OSINFO - Open Sources Information

Posted on Jun 26, 2008

By Scott Ritter

I am a former U.N. weapons inspector. I started my work with the United Nations in September 1991, and between that date and my resignation in August 1998, I participated in over 30 inspections, 14 as chief inspector. The United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM, was the organization mandated by the Security Council with the implementation of its resolutions requiring Iraq to be disarmed of its weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. While UNSCOM oversaw the areas of chemical and biological weapons, and ballistic missiles, it shared the nuclear file with the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. As such, UNSCOM, through a small cell of nuclear experts on loan from the various national weapons laboratories, would coordinate with the nuclear safeguards inspectors from the IAEA, organized into an “Action Team” dedicated to the Iraq nuclear disarmament problem. UNSCOM maintained political control of the process, insofar as its executive chairman was the only one authorized to approve a given inspection mission. At first, the IAEA and UNSCOM shared the technical oversight of the inspection process, but soon this was transferred completely to the IAEA’s Action Team, and UNSCOM’s nuclear staff assumed more of an advisory and liaison function.

In August 1992 I began cooperating closely with IAEA’s Action Team, traveling to Vienna, where the IAEA maintained its headquarters. The IAEA had in its possession a huge cache of documents seized from Iraq during a series of inspections in the summer of 1991 and, together with other U.N. inspectors, I was able to gain access to these documents for the purpose of extracting any information which might relate to UNSCOM’s non-nuclear mission. These documents proved to be very valuable in that regard, and a strong working relationship was developed. Over the coming years I frequently traveled to Vienna, where I came to know the members of the IAEA Action Team as friends and dedicated professionals. Whether poring over documents, examining bits and pieces of equipment (the IAEA kept a sample of an Iraqi nuclear centrifuge in its office) or ruminating about the difficult political situation that was Iraq over wine and cheese on a Friday afternoon, I became familiar with the core team of experts who composed the IAEA Action Team.

I bring up this history because during the entire time of my intense, somewhat intimate cooperation with the IAEA Action Team, one name that never entered into the mix was David Albright. Albright is the president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS, an institute which he himself founded), and has for some time now dominated the news as the “go-to” guy for the U.S. mainstream media when they need “expert opinion” on news pertaining to nuclear issues. Most recently, Albright could be seen commenting on a report he authored, released by ISIS on June 16, in which he discusses the alleged existence of a computer owned by Swiss-based businessmen who were involved in the A.Q. Khan nuclear black market ring. According to Albright, this computer contained sensitive design drawings of a small, sophisticated nuclear warhead which, he speculates, could fit on a missile delivery system such as that possessed by Iran.

I have no objection to an academically based think tank capable of producing sound analysis about the myriad nuclear-based threats the world faces today. But David Albright has a track record of making half-baked analyses derived from questionable sources seem mainstream. He breathes false legitimacy into these factually challenged stories by cloaking himself in a résumé which is disingenuous in the extreme. Eventually, one must begin to question the motives of Albright and ISIS. No self-respecting think tank would allow itself to be used in such an egregious manner. The fact that ISIS is a creation of Albright himself, and as such operates as a mirror image of its founder and president, only underscores the concerns raised when an individual lacking in any demonstrable foundation of expertise has installed himself into the mainstream media in a manner that corrupts the public discourse and debate by propagating factually incorrect, illogical and misleading information.

In his résumé Albright prominently advertises himself as a “former U.N. weapons inspector.” Indeed, this is the first thing that is mentioned when he describes himself to the public. Witness an Op-Ed piece in The Washington Post which he jointly authored with Jacqueline Shire in January 2008, wherein he is described as such: “David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector, is president of the Institute for Science and International Security.” His erstwhile U.N. credentials appear before his actual job title. Now, this is not uncommon. I do the same thing when describing myself, noting that I was a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. I feel comfortable doing this, because it’s true and because my résumé is relevant to my writing. In his official ISIS biography, Albright details his “U.N. inspector” experience as such: “Albright cooperated actively with the IAEA Action Team from 1992 until 1997, focusing on analyses of Iraqi documents and past procurement activities. In June 1996, he was the first non-governmental inspector of the Iraqi nuclear program. On this inspection mission, Albright questioned members of Iraq’s former uranium enrichment programs about their statements in Iraq’s draft Full, Final, and Complete Declaration.”

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Scott Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.

AP photo / Henry Arvidsson / United Nations

An Iraqi Scud missile awaits destruction by United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq in this undated file photo.

On my way to the south of France, I stopped overnight in Calais, and the next morning read the local newspaper, La Voix du Nord, at breakfast. At a court in nearby Lille, the paper said, a judge had annulled the marriage of two people who remained anonymous, but whom La Voix called Karima and Youssef (and Le Figaro dubbed Aicha and Noredine in its report of the same story). Youssef is a 30-year-old engineer who had married Karima, a student. Youssef is described as a practicing, though not extremist, Muslim, who wanted a “pure” wife. On their wedding night, horror of horrors, Youssef was not able to produce the sheet stained with blood to the assembled guests of both families waiting for it. He therefore felt deeply dishonored.

He went to the court seeking an annulment. His lawyer, Xavier Labbée, argued that the issue was not the bride’s lack of virginity, but the lies that she had told the groom before the marriage. If he had known that she was not a virgin, Labbée argued, Youssef would not have married Karima. Like a dishonest tradesman selling defective goods, she had misrepresented what was on offer. And Karima admitted that she had understood that if her husband knew she was not a virgin, he would not have married her, Labbée said. His client “was convinced that he could not construct a solid union based upon a lie.” The court accepted Labbée’s argument and annulled the marriage.

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Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

From: Mountain Runner

Posted: 26 Mar 2008 04:47 PM CDT

Not too long ago, Marc Lynch and I had a back and forth on the utility and purposes of Smith-Mundt, a law that today is used not to give America a voice in a global informational struggle -- the purpose for which it was passed -- but to impose artificial constraints that is unique among our peers and our adversaries. 

That discussion included an interesting (and incredible) statement that public diplomacy was not about advocacy.  I completely disagree, as I wrote in Understanding the Purpose of Public Diplomacy.  Crucial to understanding the purpose of public diplomacy is understanding what it is. 

So, What is Public Diplomacy?

While the term itself originated as an alternative to "propaganda," by 1965, when Edmund Gullion coined it, public diplomacy was already well on its way to be something much different than propaganda.  The definition of public diplomacy back is virtually indistinguishable from what today we call information operations, propaganda, or even psychological operations.

More recent American definitions of public diplomacy, when they exist, tend to ignore the purpose this type of communication, leaving open the possibility that all political communications of a state (or non-state actor) is public diplomacy simply by virtue of the target, a foreign public.  That may have been implied by Gullion, but it isn't what it is today and very much why the term "strategic communications" has come into fashion. 

If public diplomacy was simply the conveyance of information to influence a group of people, it would be indistinguishable from information operations or even psychological operations.  So what is it?

In a timely post on the State Department's blog, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Colleen Graffy captured a key element of what differentiates public diplomacy:

"Hmm... Now what exactly is public diplomacy"? That is the question I am often asked.

I describe public diplomacy as the art of communicating a country's policies, values and culture to other peoples. It is an attempt to explain why we have decided on certain measures, and beyond that, to explain who we are. [emphasis mine]

From: With A Grain Of Salt!

Posted: 24 Mar 2008 06:43 AM CDT

Countries faced with terrorism are currently struggling with how to establish legal precedents, so that they can handle terrorists. Because there is no clear cut answer, you get situations which range from outright human right abuses of legal systems, such as Guantanamo Bay all the way to situations where terrorists are released only to commit terrorism acts again right after they have been let loose. This is not unusual. Legal systems down the ages have had major systemic shocks, such as this and the power of a liberal democracy lies in the fact that it is able to incorporate these shocks and re-emerge stronger. If you do not believe me, see how the British Indian Legal System reacted when it was faced with the “Thugs”.

Thugs were a group of criminals, who ran rampant in India and killed an estimated 50,000 to couple of million Indians from circa 1250 to circa 1850. The number actually does not matter, just like Stalin said, death of a million is just a statistic. But in this particular case, the situation was very bad indeed. Gangs of thugs ranged far and wide, from current Pakistan down to South India, to the foothills of the Himalayas next to Nepal to due east into Bangladesh, a very wide area indeed. Over the many centuries, that we are talking about, their area of operation covered hundreds of native states, and the decaying Mughal Empire as well as the rapidly up and coming East India Company ruled areas. All this is before 1857, the great war of Independence or the Great Mutiny (take your pick).

These Thugs were professional murderers, with techniques and training passed around in special villages and in certain hereditary families. They would be protected, trained and funded in many cases by the local ruler/landlord in return for a significant cut of the proceeds. Gangs had specialised roles, some would be the confidence boosters, others would be the grave diggers, some would specialise in the actual murder etc. They had strong rituals surrounding their equipment (specially the pick used to dig the grave), religious rituals to the goddess, etc. And their modus operandi, while difficult to generalise, would roughly go like this. They would befriend fellow travellers, who they know were carrying valuables (they picked up the information from the market places or from guardsmen, etc.) and then will travel for extra-ordinary distances with the victims, sometimes up to 100s of kilometres. And then, at a carefully selected time and place, they would generally strangle the entire party, then strip them completely, mutilate the bodies and cut them open (so that the bodily gases do not expose the body after being dumped in a well), and then hide them down a gorge, a grave, well or ditch. Then the monies and goods will be divided amongst the gang (and the sponsor) and off they will go to get the next victim(s) for hundreds of years.

How on earth did they manage to get away with it all? Well, there were many reasons. First was the fact that they had local protection, so nobody could get to them as the only “authority” in that locality was that local zamindar (landowner) and if he himself had given protection, then there was no way you could get to the thugs. Second given the fact that many bodies were hidden, nobody knew where the victims were. Given the very bad roads, lack of communication, insular population, fragmented country, that is not a surprise. Further to that, given the frequent incidents of fatal illnesses, it was not surprising that people would assume that their loved ones have died on the road and had been buried by someone else or were eaten by wild animals. So no victim, no crime!

From: Global Power Europe
On Sunday or Monday, Kosovo is likely to finally declare its independence from Serbia. Hopefully this will be one of the final acts of the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession, which saw the Western Balkans degenerate into carnage and disorder. It will also lead to the creation of another country on the European continent, perhaps destined to become one day a Member State of the European Union. Equally, Serbia will be shorn of its remaining pretensions as a potential hegemon in the region; dreams of a ‘Greater Serbia’—which claimed so many lives during Slobodan Milosevic’s wars of aggression in the 1990s—will fall into the dirt. Pruned of Kosovo, Serbia will be but a rump of the former Yugoslavia, yet in a better position to face the future as a modern European nation. And as the power of the European Union moves in to fill the vacuum, the residue of Russian influence in the Western Balkans will evaporate.

This of course all relies on good policy, something Europeans have lacked until recently when dealing with the countries that were once Yugoslavia. Jacques Poos’ presumptuous declaration in 1991 that the ‘hour of Europe’ was upon us, that the European Community was ready and able to settle the urges of succession felt by many Yugoslavs, never came to be. Europeans looked on as an area proximate to their homeland witnessed the re-emergence of concentration camps, and as genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ returned to haunt the continent. The murderous actions of Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica were certainly the most excessive of the violence, particularly as European soldiers were ordered not to intervene as the killing took place. In part, it was out of this failure that the Islamist movement gained ground, hoping to use the massacre as a means to recruit new blood to the Islamist cause—with enormous and ongoing implications. And that the Americans with their advocacy of a more aggressive and interventionist approach against the Serbs turned out to be right worked only to compound Europe’s ignominy. Far from being the ‘hour of Europe’, the whole affair became the hour that many Europeans have since tried hard to forget.

The stakes are still high. A poorly managed independence bid by Kosovo on the part of we Europeans could still see a return to considerable violence and bloodshed, leading to a serious security problem. And with the United States bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, there will be no ‘Uncle Sam’ to come to our rescue. At least Europeans learnt certain things from their decade in the former Yugoslavia: the Bosnian wars produced the furrows into which the seeds of a wider, deeper and harder Common Foreign and Security Policy were planted, and for the subsequent creation of the European Security and Defence Policy. Tangible outcomes—from the European Rapid Reaction Force, the European Security Strategy, and the European Battlegroups, along with the new institutional architecture in Brussels—should ensure that we Europeans now have the capabilities to deal with similar disorder in the future. As such, the successful management of Kosovo’s independence might be considered as the culmination of what has been a difficult learning curve. But for those tools and policies to effectively be put into practice requires a coherent European stance to begin with. Unfortunately, that is the problem: Cyprus, Romania and Greece have continued to disagree with the common European line set down by London, Paris and Berlin, who are in turn supported by all remaining Member States.

The unhelpful approach to Kosovo taken by Cyprus and Greece raises issues concerning both Member States’ true allegiances. Mark Leonard, Director of the newly founded European Council on Foreign Relations, has accused them as being the ‘Trojan Horses’ for Russian interests in the European Union; that is to say, they often lean towards the Russian as opposed to the European approach on a range of issues, and veto European policy when the need arises. This is problematic at the best of times, but over the issue of Kosovo it is downright unacceptable. We cannot have certain Member States taking orders from foreign capitals, particularly when those capitals are increasingly arrogant, bellicose and working against our collective European interests.

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From: With A Grain of Salt!

Posted: 12 Jan 2008 03:29 AM CST

I am always curious about one historical anomaly. Why is the Bangladeshi Genocide never considered in the same light as that of Rwanda, Darfur, Southern Sudan, Congo, Cambodia or other genocides? Why does it not even get a fraction of the attention paid to the Palestinian Question, the Kosovo Question, the Lebanese Question or a host of other minority based problems? I can only point to four reasons why this never hit the headlines. First is that the genocide was carried out by an American Ally. Second, the country never was part of the American Interest. Third, it was carried out by Muslims on other fellow Muslims. Fourth, both Bangladesh and Pakistan did not really show much interest in pushing for this to be resolved. Between these four issues, nobody cared or even still cares about the Bangladeshi genocide.

But then, I am biased and I have to admit that right off the bat. I am a Hindu, and my roots are from Bangladesh (my father was a refugee from erstwhile East Pakistan many moons ago). So while Hindus were targeted solely for being Hindus, Muslims were targeted for being intellectuals or just wanting their rights, so I am connected to Bangladesh by virtue of language, cuisine, family, history, culture, geography, religion and a whole lot more. I know fully well that Hindus have been significantly and seriously ethnically cleansed from Bangladesh (and from Pakistan and from Kashmir) but they do not matter in the greater scheme of things of the international and the national grand Poo-Bahs. Nobody cares much for them. One of my childhood memories is about the 1971 Bangladeshi refugees fighting over left over food thrown into garbage bins but let us not go there for now. So this is a topic which is dear to my heart and I might be a bit more emotional than normal and I really don’t want to do an Alex Haley of Roots fame here.

Having said that, the history of the 1971 war and genocide is pretty well known and I do not want to reiterate it here. I quote from the report by the International Commission of Jurists here: “a campaign of genocide involved. . . the indiscriminate killing of civilians, including women and children and the poorest and weakest members of the community; the attempt to exterminate or drive out of the country a large part of the Hindu population; the arrest, torture and killing of Awami League activists and students, professionals, business men and other potential leaders among the Bengalis; the raping of women; the destruction of villages and towns.”

According to an excellent and thought provoking recent paper by Donald Beacher ('The politics of genocide scholarship : the case of Bangladesh', Patterns of Prejudice, 2007, 41:5, 467 – 492)many scholars bluntly even denied that any genocide took place. He says that compared to the Cambodian Genocide where a similar number of people were killed, "no ideological or partisan faction in the United States has stood to gain much from the study of the Bangladesh genocide." Think about it, Pakistan, that rogue country responsible for this genocide is an ally of USA!
It is still ruled by the same Pakistani Army, which is very much supporting the so-called “War on Terror”. Pakistan is still the primary base of most of the terrorists, they were either trained, educated, born in or have links to Pakistan. This “land of the pure” (an ironical name for Pakistan) was responsible. It has lost effective control over large swathes over its public and real life space to the fundamentalists. It has carried out massacres (some say it's also genocide, but that’s a bit debatable) in Baluchistan and Karachi. And this is a USA ally! So why on earth would American politicians, media or academics be interested in investigating it any further (specially compared to the Cambodian Genocide)?

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            Turkey hosted an important conference between 6th and 8th of December 2007. “International Security Cooperation: Intelligence Practice” was organized by Bilkent University (Department of International Relations) and Kent State University at the Bilkent Hotel with the foundation of NATO. The fact that the lecturers who are consist of  academicians and the practitioners came from many different countries such as, USA, UK, Spain, Israel, Egypt, India, Pakistan,and Bangladesh and shared their opinions completely has enhanced the concept of the conference. As stressed in  the opening speech which was given by Assoc. Prof. Ersel Aydınlı, The Head of department international relations in Bilkent University, who runs the organization of the conference, the arguments about supporting the share of international intelligence has lasted until the end of the conference. There were several solutions about the obstacles about the issue of sharing international intelligence and how to share international intelligence in the presentations performed in the conference. In this article, the aim is to give a short evaluation about the prominent presentations.

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