MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-11-25 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] [conspire] CIA chief Brennan hints new gov't
|
Increasingly it is obvious that these attacks on Frances were a
political blunder and no amount of surveillance would have prevented them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/world/europe/its-capital-frozen-belgium-surveys-past-failures-and-squabbles.html?action=click&contentCollection=Middle%20East®ion=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&moduleDetail=undefined&pgtype=Multimedia
BRUSSELS — A month before the Paris terrorist attacks, Mayor Françoise
Schepmans of Molenbeek, a Brussels district long notorious as a haven
for jihadists, received a list with the names and addresses of more than
80 people suspected as Islamic militants living in her area.
The list, based on information from Belgium’s security apparatus,
included two brothers who would take part in the bloodshed in France on
Nov. 13, as well as the man suspected of being the architect of the
terrorist plot, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Molenbeek resident who had left
for Syria to fight for the Islamic State in early 2014.
“What was I supposed to do about them? It is not my job to track
possible terrorists,” Ms. Schepmans said in an interview. That, she
added, “is the responsibility of the federal police.”
Continue reading the main story
Officials Discuss Raids in BrusselsNOV. 23, 2015
The federal police service, for its part, reports to the interior
minister, Jan Jambon, a Flemish nationalist who has doubts about whether
Belgium — divided among French, Dutch and German speakers — should even
exist as a single state.
Photo
Mayor Françoise Schepmans of Molenbeek, Belgium, in January. Credit
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
As Brussels remained locked down for a fourth day, facing what the
authorities say is its own imminent terrorist threat, the failure to
stop two brothers clearly flagged as extremists before the Paris carnage
highlighted the tribal squabbles of a country that holds the unenviable
distinction of going without a functioning government for 541 days.
Flemish nationalists, ever eager to show that Belgium in its current
form does not work, have jumped on the mess, with Karl Vanlouwe, a
member of the Belgian Senate, writing in the newspaper Le Soir on
Tuesday that “20 years of laxity” by the French-speaking Socialist Party
had turned Brussels into a “rear base of Islamic barbarity.”
The perennial dysfunctions of a small country with just 11.2 million
people would not normally transcend its borders, but they are now blamed
for having helped turn Belgium into a hub of terrorist activity that is
threatening lives as well as the Continent’s troubled enterprise of
integration and intelligence sharing.
Belgium has a government, unlike the long stretch of limbo after
inconclusive elections in 2010. But with its capital paralyzed and its
political elite pointing fingers over who is to blame for letting
jihadists go unchecked, the country is again being ridiculed as the
world’s most prosperous failed state.
An Italian newspaper called it “Belgistan,” and a German one declared
Belgium “kaput.” A French writer, Éric Zemmour, suggested in a recent
radio interview that instead of bombing Raqqa, Syria, the
self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State, “France should bomb
Molenbeek.”
Belgians, accustomed to being derided, particularly by the French, have,
in the main, not risen to the bait, although the editor in chief of the
newspaper La Libre, Francis Van de Woestyne, complained on Tuesday that
“French condescension has no limits.” But Belgians, too, are wondering
what went wrong in Molenbeek and in the system as a whole.
A Political Maze
With three uneasily joined populations, Belgium has a dizzying plethora
of institutions and political parties divided along linguistic,
ideological or simply opportunistic lines, which are being blamed for
the country’s seeming inability to get a handle on its terrorist threat.
It was hardly difficult to find the two Molenbeek brothers before they
helped kill 130 people in the Paris assaults: They lived just 100 yards
from the borough’s City Hall, across a cobblestone market square in a
subsidized borough-owned apartment clearly visible from the mayor’s
second-floor corner office. A third brother worked for Ms. Schepmans’s
borough administration.
Much more difficult, however, was negotiating the labyrinthine pathways
that connect — and also divide — a multitude of bodies responsible for
security in Brussels, a capital city with six local police forces and a
federal police service.
Brussels has three Parliaments, 19 borough assemblies and the
headquarters of two intelligence services — one military, one civilian —
as well as a terrorism threat assessment unit whose chief, exhausted and
demoralized by internecine turf battles, resigned in July but is still
at his desk.
Lost in the muddle were the two brothers, Ibrahim Abdeslam, who
detonated a suicide vest in Paris, and Salah, who is the target of an
extensive manhunt that has left the police flailing as they raid homes
across the country, so far without results.
To the system’s rising chorus of critics, the scale of the lockdown
itself — the security alert has closed schools, many shops and the
subway system in Brussels — is a reflection less of focused authority
and actionable intelligence than of diffuse incoordination.
Of 16 people detained in a huge sweep on Sunday evening, 15 were
promptly released. No explosives or guns were found, a blow to efforts
to avoid what the federal government asserts is a “serious and imminent”
threat of Paris-style terrorism.
Lars Bové, the author of a book on the Belgian security system, said
that cooperation between different layers of government and different
security services was improving but that information sharing remained a
problem, particularly between federal agencies and local authorities.
Responsibilities, he said, “tend to overlap,” with only fuzzy rules for
who is supposed to do what.
Muriel Targnion, the mayor of the eastern town of Verviers, where the
federal police stormed a terrorist safe house in January, said she had
been told by security services in Brussels that her town had 34
residents suspected as jihadists. But that was all she was allowed to know.
“All I was given was a number,” she said. “No names, no addresses. Nothing.”
History of Rivalries
Information sharing does not come easy in a country with fierce
rivalries between groups that, in some cases, cannot talk to each other,
at least not in a common language.
On top of language, said Sus van Elzen, a Flemish writer and former
political magazine editor, “it is in our genes to reject all
centralizing power” and, on all sides of the linguistic divide, to
mistrust outsiders.
News Clips: Europe 1:12
Shoppers Missing in Brussels
Continue reading the main story
Video
Shoppers Missing in Brussels
Workers in Brussels say the recent terror attacks have had real economic
consequences as more shoppers are staying away from shops. Publish Date
November 24, 2015. Photo by Laurent Dubrule/European Pressphoto Agency.
Watch in Times Video »
Belgium’s history, he added, is a “very unhappy story” of constant
retreat from intruding forces, notably the Spanish, the French and the
Germans, that have sought to impose a centralized order.
Belgium was formed from part of what were known as the Low Countries,
which for centuries were fought over by the dukes of Burgundy, Hapsburg
emperors and the rulers of France. The chief languages, Dutch and
French, became instruments of those in power, and both fell in and out
of favor. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Congress of Vienna
made the largely Roman Catholic Belgium part of Holland, which was ruled
by a Protestant king. The union led to unrest, and eventually rebellion,
and in 1831 another gathering of Europe’s great powers established the
kingdom of Belgium.
Today centralized order hardly seems the problem, except when it comes
to tracking terrorists. Even if intelligence professionals all speak
Belgium’s two main languages, they are still divided into feuding fiefs.
Luc Verheyden, a veteran intelligence officer who in 2006 helped set up
OCAD, a coordinating agency for threat analysis, resigned four years
later, citing his frustration over the refusal of the police and other
security services to cooperate.
“The creation of OCAD was not appreciated by certain services because it
forced them to share information,” he told the Belgian news media when
he quit. “They were waiting around the corner for revenge,” he added.
OCAD’s chief and Mr. Verheyden’s former boss, André Vandoren, resigned
in July after political sniping and complaints from a secretive
parliamentary committee that he had trespassed onto intelligence
gathering turf that belonged to Sûreté de l’Etat, Belgium’s more
established intelligence service.
“Everything in Belgium is politicized; you cannot have an administrative
function, particularly a senior one, if you don’t have a political
affiliation,” said Claude Moniqué, a former French intelligence officer
who runs a risk analysis company in Brussels.
Continue reading the main story
Recent Comments
DCTB 28 minutes ago
The universe writ small. In some ways it's a wonder than western style
democracies have flourished at all, given the unfortunate realities...
Mercutio 29 minutes ago
It is a shock to read this report. That can’t be Belgium because Belgium
is one of us -- Western, wealthy, accomplished, stable,...
A geographer 29 minutes ago
Nobody has asked the question: two or more linguistic tribes can live
together in Switzerland, so why not Belgium ? Just like Belgium,...
Language Divisions
Language divisions might not prevent intelligence experts from
communicating, but they shape the political environment in which the
experts operate and decide who fills the ministerial positions that set
their priorities.
Mr. Jambon, the Flemish nationalist interior minister, has infuriated
many French-speaking Belgians with what they see as insinuation that
they alone are to blame for the growth of Islamic militancy in Belgium.
“The link that has again been established between terrorism and our
country forces us to look into the mirror,” Mr. Jambon said two days
after the Paris attacks. The reflection he saw, however, was heavily
filtered by the lens of Belgium’s tribal politics.
“The question I ask myself is: Why did we succeed to eradicate
radicalism in Antwerp and other Flemish cities, and why doesn’t it work
in Brussels?” he said, contrasting his Dutch-speaking region of Flanders
with Belgium’s mostly French-speaking capital.
Antwerp, the largest city in Flanders, has cracked down on Islamic
extremists. This year the city was the site of Belgium’s biggest
terrorism trial, with more than 40 defendants accused of traveling to
fight in Syria or of encouraging others to do so.
But the trial was held in Dutch-speaking Antwerp only because that was
where its principal defendant, Fouad Belkacem, and the now-banned
organization he led, Sharia4Belgium, a well-known recruiter for jihad,
had operated for years.
From there, Mr. Belkacem reached out to French-speaking areas, notably
Molenbeek, where in 2012 he organized a rally outside a police station
to protest the arrest of a woman wearing an Islamic head covering.
Before the trial, when he was sentenced to 12 years for supporting
terrorism, Mr. Belkacem was “very active here,” Ms. Schepmans said, and
he set alarm bells ringing about the dangers of extremism.
The federal authorities were so worried that they offered to help
Molenbeek with money to set up a unit to combat radicalization. But the
money offered was paltry — initially 40,000 euros, or about $42,500, and
later €60,000. The borough found funding from its own budget and the
radicalization unit now has four employees. Only one speaks Arabic.
Molenbeek’s police force, housed in a big concrete block adjoining City
Hall, knows the neighborhood and its residents, but the mayor said that
it “has neither the means nor the powers” to keep tabs on Islamic
militant suspects.
Arthur van Amerongen, a Dutch writer on the Middle East who lived in
Molenbeek a decade ago while doing research for a book on Islamic
extremism, said it had been obvious for years, particularly under a
Socialist mayor who governed until 2012, that militants were making
inroads there, but “nobody wanted to know because this did not fit their
political agenda.”
Neither local authorities nor the central government showed interest,
Mr. van Amerongen said, noting that his book, “Brussel: Eurabia,” was
greeted with accusations of racism and bias against French-speaking
Molenbeek.
Intelligence services, too, have struggled with the same political
calculations and constraints.
While long derided for its often chaotic and fractious ways, Belgium is
if anything “overorganized,” with so many overlapping bodies and
agencies that nobody is ever really in charge, said Hubert van Humbeeck,
a Belgian political commentator. “It works more or less normally, but
when something so unpredictable like terrorism happens, all the
institutions collide.”
“This is the Belgium disease,” he added. “Everyone always says it is not
their fault, and they are often right.”
On 11/17/2015 04:03 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> CIA Director John Brennan, taking advantage of the PR opportunity of the
> Daesh attacks on Paris and Beirut, yesterday gave a keynote at the
> Center for Strategic and International Studies, once again pushing for
> its wishlist of items to further expand mass surveillance.
>
>
> http://www.c-span.org/video/?400755-1/cia-director-john-brennan-remarks-global-security&start=2685
>
> That was a pretty vague and brief talk, but you'll notice a couple of
> polite swipes: 'Unauthorized disclosures' have led to 'a lot of
> hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover
> these terrorists.... There have been some policy and legal and other
> actions taken that make our ability collectively, internationally, to
> find these terrorists much more challenging, and I do hope that this is
> going to be a wake up call.'
>
> He means Snowden, and in particular Snowden's revelation to the American
> public of two surveillance programs: covert bulk collection of USA
> telephone traffic under PATRIOT Act section 215 (the section that was
> intended to permit collection of business records, such as telephone
> call metadata, that is relevant to a national-security investigation,
> and was interpreted by George W. Bush's Justice Department as permitting
> the collection of _all_ telephone data), and spying on non-U.S.
> citizens under Section 702.
>
> Brennan also put us all on notice that there's going to be a new spook
> war on effective encryption software: 'There has been a significant
> increase of operational security of a number of these operatives and the
> terrorist networks as they have gone to school on what it is they need
> to do to keep their activities concealed from the authorities. As I
> mentioned, there are a lot of technological capabilities that are
> available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both
> technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to
> have the insight they need to uncover it.'
>
> He means your ability to keep your records and communication under your
> own control, subject to your privacy measures, and able to be validated
> and authenticated. He's again' it.
>
> (Because, gosh, none of those foreigners were capable of making
> effective use of strong encryption when it became a commodity item for
> everyone twenty years ago. Clearly, the possibility of them using it is
> a sudden emergency requiring new action.)
>
> In two weeks, a provision of the new USA Freedom Act, supported by court
> decisions, takes effect that prevents the NSA from collecting and
> storing American phone data in bulk. The spooks _very much_ don't like
> that bit, even though it's only the tiniest start towards putting the
> huge mass-surveillance apparatus a bit more under control.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/us/politics/judge-deals-a-blow-to-nsa-phone-surveillance-program.html
>
> And all that concern about government surveillance? Brennan calls it
> 'hand-wringing over the governments role in the effort to uncover these
> terrorists.'
>
> Effectiveness of the Section 215 and Section 702 programs in _actually_
> stopping terrorist attacks have been more than questionable: They've
> been pretty much exactly nil, and the government has then lied and
> claimed otherwise -- as shown when PBS Frontline looked into both
> programs:
>
> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/american-terrorist/the-hidden-intelligence-breakdowns-behind-the-mumbai-attacks/
>
>
> Nonetheless, expect the spooks' new war on crypto and privacy to start
> in three... two... one.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/us/after-paris-attacks-cia-director-rekindles-debate-over-surveillance.html
> http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/16/9745932/paris-attack-terrorism-surveillance-cia-brennan
>
>
> (Meanwhile, over in the UK, PM Cameron spoke of putting aggressive
> surveillance proposal on the fast track. Commenters immediately dubbed
> this pending proposal the Snoopers' Charter.)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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