Even after expressing alarm about civilians being killed in Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s war last year against Shiite separatists in Yemen, the U.S. provided the Saudis with crucial military aid, including ammunition and satellite imagery, the WikiLeaks document trove shows.
While earlier cables indicated that the Yemenis had diverted U.S. counterterrorism assistance to fight the Houthis, direct American support to the Saudis’ role in the fight has been obscure. But in a December 2009 cable WikiLeaks released today, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James B. Smith, described supplying Riyadh with “stocks of ammunition for small weapons and artillery.” He would later approve using U.S. satellites to target the Yemeni rebels near Saudi Arabia’s southern border.
Strikingly, Smith held few illusions about the Saudi war, calling it a “massively disproportionate” fight against lightly-armed separatists who were subjected to “day and night aerial bombardment and artillery shelling.” (Including, apparently, U.S. artillery.) The Saudis waged an “embarrassingly long campaign that was poorly planned and executed,” and they railed against what they considered U.S. intransigence over the “emergency provision of munitions, imagery and intelligence,” something Smith chalks up to bureaucratic delays.
But that wasn’t the end of the U.S.’s undisclosed contributions to the border war. And it was more than just bureaucratic inertia that stopped the U.S. from sharing its eyes in the sky with the Saudis — for a time. In February 2010, disturbed by the imprecision of Saudi air strikes on Houthi targets — in particular, one that hit a “Yemeni medical clinic” — Smith told a Saudi defense official that the U.S. had concerns about “providing Saudi Arabia with satellite imagery of the Yemen border area absent greater certainty that Saudi Arabia was and would remain fully in compliance with the laws of armed conflict.” Continue Reading “U.S. Satellites, Ammo Aided Saudis in Border War” »
To the conspiracy-minded: if you’ve got a mind for finance, get ready to be happy. The Carlyle Group, which may or may not control the world, is thinking about going public. Buy enough shares and you’ll discover the hidden funding that determines the contours of geopolitics. Or at least you can tell the internet you did.
Carlyle, a private equity giant — Washingtonian estimated in 2006 that it generated $46 billion in revenues (PDF) — might be prepping for an initial public offering in order to raise money to finance a lot of corporate buyouts. Bloomberg forecasts that the firm will go public by late 2011. Noting the weakness in the private equity market, the Wall Street Journal considers Carlyle’s possible public turn “more a sign of weakness than a sign of strength.” That would be quite a turnabout for a firm known to the Internet for being something between a shadow government and the Stonecutters.
Add to that Carlyle’s connections to very powerful people. Its advisers have included former President George H.W. Bush; ex-British premier John Major; one-time cabinet secretaries like James Baker and Frank Carlucci; and Clinton White House chief of staff Mack McLarty; to say nothing of a parade of defense-industry rainmakers. But the root of most Carlyle-based conspiracy theories is that from 1994 to shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden’s non-terrorist family members were investors as well, and one of bin Laden’s half-brothers attended a Carlyle meeting in D.C. the morning of 9/11.
They’ve sent you exploding printer cartridges. Your Christmas present last year was a twenty-something with a bomb in his skivvies. So what’s al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s latest gift of murderous gadgetry? In a department store, they’d call it Eau du Terror.
Saudi Arabia’s Okaz newspaper reports that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) recently tried to kill government officials and religious clerics by sending agarwood-scented and poison-dosed perfume to their homes and offices. The Saudi Interior Ministry claims it got wind of the plot after the arrest of 149 al-Qaeda suspects in the country comprising 19 separate cells. The suspects allegedly planned to rob banks in order to pay for the perfume plot and others.
The perfume poison is just the latest in a series of creatively-engineered AQAP weapons. In late summer of last year, a Saudi al-Qaeda member tried to assassinate the country’s Deputy Interior Minister with a bomb allegedly placed up his butt. Last Christmas, AQAP equipped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with an underwear bomb in an attempt to blow up a flight to Detroit. And most recently, the Saudi al-Qaeda affiliate tried to bring down a UPS plane using explosives hidden in printer cartridges. The explosive devices are the craftsmanship of one man, AQAP bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri, though there’s no word yet on whether he was involved in the alleged perfume plot.
The Air Force has news for anyone looking for sinister motives behind the flying branch’s latest orbital gizmo: the mysterious, high-tech X-37B space plane. The 29-foot-long robotic shuttle — vaguely labeled a “test asset” by the Pentagon — returned to earth on Friday after 224 days, nine hours and 24 minutes in space. In those eight months, observers speculated that the X-37 might be a prototype bomber, a satellite-snatching snoop or a speedy, quick-reacting sensor platform. Forget it, Richard McKinney, Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for Space Programs, said Monday. “I applaud the ingenuity and innovation of some reports, but really it’s as described. This is a test vehicle, pure and simple.”
But a test vehicle for what? Well, for testing, McKinney said. The way he described it, the X-37 should eventually function as an orbital laboratory for new satellite components and other space gear — pricey stuff that today gets boosted into the heavens with very little realistic testing. “If we could place technology in orbit, check it out and bring back to earth, that would be significant accomplish,” he said. “The purpose of this particular mission was the vehicle. In order do the other things we talked about … we’ve got to have a vehicle to do that.”
All the same, the X-37 did carry something in its payload bay during its inaugural flight — something secret, McKinney admitted. “It’s not unusual for us to put satellites into orbit that are classified. This is no different than that.”
What, you thought Hamid Karzai was sticking by his ban on private security firms? You try running a war without them.
An Afghan interior ministry official, Abdul Manan Farahi, announced a stay of execution for 52 security firms that were supposed to be shut down by the middle of December. “Their future operations will continue in accordance with the law and regulations in place,” Farahi told reporters in Kabul, the BBC reports, allowing the firms to remain open until their contracts to protect convoys, roads, buildings and foreign aid workers expire.
The air war over Afghanistan has reached a post-invasion high. Unfortunately for the U.S., Afghan anger over air strikes is soaring as well.
No group of people is going to be enthusiastic about a foreign power dropping bombs on their countrymen, as the Pakistanis can attest. But a new poll from the Washington Post, ABC News and the BBC finds that 73 percent of Afghans say that U.S. air strikes are “unacceptable.” That’s an increase from the last survey, which found 66 percent opposition to the U.S. air war last December.
Back then, restrictions from General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of the war, had all but stopped the air war entirely — and two-thirds of Afghans still disapproved of it. So NATO might have a statistical warning sign, now that its planes recently tallied 2,600 attack sorties between June and October, a 50 percent increase over the same period in 2009. In October 2010 alone, as Danger Room was the first to report, the U.S. launched more than 1,000 air strikes. That carries a risk of reviving the public anger over the air war that led McChrystal to tamp down the strikes in the first place.
When the Air Force launched its secret, robotic space plane this spring, military officials confessed that they weren't exactly sure when it was coming back. More than seven months later, the X-37B landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where it was met with Air Force personnel in SCAPE suits (self-contained atmospheric protective ensemble). They gave the robo-orbiter an initial once-over — and made sure the area was safe for humans, too.
Better-informed observers believe the X-37B could be used by the Pentagon as a cheap replacement for the all-but-defunct Space Shuttle — a way to get spy sensors into orbit in a hurry.
And the U.S. military's use of space planes is only getting started. As David Axe noted last week, the Air Force has commissioned a second X-37, to enter service next spring. The first X-37 could find itself back in orbit in short order, as well. Which means we could see more dudes in crazy-looking suits meeting up with robotic spacecraft soon.
It’s one of those grandiose ideas that gets bandied about by Pentagon scientists and pops up in the press every few years. The “Face of Allah” weapon would beam a massive, lifelike hologram over a battlefield, projecting the image of some deity “to incite fear in soldiers on a battlefield,” according to one researcher.
We last checked in on holographic weapons research two years ago, when the University of New Hampshire was working on some Pentagon-funded projects. Since then, another university team has turned holograms into a reality — but not as tools of war. Not yet, at least.
Optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian and his teammates at the University of Arizona have demonstrated what The New York Times calls “actual moving holograms that are filmed in one spot and then projected and viewed in another spot.” The Times likens the holograms to the tiny image of Princess Leia that R2D2 showed Luke Skywalker in the beginning of Star Wars, only “a lot more haltingly, as the display changes only every two seconds.”
You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few terrorist connections. Al-Qaeda has discovered the joys of Facebook. “I entreat you, by God, to begin registering for Facebook as soon as you [finish] reading this post,” one online extremist urged his jihadist pals.
Facebook isn’t going to replace jihadosphere fora like the Fallujah message board any time soon. Those sites are for committed students of extremism, while Facebook is a tool for reaching those who might be curious about auditing the class. But there’s a dawning “recognition” in the jihadosphere, according to a recent Department of Homeland Security study of terrorists’ Facebook usage, of “the inherent value in exploiting a non-ideological medium, namely its wide user base that is comprised of the general public.”
Terrorists have been talking about “invading Facebook” for years. But early extremist activity on Facebook was tactical: cataloging “Crusader losses” in Iraq and Afghanistan and providing al-Qaeda-favorable spin on the media event of the day. These days, it’s about getting a broad pool of Muslim Facebook users to Like al-Qaeda. DHS quotes a post on an extremist message board urging terrorists to open Facebook accounts so they can “[m]ove from an elite society ([on] jihadi forums and websites) to mainstream Muslims, [encourage] their participation, and interact with them.”
Basically, DHS finds, al-Qaeda uses Facebook to launder its message through an outlet that the kids think is cool. Extremists quoted in the study talk about disguising their involvement in the group for maximum appeal. Partially, that’s to keep “the idolator dogs” of U.S. intelligence off their scent — they recommend takfiris sign up for Facebook using identity-masking tools like Tor — but it’s primarily to come across as a credible authority, someone who just happens to be using Facebook to get a point across. Continue Reading “Osama Wants To Be Your Facebook Friend” »
But who knows: maybe next week we’ll keep you in Wiki-world as well, since as of this writing, only 667 out of over 251,000 diplo-cables have become public. Only then will we be able to know for sure which week will count as the most dangerous. Place your bets.
