The ostensible purpose of your ban is to keep Americans safe from terrorists by barring visitors, refugees and immigrants from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. So let’s consider, nonhysterically, what such a ban might have accomplished had it come into force in recent years.
It would not have barred Ramzi Yousef, the Kuwait-born Pakistani who helped mastermind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, the American perpetrators of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 people were murdered.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of Eric Rudolph, the Christian terrorist who killed one person at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and later bombed abortion clinics and a gay bar.
It would not have barred Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers. Atta was an Egyptian citizen who arrived in the U.S. on a visa issued by the American Embassy in Berlin in May 2000.
It would not have barred Atta’s accomplices, all in the United States on legal visas. Fifteen of them were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and another from Lebanon.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks, in which five people were killed. The attacks are widely believed (without conclusive proof) to have been the work of the late Bruce Ivins, an American microbiologist.
It would not have barred Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a Miami-bound airliner in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes. Reid was a London-born Briton who converted to Islam as an adult.
Why Hackers Aren’t Afraid of Us
a group of finance ministers to simulate a similar attack that shut down financial markets and froze global transactions. By several accounts, it quickly spun into farce: No one wanted to admit how much damage could be done or how helpless they would be to deter it.
.. something has changed since 2008, when the United States and Israel mounted the most sophisticated cyberattack in history on Iran’s nuclear program, temporarily crippling it in hopes of forcing Iran to the bargaining table.
.. the sophistication of cyberweapons has so improved that many of the attacks that once shocked us — like the denial-of-service attacks Iran mounted against Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and other banks in 2012, or North Korea’s hacking of Sony in 2014 — look like tiny skirmishes compared with the daily cybercombat of today.
.. Yet in this arms race, the United States has often been its own worst enemy. Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.
.. the WannaCry ransomware attack by North Korea last year, which used some of the sophisticated tools the N.S.A. had developed.
.. Nuclear weapons are still the ultimate currency of national power, as the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore last week showed. But they cannot be used without causing the end of human civilization — or at least of a regime. So it’s no surprise that hackers working for North Korea, Iran’s mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and the People’s Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great advantage of cyberweapons is that they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect, easy to deny and increasingly finely targeted. And therefore, extraordinarily hard to deter.
.. Cyberattacks have long been hard to stop because determining where they come from takes time — and sometimes the mystery is never solved.
.. Today cyberattackers believe there is almost no risk that the United States or any other power would retaliate with significant sanctions, much less bombs, troops or even a counter cyberattack.
.. “They don’t fear us,”
.. At the State Department, the eviction took weeks, shutting down systems during negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal. The hackers were even bolder at the White House. Instead of disappearing when they were exposed, they fought back, looking to install new malware as soon as the old versions were neutralized.
.. It appears the attackers just wanted to prove they could go, and stay, anywhere in the American government’s network.
.. the United States never called out the Russians for what they were doing.
.. If Mr. Putin thought there was no price to be paid for invading White House systems, why wouldn’t he attack the Democratic National Committee?
.. By the summer of 2016, some Obama administration officials, waking to the threat, proposed counterstrikes that included exposing Mr. Putin’s hidden bank accounts and his ties to the oligarchs and cutting off Russia’s banking system. But the potential for escalation caused Mr. Obama and his top aides to reject the plan.
“It was an enormously satisfying response,” a senior American official told me later, “until we began to think about what it would do to the Europeans.”
Mr. Obama also understandably feared that anything the United States did might provoke Mr. Putin to tinker with election systems just enough to give credence to Donald Trump’s warning that the system was “rigged.”
.. Since the election, the American retaliation has included closing some Russian consulates and recreation centers and expelling spies — actions one Obama national security official called “the perfect 19th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.”
.. The wide-open vulnerabilities in America’s networks have essentially deterred the United States from credibly threatening retaliation against the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans and the Iranians.
.. One way to start is to make sure no new equipment goes on the market unless it meets basic security requirements. We won’t let cars on the road without airbags, so why do we do less with the systems that connect them to the internet?
.. Second, we must decide what networks we care most about defending — and make those priorities clear. Mr. Mattis’s threat to turn to nuclear weapons hardly seems credible — unless the cyberattack would create an existential threat to America. That requires an intensive public review of what is critical to our nation’s survival.
..President Trump forfeited the perfect opportunity when he decided against a commission to learn the larger lessons from the 2016 election.
.. the United States needs to end the reflexive secrecy surrounding its cyberoperations. We need to explain to the world why we have cyberweapons, what they are capable of and, most important, what we will not use them for.
.. it is in the nation’s interests to develop global norms clarifying that some targets are off limits: election systems, hospitals and emergency communications systems, and maybe even electric power grids and other civilian targets.
.. Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, has proposed digital Geneva Conventions that begin to establish those norms, outside the structure of governments and treaties.
.. Intelligence agencies hate this idea: They want the most latitude possible for future operations in an uncertain world. But in any arms control negotiation, to create limits on others, you need to give up something.
Exiting the Iran deal is a blow to financial transparency and US control
the West’s dominance of global finance has meant that the US effectively controls conduits which are the lifeblood of non-Western powers like Russia and China as well. Russia, itself bitterly subject to American sanctions, hopes to escape the noose by deploying a blockchain-based parallel infrastructure for international transactions. Whether such an enterprise will prove laughable and quixotic, or whether it might pierce meaningful holes in the US-dominated conventional system, depends a great deal on how policymakers, bankers, and entrepreneurs around the world react to it.
.. However, now, specifically with respect to its enforcement of financial sanctions on an apparently compliant Iran, it is the United States that seems, even among its Western partners, to be the rogue state in need of policing. However begrudging European acquiescence to extraterritorial US sanctions may have been two days ago, it is more begrudging today.
.. More than that, the remaining counterparties of the Iran nuclear deal — China, France, Russia, the UK, and the EU — all want the deal to continue. They will be at pains to persuade Iran that it continues to enjoy significant sanctions relief relative to what it would face if it abandoned the deal. Which puts those countries between a rock and the hard-place of extraterritorial enforcement by the US of reimposed prohibitions. At a policy level, the remaining signatories now have an active interest in enabling, even encouraging, evasion of US financial controls, an interest that is morally and politically defensible. All of a sudden La Resistance among sullen French bankers isn’t just about the juicy fees foregone, but a heroic struggle to #resist Donald Trump, to prevent the renuclearization of Iran. And policymakers might agree.
.. That might mean taking some of the pressure off of European and vacation isle tax havens, reversing the recent, American-enforced trend towards transparency. It might mean partnering with China and Russia to participate in the parallel, alternative financial arrangements that those countries seek to develop. It plainly puts at risk the hard won, absolutely extraordinary, hegemony that American regulators have over global finance.
.. And for those among the US #resistance who see Vladimir Putin beneath every strand of orange hair, what Donald Trump has just done makes the possibility of a new Russian SWIFT considerably less laughable.
Journalist Details Israel’s ‘Secret History’ Of Targeted Assassinations
Our guest, Israeli investigative reporter Ronen Bergman, says that Israel has developed the most robust streamlined assassination machine in history. His new book, based on a thousand interviews, chronicles decades of shootings, poisonings, bombings and drone strikes. The targets were perceived enemies of the Jewish state, ranging from British colonial officials in the 1940s to leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO to Iranian nuclear scientists. Bergman describes the planning and approval process for targeted killings, which typically involved young military and intelligence operatives making the case for a strike to the country’s prime minister.
Bergman writes that Israeli assassination teams were effective at eliminating their targets but often at a moral and political price their leaders would only come to understand years after their missions. Ronen Bergman is a senior correspondent for military and intelligence affairs for Yedioth Ahronoth, the country’s largest daily newspaper, and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He spoke to FRESH AIR’s Dave Davies about his new book “Rise And Kill First: The Secret History Of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations.”
.. one of the most powerful things I have ever seen on a screen was the movie “The Gatekeepers” by Dror Moreh, the Israeli filmmaker. And I’m sure you’re familiar with this. He interviews all of the living heads of Shin Bet, which I guess is the internal intelligence service in Israel.
BERGMAN: Yes.
DAVIES: All of them in their later years felt that the violence and retribution which they had engaged in earlier had to be stopped, and there had to be a negotiated arrangement with the Palestinians. Did you find that in – among the intelligent professionals that you spoke to as they grew older?
BERGMAN: Yeah. The same five that are interviewed in “Gatekeepers” are extensively quoted in “Rise And Kill” as well, as well as many, many others – the chiefs of the intelligence. And you’re absolutely right. They rule. The rare exception is that all the chiefs of Israeli intelligence and military commanders and operation commanders all believe that there’s no other way but a two-state solution and a political discourse with the Palestinians.
The problem is that I think when they were on duty and the political level above them opposed such a path, they usually stayed silent or, you know, in a very quiet voice say, well, maybe there’s another way. But once they were ordered to confront the problem by force, they did that with whatever they could. And they supplied the solutions that just prolonged the problem. They supplied the solution for many, many, many years that kept the Palestinian population in the occupied territories relatively quiet.
And that – and I’m quoting one of the chiefs of the – of Shin Bet. And that enabled the government basically to do whatever it wanted because they were not confronting a lot of riots or demonstration or terrorism. And they could build settlements, and they could enjoy the cheap labor. And they didn’t need to understand and confront the problem of occupying another nation, another country and another people.
.. And what Mossad was able to do instead of just shooting him was to get very close to him and replace one of the things that he uses frequently with the same substance but mixed with poison. They call the poison the potion of gods. That was the nickname. And they poured that into his toothpaste which he used quite frequently. Then he got the ill. Nobody knew what happens to him.
.. Israeli military intelligence who is supposed to deliver information for a targeted killing operation in 2003, said, I’m not going to do so. You want to destroy a building belonging to the Fatah, one of the Palestinian factions in Gaza. You want to destroy it, he told his commanders, because there are people inside but not specific people. You just want to destroy it with people in order to send a message to the Palestinians. I think this is forbidden. This is illegal, manifestly illegal. This is a war crime. And he declared…
.. But at that time, after a horrific suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that took place just hours before, the chief of staff ordered to destroy a building with someone inside. Someone – doesn’t matter who – has to be killed as a – sort of a message sent to the Palestinians. And that junior brave intelligence officer says, this is the line. I’m drawing it here. I’m not going to do so. This is war crime. This is illegal.
DAVIES: You know, military organizations assume that people will follow orders, whatever qualms they might have. What was the fallout of this refusal to carry out this mission?
BERGMAN: The echoes that there’s was a mutiny in Unit 8200 – which is considered to be creme de la creme, prime of Israeli intelligence – immediately reached every corridor of the – thundered through the corridors of the military and reached the prime minister himself. No one could believe that these people, the intelligence officers could ever rebuild. People at the chief of staff said this guy should be court martialed. And someone said, even, he should be shot. But I think the IDF didn’t want this to be brought to trial because they understood that the order, from the beginning, was illegal. So they just dismissed the junior officer. They didn’t want to deal with that.
But they were afraid that it will lead to a wave of other people refusing to take orders, so they preferred to hushen (ph) that.
.. He didn’t – he still, even today, doesn’t want to be identified because he understands that some people in Israeli society would judge him for that. And he doesn’t want to have problems in his civilian life.
.. just before Trump was elected and before the inauguration, they suggested that the Israelis stop giving sensitive material to the White House. They said we are afraid that Trump or someone of his people are under leverage from the Russians. And they might give sensitive information to the Russians who, in their turn, would give that to Iran. They said we have evidence that part of the material that Edward Snowden stole from the CIA and NSA – and was not yet published – found its way to Iran. And we believe, of course, that he gave everything he had to the Russians.
.. you know of specific information that the U.S. shared with the Russians that has not been revealed publicly and that you are not revealing publicly?
BERGMAN: The nature of the information that President Trump revealed to Foreign Minister Lavrov is of the most secretive nature. And that information could jeopardize modus operandi of Israeli intelligence.
.. I had 1,000 people speaking from prime minister and minister of defense, chiefs of staff, chief of the Mossad to the actual operatives and assassins.
.. But the main reason, I think, that led most of these people to speak was that after so many years in the shadows – after so many years in secret, they wanted to tell people how they defend Israel, how they were the guards on the wall. And they thought that I’m writing – not the authorized of course. I’m not working for the administration, but this is the unauthorized, unofficial – but the history of Israeli intelligence. And they wanted to make sure that their footprint is set upright in this book.