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The Islamists Have Brainwashed General Petraeus!


You only think he’s fought religious fanatics in two wars. What are David Petraeus’ real sympathies, anyway?

Only Frank Gaffney, who fears for your liberty every time a Muslim prays, has the courage to ask that question. In a recent talk, Gaffney, a Pentagon official in the Reagan era, said that Petraeus’ recent umbrage at the burning of a Koran was tantamount to “a kind of submission to this program” — Islamic law, don’tcha know — lest we give offense, which is a blasphemy and a capital crime under Sharia.”

My God. And President Obama nominated this man on Thursday to become director of the CIA! Everyone who’s watched Petraeus’ career has seen his obvious identification with America’s most implacable enemies. Thankfully Gaffney had the stones to tell the hysterical, spittle-flecked truth.
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Unfollowed: How a (Possible) Social Network Spy Came Undone

A screengrab shows @PrimorisEra’s now-deleted Twitter account.

It started out with a leggy, bikini-clad avatar. She said she was a missile expert — the “1st Lady of Missiles,” in fact — but sometimes suggested she worked with the CIA. With multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, she earned a following of social media-crazed security wonks. Then came the accusations of using sex appeal for espionage.

Now everyone involved in this weird network is adjusting their story in one way or another, demonstrating that even people in the national security world have trouble remembering one of the basic rules of the internet: Not everyone is who they say they are.

“I think anyone puts pictures out online to lure someone in,” the woman at the center of the controversy insists. “But it’s not to lure men in to give me any information at all… I liked them. They’re pretty. Apparently everyone else thought so too.”

This is a strange, Twitter-borne tale of flirting, cutouts, and lack of online caution in the intelligence and defense worlds. Professionals who should’ve known better casually disclosed their personal details (a big no-no in spook circles) and lobbed allegations they later couldn’t or wouldn’t support (a big no-no in all circles). It led to a Pentagon investigation. And it starts with a Twitter account that no longer exists called @PrimorisEra.

The subject of much confusion and even more speculation, @PrimorisEra purports to be a woman in her late 20s named Shawn Elizabeth Gorman. Many have corresponded with her through Google Chat, IM, Facebook, and Twitter. Very few of them have met her in person. She claims to hold a security clearance and work for a Defense Department contractor that she won’t identify. According to Johns Hopkins University, a woman with that name is pursuing a masters’ degree in government and business.

That is not how she has presented herself on the Internet.

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Drones Spray, Track the Unwilling in Air Force Plan

Here’s how the U.S. Air Force wants to hunt the next generation of its enemies: A tiny drone sneaks up to a suspect, paints him with an unnoticed powder or goo that allows American forces to follow him everywhere he goes — until they train a missile on him.

On Tuesday, the Air Force issued a call for help making a miniature drone that could covertly drop a mysterious and unspecified tracking “dust” onto people, allowing them to be tracked from a distance. The proposal says its useful for all kinds of random things, from identifying friendly forces and civilians to tracking wildlife. But the motive behind a covert drone tagger likely has less to do with sneaking up on spotted owls and more to do with painting a target on the backs of tomorrow’s terrorists.

Effectively tracking foes has become a high priority — and deeply secret — research effort for the Pentagon, which has struggled at times to sort out insurgent from innocent in places like Afghanistan. The Navy has a $450 million contract with Herndon, Virginia’s Blackbird Technologies, Inc. to produce tiny beacons to make terrorists trackable. The Defense Department has been pouring serious cash — $210 million that they’ll admit to — to find advanced new ways to do this so-called “Tagging, Tracking and Locating” work, as Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger noted in Popular Science last year.

The research she cataloged is as mind-boggling as it is varied. Ideas range from uniquely-identifiable insect pheromones to infrared gear that tracks people with their “thermal fingerprint.” One company, Voxtel, makes tiny nanocrystals that can be hidden in clear liquids and seen through night vision goggles.

A 2007 briefing from U.S. Special Operations Command on targeting technology stated that SOCOM was looking for “perfumes” and “stains” that would mark out bad guys from a distance. The presentation  listed a “bioreactive taggant” as a “current capability” next to a picture of what looks like a painted or bruised arm.

Another tracking technology is “smart dust” — a long-forecast cloud of tiny sensors that stick to target human or his clothes. And that seems to be what the Air Force wants its mini drone configured for.

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Army Wants to Stage Plays at Guantanamo Bay

Get ready for live theater at the world’s most notorious detention facility. No, not for live readings of the Gitmo Files. The Army wants to stage readings from Sophocles’ classic plays Ajax and Philoctetes for the beleaguered troops at Guantanamo Bay.

It’s hardly just entertainment. The readings are part of a theater program “aimed at helping combat veterans return to civilian life after deployments.”

Called “Theater of War,” the program takes the martial themes of the plays and treats them like “ritual reintegration for combat veterans by combat veterans.” Panel discussions with veterans typically follow the readings, “to increase awareness of post-deployment psychological health issues, disseminate information regarding available resources, and foster greater family and troop resilience.”
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NATO Sending Mixed Messages about Afghan Militias

Staff Sgt. Richard Rodriguez was on a mission. On March 27, the stocky military policeman from the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division led a group of American and Afghan security forces on a foot patrol through the town of Baraki Barak, 50 miles south of Kabul. (See video above.)

Among Rodriguez’s goals: to identify young, male candidates for a new militia-style, neighborhood-watch program — and enroll them in NATO’s biometric database for vetting.

Spotting one likely candidate, Rodriguez extolled the virtues of joining the so-called “Afghan Local Police” as another soldier took the man’s photo and fingerprints. If the recruit signed up, he would join an estimated 5,000 other men already committed to wear the blue ALP uniform and stand guard in their own villages, armed with AK-47s and their intimate knowledge of the local people and terrain.

NATO and Afghan commanders both agree that these fresh forces can’t come soon enough. After no fewer than five attempts since 2001 to stand up inexpensive, minimally-trained local militia forces, the U.S.-led alliance is running out of time. The first of roughly 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan are slated to withdraw this summer, potentially leaving a huge gap in the country’s defenses.

But when it comes to training and leadership for the new patrolmen, there seems to be some confusion. Some U.S. and Afghan officers say the local police will be trained and led by Afghan National Police. But NATO’s top cop-trainer insists that’s not the case — and only foreign Special Forces will have that responsibility.

The absence of clear plan could undermine the local-police program, at a stage of the war where there’s simply no time to try raising yet another pro-NATO militia.

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Drones Rejoice! Petraeus to Head CIA, Panetta to Pentagon

The long-awaited shakeup of the Obama administration’s national security team has begun. Leon Panetta will leave the CIA to replace Robert Gates as secretary of defense. Gen. David Petraeus will leave command of the Afghanistan war to replace Panetta. It’s a good day to be an armed Predator drone or a shadow warrior.

Neither man is an obvious choice for his new job. Panetta is an accidental CIA director. With practically no intelligence experience, he became director in 2009 after President Obama’s first choice dropped out in the face of liberal opposition. Unexpectedly, he forged a tight relationship with both agency veterans and the president, and turned the CIA into the tip of the spear for counterterrorism in Pakistan.

Petraeus has spent his life in the military and became the premier Army officer of his generation. His reputation for competence has led successive presidents to go to him to fix disasters — George W. Bush sent him to turn the Iraq war around; Obama sent him to Afghanistan after the McChrystal Rolling Stone debacle. But Panetta restored the confidence of the president in the CIA, so it’s not clear what’s prompting the need for such a drastic career detour for Petraeus — aside from the political need to keep him on Team Obama.

Panetta inherits what Heather Hurlburt of the progressive National Security Network calls “two and a half wars” — Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya — and a massive bureaucracy that both doesn’t know him and considers Gates a hard act to follow. Obama has said that the Pentagon needs to reexamine its global responsibilities so it can trim its half-trillion annual budget by $400 billion over the next twelve years, far more than Gates’ “efficiencies initiative” sought to cut.

“He’ll never live up to what building wants or has come to expect,” Hurlburt says of Panetta. “Gates tried to prepare them that this is coming, and cushion the building for what’s coming, but that’s not tenable. It’s an unenviable task.”

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First Look: Inside the Army’s App Store for War

If all of the bureaucratic and security hurdles can be overcome, the Army will soon launch its version of an app store, where soldiers can download Army-relevant software to their work computers and — with a little luck — mobile phones. This is what its homepage will look like.

Called Army Marketplace, it’ll start off featuring the few dozen applications that soldiers created last year during the Apps for the Army contest. Those early efforts ran the gamut from workout guides to digitized manuals for standard Army tasks. So far, there are 17 apps for Android phones and another 16 for iPhones.

But the Army Marketplace will do more than sell existing apps. It’ll help generate ideas for new ones, says Lt. Col. Gregory Motes, chief of the Army’s new Mobile Applications Branch. Imagine that a soldier wants an app instructing how to call for artillery fire, and the app doesn’t exist yet. The soldier would post a description of what she needs on a Marketplace forum, attracting discussion from fellow soldiers and potential designers.

If other troops can’t home-brew a solution, the Army would open a bidding or contracting process from would-be vendors who’ve expressed interest on the thread. Ideally, the app would be available on Marketplace not long thereafter, with a nominal purchase price, a la the App Store or Android Market.

“It’d use an agile software-development process, to close with the vendor and try to quickly turn these apps around,” Motes tells Danger Room. “The current process of software creation [in the Army] is a very long and arduous process. That’s how we do things. But app development needs to be done quickly.”

You’ll have to be a member of the Department of Defense community to see the store and access its wares. It’ll be hosted on a secure DOD server and require a username and password from intranets like Army Knowledge Online. Eventually, Marketplace will become an app of its own, loadable onto the forthcoming Army-issued smartphone so users aren’t tied to a website. Marketplace isn’t meant for the general public — which creates problems for how it interacts with smartphones. (More on that in a moment.)

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NATO Bombs Gadhafi Cribs (But Not to Kill Him, Honest)


Whatever you do, don’t call it regime change. NATO planes dropped bombs on one of Moammar Gadhafi’s Tripoli offices overnight, and the alliance says it’ll expand its targeting list to strike “palaces, headquarters, communications centers and other prominent institutions supporting the Libyan government.” But, it promises, killing Gadhafi isn’t on the agenda.

Last night’s compound raid, conducted by a Norwegian F-16, was swiftly denounced by Gadhafi’s regime as an assassination attempt. But that’s not what NATO says it’s out to do, since, officially, regime change isn’t a military objective of the stalemated war.

Bombs might be set to fall on regime headquarters. But that’s just a tactic to get Gadhafi’s generals to take matters into their own hands. NATO officials tell the New York Times that the expanded bombing might persuade Gadhafi to “flee into exile — or it might prompt someone in his inner circle to force him out.”

Why the indirect approach? Because the military, with everything else it has to deal with, doesn’t want to be left holding the bag on rebuilding Libya post-Gadhafi.

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Gitmo Doctors Hid Evidence of Torture


Updated, 5:55 p.m.

They explained away the bone fractures, didn’t ask what caused the lacerations, and called the hallucinations routine. Rather than blowing the whistle, medical professionals entrusted with the care of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay turned a blind eye when there were clear indications of abuse.

That’s according to a newly published report from two physicians with unprecedented access to the medical records of nine Gitmo detainees.

Writing in the online journal PLoS Medicine, Physicians for Human Rights senior medical adviser Vincent Iacopino and retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist now in private practice, found that medical personnel at Guantanamo concealed mental and physical ailments that signaled abusive treatment.

The report — which represents the first independent review of any Guantanamo detainee’s medical record — is the clearest evidence yet that members of the base’s medical staff were complicit in the torture regime there.

“Medics have an independent, professional responsibility to identify and report incidences of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture,” Xenakis tells Danger Room. “They had a responsibility to speak up.”

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Did a Sex Tape Create an al-Qaida Spy?

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the spying book: Tempt a guy with sex; record him in a compromising position, and then blackmail him into working for you. According to a new file released by WikiLeaks, that’s exactly what happened to one inmate there. But be wary of this espionage tale. As with a lot of Gitmo detainee accounts, the detainee’s history of trying to please interrogators and his experience being tortured make it difficult to say for sure what really happened.

Abd Al Rahim Abdul Raza Janko (pictured) told interrogators at Guantanamo Bay that his journey into an al-Qaida guest house began with blackmail while he was studying Islamic law and Arabic literature in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He claimed Prince Fisal Sudid Qasmi invited him to hang out with his college friends at a local hotel. When he arrived, he said a raging sex party was already in progress and he promptly took part in it. Weeks later, Janko said Qasmi confronted him with a videotape of the party, threatening to send it to a television station or his family if he didn’t agree to spy for the UAE. The confrontation, according to Janko, kicked off an odyssey that began with him snooping on Filipino classmates’ plans to smuggle fighters back home and ended with him heading to Afghanistan in early 2000 to spy on al-Qaida.

Using sex to blackmail subjects is a longstanding practice among intelligence services. In his memoir of life as an informant for British and French intelligence, Omar Nasiri, a pseudonymous graduate of the Khalden jihadi training camp in Afghanistan, recounted how British intelligence used the threat of blackmail to pressure a gay Muslim friend into spying on Islamist extremists in Britain. In a particularly sickening case from he mid-1990s, Egyptian intelligence services reportedly photographed the drugging and rape of an al-Qaida member’s young son, using the incident to pressure him into planting microphones at home.

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