasury – notably Stuart Levey, whose zeal in trying to make it difficult for Iranian banking interests to do business outside their borders has been widely remarked – just designated the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK) a terrorist group, or, more accurately, a group controlled by the better known Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) of Turkey. PJAK, of course, was named by Seymour Hersh, among others, as a likely beneficiary of alleged U.S. covert aid designed to harass the Islamic Republic two years ago after it claimed responsibility for a number of deadly attacks against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and other regime targets. Tehran itself has long claimed that PJAK is supported by the U.S. and Israel. Like the PKK, it is based in Iraqi Kurdistan.

While designating PJAK a terrorist group is unlikely to have any immediate practical impact on its operations, it raises the question, as noted by Dr. Elling, whether this marks the first concrete gesture – or token of good faith – by the Obama administration toward Iran or whether this was simply the coincidental fruition of a bureaucratic process that may have been set in motion by the publication by the New York Times of a front-page article on the relationship between PJAK and the PKK back in October, 2007. I don’t have a clear answer as yet, but the timing and the fact that Levey, who is being retained by the Obama administration in his current position as Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, has strong political instincts argues in favor of the more purposeful interpretation.

Here’s the release put out by Treasury:

February 4, 2009
TG-14

Treasury Designates Free Life Party of Kurdistan a Terrorist Organization

Washington, DC – The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), a Kurdish group operating in the border region between Iraq and Iran, under Executive Order 13224 for being controlled by the terrorist group Kongra-Gel (KGK, aka the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK).

“With today’s action, we are exposing PJAK’s terrorist ties to the KGK and supporting Turkey’s efforts to protect its citizens from attack,” said Stuart Levey, Treasury’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

Designated in December 2002 under E.O. 13224, KGK has been involved for more than 20 years in targeting Turkish government security forces, local Turkish officials, and villagers who oppose the KGK in Turkey. Turkish authorities have confirmed or suspect that KGK is also responsible for dozens of bombings since 2004 in western Turkey.

The KGK leadership authorized certain Iranian-Kurdish KGK members to create a KGK splinter group that would portray itself as independent from but allied with KGK. PJAK was created to appeal to Iranian Kurds. KGK formally institutionalized PJAK in 2004 and selected five KGK members to serve as PJAK leaders, including Hajji Ahmadi, a KGK affiliate who became PJAK’s General Secretary. KGK leaders also selected the members of PJAK’s 40-person central committee. Although certain PJAK members objected to the KGK selecting their leaders, the KGK advised that PJAK had no choice.

As of April 2008, KGK leadership controlled PJAK and allocated personnel to the group. Separately, PJAK members have carried out their activities in accordance with orders received from KGK senior leaders. In one instance, PJAK’s armed wing, the East Kurdistan Defense Forces, had been acting independently in Iran. KGK senior leaders immediately intervened, however, and recalled the responsible PJAK officials to northern Iraq.

Under E.O. 13224, any assets PJAK has under U.S. jurisdiction are frozen, and U.S. persons are prohibited from engaging in any transactions with PJAK.

Identifying Information
FREE LIFE PARTY OF KURDISTAN
AKAs:
Kurdistan Free Life Party
Party of Free Life of Kurdistan Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistane
PJAK
PEJAK
PEZHAK

Location: Qandil Mountain, Irbil Governorate, Iraq
Alt, Location: Razgah, Iran

On PBS tonight, NOVA is presenting “The Spy Factory,” based on James Bamford’s excellent book, The Shadow Factory.

PBS says the NOVA program:

chronicles the NSA’s role in eavesdropping both before and after 9/11. Drawing on dozens of interviews with agency insiders and probing publicly available sources as well as transcripts of terrorist trials and an FBI chronology of the terrorists’ movements, NOVA assembles a detailed picture of events leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

The program sheds light on the vital data known inside the NSA but only partly relayed to other agencies. The trove of information the NSA had access to in advance included Osama bin Laden’s now-disconnected direct satellite phone, which the NSA tapped starting in 1996. Exclusive footage shows the three-story house in Yemen that served as Al Qaeda’s communications and logistics headquarters. The NSA was listening in on phone communications to and from the house for years prior to the 9/11 attack.

Three times the size of the CIA and far more secret, the NSA is comprised of top linguists, mathematicians, and technologists trained to decipher all kinds of communications—epitomizing the hidden world of high-tech, 21st-century surveillance. To show how this eavesdropping operates, NOVA follows the trail of just one typical e-mail sent from Asia to the U.S. Streaming as pulses of light into a fiber-optic cable, it travels across the Pacific Ocean, coming ashore in California, and finally reaching an AT&T facility in San Francisco, where the cable is split and the data sent to a secret NSA monitoring room on the floor below. This enables the NSA to intercept not only most Asian e-mail messages but also the entire U.S. internal Internet traffic.

Thus, since 9/11, the agency has turned its giant ear inward to monitor the communications of ordinary Americans, many of whom are on the government’s secret watch list, now more than half-a-million names long.

But how effective is this monumental monitoring effort in countering security threats? The NSA is faced with an enormous and ever-expanding archive of phone calls and e-mail messages. Many experts in data mining and analysis are skeptical about the value of collecting so much information without the ability to understand it, as it may lead to critical clues being lost in the static.

Among those interviewed on “The Spy Factory” are former NSA, CIA, and FBI analysts and officials, many speaking publicly for the first time. Among these is Mark Rossini, the senior FBI agent in the CIA’s Osama bin Laden tracking unit. For the first time, Rossini tells how intelligence agency turf wars prevented him from notifying his FBI superiors that Al Qaeda terrorists were heading for the U.S. with valid visas in early 2000.

Surprisingly, the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into the NSA’s role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood the full extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and FBI. Traditionally, the NSA didn’t share its raw data with those other agencies, an institutionalized reluctance that played a critical role in the failure to stop the 9/11 plotters.

In what Bamford calls “one of the largest ironies in the history of American intelligence,” he notes that weeks before the attacks, the terrorists were staying in a hotel near NSA headquarters in Maryland, almost within sight of the office of then-NSA Director Michael Hayden. Hayden, who was later appointed director of the CIA by President Bush, was never held accountable for his agency’s failure, and after 9/11 he spearheaded the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping activities in the name of making the nation safe from terrorists.

Addressing the question, Are we any safer now than we were before?, Bamford says, “We should have been safe the way it was. NSA had all the information that it needed to stop the 9/11 hijackers. It had laws that allowed it to track the hijackers.” Bamford adds that those same laws also protected the privacy of ordinary Americans in ways that have since vanished.

The show will be repeated throughout the week on most PBS stations. Check your local listings. The show will also be available on the PBS website later this month.

The bottom of your shoe, not the fish. The fantastic trend of protesters showing their disdain for dictators and other official criminals by tossing a shoe (or two) at them continues in Britain, as an as-yet unidentified “European” man hurls his footwear at Chinese PM Wen Jiabao.

I recognize the advances China has made in freeing its economy and improving its treatment of its citizens, but a show of dissent is always welcome. If you agree, become a Facebook fan of the latest shoe-thrower!

Likud Party leader and well-known soothsayer Binyamin Netanyahu has predicted that if Israel doesn’t have total control over Jerusalem then al-Qaeda will blow up the Holy Sepulchre, sparking “an escalation of religious conflict” we can’t even envision.

It seems to me that either the once and future Israeli Prime Minister or al-Qaeda is dramatically over-estimating the importance of the Holy Sepulchre to modern Christianity, its claims to being “Christianity’s holiest site” notwithstanding.

1,000 years ago (actually it’ll be 1,000 years ago to the day on October 18) the Fatimid caliph destroyed the previous Sepulchre, and that did indeed spark a series of Crusades (ok… so it look 70 years for the Crusades to get going, but news traveled more slowly in those days). Yet it seems to me that Christianity has matured somewhat since the depths of the dark ages, and as eager as some in the west remain for any excuse to start a major war, I’d like to think the bulk of Christendom really isn’t so hung up on some 11th century building in Jerusalem.