Tag Archives: Intelligence

What Questions Remain About 9/11?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 September 2018

In less than a week, it will be the seventeenth anniversary of al-Qaeda’s “Plane’s Operation”, the assault on the United States. It is a vertiginous enough reflection that many of us have been alive more years since 11 September 2001 than before it, and positively alarming that many of those who will soon move into the government, media, and other leading societal institutions will have been born after an event that still shapes so much of the international scene. As Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan put it in The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 (2011), we are left with “the brief name ‘9/11’,” the context and meaning stripped away all this time later. The book is a useful overview of an event that should always be to some degree fresh in mind, though it is not without its problems in its analytical sections. Continue reading →

Syria Continues to Unravel as External Powers Dominate

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 1 March 2018

Aftermath of a pro-Asad coalition bombing in Hamouria, in besieged Eastern Ghuta, near Damascus, 22 February 2018. (AFP)

In the summer and autumn of 2017, it was claimed Syria’s civil war was winding down, but the nearly seven-year conflict is nowhere near to finished, and recent events suggest it could even escalate. Continue reading →

Trump Completes Obama’s Syria Policy

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 February 2018

Syrian rebels in eastern Aleppo, November 2016 (image source)

Operation TIMBER SYCAMORE, the formally-covert program run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has, since approximately 2012, ostensibly provided support to vetted Syrian rebel units fighting against Bashar al-Asad’s regime. This program, begun by President Barack Obama, was never raised to a level that could alter the course of Syria’s conflict in favour of the opposition, and indeed one of its most concrete effects was denying certain categories of heavy weapons to the rebellion. While providing subsistence to some rebels, the program was mostly a political instrument, shielding Obama from criticism as he tilted U.S. policy in Asad’s favour by empowering his patron, Iran. President Donald Trump abandoned even this fig-leaf of opposition to Asad in July 2017, announcing the end of the program, a termination that went into effect last month. Continue reading →

American Islamic State Jihadist Plotted to Bomb Trump’s First Presidents’ Day

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 17 December 2017

Robert Hester (image source)

The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Robert Lorenzo Hester, Jr., 25, of Columbia, Missouri, on 21 February 2017, for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State (IS) and plotting an act of domestic terrorism. The plan had been an attack on 20 February, the first Presidents’ Day of the Donald Trump administration. Continue reading →

Islamic State Denies Targeting Jordan With Chemical Weapons (2004)

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 13 December 2017

The founder of what is now the Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, gave a speech on 30 April 2004, entitled, “Blowing up the Intelligence Headquarters: A Response to the Lies of Jordanian Intelligence”.

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The Campaign to Weaken An Al-Qaeda-Affiliated Group in Syria

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 September 2017

Abdallah al-Muhaysini and Muslah al-Alyani, two senior clerics in Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the former al-Qaeda branch in Syria, resigned on 11 September 2017 after leaked recordings showed HTS commanders musing about assassinating al-Muhaysini. There is clearly a well-orchestrated campaign underway to weaken HTS by discrediting and dividing it, and the sophistication of the campaign gives every indication of being the work of a state intelligence service, almost certainly Turkey’s. Continue reading →

The Islamic State’s Shadow War With Israel

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on March 5, 2017

Al-Naba 70, released on 2 March 2017, p. 15. The caption under the picture says: “The apostate Husayn Duwayhi al-Bareeki”

In the 70th edition of Al-Naba, the weekly newsletter of the Islamic State (IS), entitled, “The Liquidation of Spies for the Jewish State” (tasfiya juwasees lil-dawla al-yahudiya), which did include a description of IS’s Wilayat Sinai having eliminated an Israeli spy network, but also included more general information about the IS security structure in Egypt. Continue reading →

Film Review: Snowden (2016)

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 29, 2016

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Snowden never, ever recovers from its premise: that Edward Snowden, a super-capable, pure-hearted all-American, found terrible government crimes against the American population while working at the National Security Agency, and was moved to disclose them to the world after being stymied in official channels.

Literally none of that is true. The Snowden revelations found mistakes that were generally cleared up by an efficient and functional bureaucratic oversight mechanism. Snowden did not try to go official channels in the way he described, and the bulk of what Snowden revealed was nothing to do with the privacy of Americans but was related to foreign intelligence, where the legal and practical situation is that everyone hoovers up as much data as they can. The capabilities of the Snowden presented here, personal and professional—to say nothing of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden’s motives—would not withstand scrutiny for a single second against the actual historical record. This could be said fairly generally of the whole film. Continue reading →

Turkey Continues to Protest the Coalition’s Syrian Kurdish Allies

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 22, 2016

Saleh Muslim Muhammad

This morning, Turkey issued arrest warrants for forty-eight members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has fought a forty-year war against the Turkish state. The PKK is listed as terrorist by Ankara, Britain, the European Union, NATO, and the United States. Among those being sought is Saleh Muslim Muhammad, the leader of the Syrian branch of the PKK, known as the Democratic Union Party (PYD), whose armed wing—the People’s Protection Units (YPG)—happens to be the favoured Western instrument in combatting the Islamic State (IS) in Syria. The West has long denied or obfuscated the fact it is working with an organization that a NATO partner considers its nemesis and a long-standing threat to its national security. The Turks, it seems, are not content to let this ambiguity stand, and there are good reasons of Western self-interest why the alliance with the PKK deserves another look. Continue reading →

Film Review: Bethlehem (2013)

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 20, 2016

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Bethlehem is one of the most compelling films I’ve seen in a long time. There are so few good spy films available that this is a welcome surprise. Unlike Burn After Reading, a genius film, the intention here is not to show things from the agency side, to demonstrate how wildly out of control things can get when you only have half-or-less of the facts. It is also not Charlie Wilson’s War, which shows the feats that intelligence agencies can accomplish when well-directed. Bethlehem is most like Breach, which showed the immense damage an individual spy can do. But instead of showing the effects the act of spying had, with the human characters secondary, Bethlehem tracks specifically the complex relationship that develops between handler and asset. Continue reading →