Archive for December 20th, 2016
Is National Security Agency NSA grappling with how to store so much data they collect?
Posted on: December 20, 2016
Is National Security Agency NSA grappling with how to store so much data they collect
By the first half of 2004, the National Security Agency was drowning in information. It had amassed 85 billion phone and online records and cut the ribbon on a new hacking center in Hawaii — but it was woefully short on linguists who could make sense of captured communications and lacked enough network analysts to effectively monitor all the systems it had hacked.
The signals intelligence collected by the agency was being used for critically important decisions even as NSA struggled to understand it.
Some bombs in Iraq were being targeted based entirely on signals intelligence, a senior NSA official told staff at the time — with decisions being made in a matter of “minutes” with “less and less review.”
Information overload is just one of several themes running through 262 articles from the NSA’s internal news site, SIDtoday, which The Intercept is now releasing after careful review.
The documents also detailed an incident in which the Reagan administration appears to have leaked classified intelligence to the press for political purposes, described in an accompanying article by reporter Jon Schwarz.
SIDtoday articles published today also describe how the NSA trained FBI agents, enabled U.S. intervention in Latin America, and, with the help of a gifted analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, learned the value of simply reading information that was already public.
One document even suggests that NSA personnel routinely got dangerously chatty at restaurants near headquarters. These stories and more are described in the highlights reel below. The NSA declined to comment.
Dropping Bombs in Iraq “With Less and Less Review”
A top NSA official disclosed in a January 2004 SIDtoday column that U.S. forces were “dropping bombs” based entirely on signals intelligence, the type of intelligence collected by the agency. He then implied that the American officers involved risked prosecution for war crimes.
Charles Berlin, chief of staff in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, recounted an anecdote about a former commander of his who, in one session in the winter of 1995-96, personally reviewed more than 100 possible airstrike targets in the Balkans. The commander’s motivation, Berlin said, was to protect his underlings from being prosecuted for war crimes, and his actions “really brought home the concepts of responsibility and accountability.”
“For us today this lesson is especially important,” he added. “The planning cycle for dropping a bomb has compressed from a day to minutes and the criterion for the aiming point has less and less review.”
“As many of you know, our forces in Iraq are dropping bombs on the strength of SIGINT alone. We are proud of their confidence in us, but have you ever considered the enormous risk the commanders are assuming in this regard? Are you ready to share that risk?”
Inside the NSA’s Call-Logging Machine
Among the ways the NSA identified potential terrorists was through a practice known as “information chaining,” which uses communications metadata to draw a social graph. And there’s no question the agency had lots of metadata: As of 2004, the NSA had amassed a database of more than 85 billion metadata records related to phone calls, billing, and online calls — and was adding 125 million records a day, according to a January 2004 SIDtoday article titled “The Rewards of Metadata.”
The database, known as FASCIA II, would at some unspecified point in the future begin processing 205 million records a day and storing 10 years of data, the article added.
One of the world’s largest Oracle databases at the time, FASCIA II held metadata records from telephone calls, wireless calls, billing, the use of media over the internet, and high-powered cordless phones, with plans to add email metadata in the future.
The article explained that metadata is used by the agency in the process of “information chaining,” in which analysts spy on relationships between people. It further claimed that two senior al Qaeda operatives had been captured with the help of such techniques. A March 2004 SIDtoday article said a chaining tool called MAINWAY helped a counterterrorism analyst uncover six new “terrorist-related numbers.”
Short on Linguists, NSA Struggled to Understand Targets
It’s one thing to collect phone calls, email messages, and other signals intelligence. It’s quite another to make sense of it. Several SIDtoday articles from the first half of 2004 made clear that the NSA was falling far short in its attempts to process communications conducted in languages other than English.
Only half of the agency’s more than 2,300 “language missions” worldwide had qualified personnel, according to a June 2004 SIDtoday article by an NSA “senior language authority.” The author declared that “this shortcoming must be rectified.” An NSA report to an oversight council, quoted in the article, said that the lack of qualified language analysts was particularly acute in the “Global War on Terrorism.”
Exacerbating the situation was the fact that captured communications require a high level of linguistic proficiency to understand. “The cryptologic language analyst must be able to read and listen ‘between the lines’ to unformatted, unpredictable discourse,” as the article put it.
Only a quarter of military cryptologic linguists, who formed the vast majority of the workforce, could work at this level, known as “level 3” proficiency, while barely half of the civilian cryptologic linguists could, according to a follow-up SIDtoday article. The military’s language training institute offered “virtually no existing curriculum” above level 2.
NSA’s plan to address the problem included reforms to the training institute and on-site instruction to bring existing linguists up to higher levels.
The agency planned to invest about $80 million per year in training over five years. Other efforts included an internal online language training tool, an evaluation of redundant Arabic machine translation projects underway in various government agencies, and the formation of a language technology team within the NSA.
How the NSA Over-Hacked
Sometimes metadata isn’t enough and the NSA decides it needs to compromise targets’ computers to collect much more data. The first half of 2004 saw a ramp-up of NSA’s hacking capabilities. In March, SIDtoday reported, the agency’s elite hacking team Tailored Access Operations approved Kunia Regional Security Operations Center in Hawaii — the same facility where Edward Snowden later worked — as the first NSA field office to conduct “advanced” Computer Network Exploitation. Other facilities conduct the first stage of hacking, “target mapping,” but the Kunia facility began doing “vulnerability scanning” all the way through to “sustained SIGINT collection.”
Another March SIDtoday article said that an advanced network analysis division used to help “exploit targets of interest” had “played an instrumental part” in capturing alleged al Qaeda operative Husam al-Yemeni, had developed a “more complete understanding of the Pakistani Army Defense Network (ADN) infrastructure,” and had assisted with the hacking of “an important digital network associated” with the leader of Venezuela at the time, referred to erroneously as “Victor Chavez.”
The NSA was so successful at hacking networks that the agency was overwhelmed with information. “We simply do not have enough network analysts to effectively monitor these targeted networks,” an NSA division chief wrote in an April 2004 SIDtoday article. To solve the problem, the agency began prototyping an automated monitoring system.
“Outstanding” Bookworm Spy Doesn’t Need to Really Spy
Even as the NSA made enormous efforts to collect vast quantities of private communications, a lone SIDtoday article extolled the value of publicly available data. The piece, from May 2004, gushed about a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who dug up leads by poring over Russian material that was “open source.” The DIA bookworm searched in newspapers, government documents, and “obscure websites” for information that aided the NSA in collecting intelligence, including names, telephone numbers, and addresses.
The article, co-authored by an NSA director with responsibility for Russia, praised the analyst’s “outstanding language and research skills.” It turned out that “critical lead information” on Russian underground facilities, including a mysterious and widely discussed site at Yamantau Mountain in the Urals, was “often only available in open source literature, such as the Internet.”
-
We published 262 new Snowden docs today, including where NSA grapples with how to store so much data they collecthttps://theintercept.com/2016/12/07/drowning-in-information-nsa-revelations-from-262-spy-documents/ …
How the NSA Secures — and Routinely Puts at Risk — Sensitive Information
Knowing how much intelligence value could be reaped from openly circulated information, the NSA worked to encourage discretion among members of its workforce. NSA employees practiced poor operational security on a “monthly” basis by disclosing too much information in restaurants and other public settings near the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters, an agency security manager indicated in a tutorial on operational security that ran in SIDtoday in April 2004.
The article used a hypothetical scenario to explain why operational security, or OPSEC, was important for everyone. The author, OPSEC manager for the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, wrote: “You’re at a luncheon at a local restaurant to bid farewell to Sue, a co-worker who is moving on to a new office.” Your boss makes a toast to Sue, describing her contributions against organized crime and offering various details of her work. Sue then gives a toast thanking some of the gathered individuals.
“Sound familiar?” the OPSEC manager asked. “Then you’ve witnessed (or perhaps participated in) a demonstration of poor OPSEC. … Have you ever stopped to consider what your unclassified public discussions might be giving away? Take the scenario, for instance. This is a scene that is played out monthly in the Fort Meade area.” The article went on to list the pieces of information that an adversary, who could have been listening in from a nearby table, would have learned.
OPSEC turned out to be a recurring theme for SIDtoday — OPSEC training is, after all, mandatory for all NSA personnel. A January 2004 article, written by the author of the April 2004 piece, listed some tips to help personnel to apply OPSEC to their day-to-day activities: Identify your critical information, analyze the threat, identify vulnerabilities, assess risk, and apply countermeasures.
NSA employees aren’t the only ones trained to practice good OPSEC. A March 2005 article reported that the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba practiced OPSEC successfully. President Bush considered Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a “threat to democracy in the region and a threat to U.S. interests in particular.” But “from a SIGINT perspective, Venezuela poses a particularly difficult challenge. With Castro as his mentor, Chavez has learned the importance of communications security and has made sure that his subordinates understand this as well.”
Law & Order & the NSA
Various 2004 SIDtoday articles highlight the NSA’s behind-the-scenes work on behalf of federal law enforcement.
One detailed a two-week training course on “intelligence reporting” given by NSA staff to FBI officers working on terrorism cases. The course, which had a component dubbed “SIGINT Reporting 101,” aimed to provide “insight into the complexity and difficulty of our business” and to dispel “Hollywood myths about the NSA.”
Another SIDtoday article showed how the U.S. Coast Guard was able to interdict a boat carrying 3.2 metric tons of cocaine thanks to the NSA’s monitoring of VHF radio signals, which carried voice communications of narcotraffickers. An official Coast Guard history of the incident elides the NSA’s role. The same SIDtoday article also disclosed that the Colombian air force carried out a strike against a suspected trafficker aircraft after a tip-off from the NSA.
NSA vs. FARC
Colombian guerrillas holding American hostages evaded massive NSA surveillance, according to a February 2004 SIDtoday article.
One year, after three American contractors, who had been on a surveillance mission for the U.S. military, were captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist guerilla group, the U.S. “has not been able to determine with high confidence the exact location and status of the hostages,” wrote an NSA account manager for the military’s Southern Command. This despite “hundreds” of U.S. government personnel having worked to gain their release.
U.S. efforts were stymied when FARC’s leadership ordered that personnel cease mentioning hostage operations directly in their communications; the best the NSA could achieve at the time of the SIDtoday article was to monitor calls between two radio operators, “Paula and Adriana,” who in turn were connected to the FARC leaders “we strongly suspect are linked to the hostages.”
The author of the SIDtoday article added that the agency continued to try and get a fix on the location of the hostages. Yet their captors eluded the Americans for another four years.
The three Americans were freed by Colombian commandos in July 2008.
A March 2004 SIDtoday article noted a success against FARC, bragging that the arrest of FARC financial leader Anayibe Rojas Valderrama, known as “Sonya,” and a number of her associates a month earlier “resulted from years of monitoring. … Accurate geolocational data as to where she was and when, allowed a vetted Colombian team to capture them by surprise and without any loss of life.” Valderrama was extradited to the United States where she was tried and convicted on drug trafficking charges in 2007.
Internal NSA Criticism of Political Groups and the News Media
A national intelligence officer gave a top-secret “issue seminar” to NSA staff on the question of “where political action fades into terrorism,” according to a seminar announcement published in June 2004. The announcement suggested that the line between “legitimate political activity” and “activity that is the precursor to, or supportive of, terrorism” is fuzzy. The course used the Vienna-based organization Anti-Imperialist Camp as a case study, describing it as “ostensibly a political organization” but noting that “its many ties to terrorist organizations — and its attempts to collaborate with Muslim extremists — raise questions about where political action fades into terrorism.”
No further details were given to substantiate the alleged ties; the group’s website remains online. A spokesperson for the group, Wilhelm Langthaler, told The Intercept that the group was targeted for such accusations for political reasons, including its opposition to the war in Iraq and “our public support for the resistance against occupation which we have compared with the antifascist resistance against German occupation.”
Another seminar announcement said the news media helped stymie U.S. intelligence collection. “A day hasn’t gone by that our adversaries haven’t picked up a newspaper or gone on the Internet to learn something new about how the US intelligence gathering system operates and what its capabilities or limitations are,” the course overview explained.
“And in response, a day hasn’t gone by that our adversaries haven’t modified their operations and activities to avoid being detected and collected against by the US intelligence gathering system.”
NSA’s Role in the Failed Iran Hostage Rescue Attempt
In an anecdote about signals intelligence during the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission, a SIGINT staffer recalled the night of April 24 of that year, when he was told he was monitoring the ongoing “Operation Ricebowl.” In a May 2004 SIDtoday article, the staffer wrote: “We knew the parameters of the Iranian Air Defense system because it was U.S. equipment and installed by U.S. contractors while the Shah of Iran was still in power.
We knew exactly where the gaps in coverage were and we exploited it during the rescue attempt.” The author went on to describe his shock the next morning when he saw on TV news at home that the mission had ended with a disastrous helicopter crash.
Top photo: American soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry run through a smoke screen as they try to avoid sniper fire during an offensive operation on Aug. 16, 2004, in Najaf, Iraq.
The swastika (Zawba3a, tornedo) is a Syrian symbol going back 4,500 years ago
Posted on: December 20, 2016
Swastika (Zawba3a) is a Syrian symbol going back 4,500 years ago
. ««رسالة من أرض الرافدين »»
وصلت لأحد رفقائنا ” في كادر الأكاديمية ” على بريده الخاص رسالة فيها الكثير من التساؤلات و الأستفسارات التي تهم أبناء أ…متنا في معرفة الكثير من النقاط المبهمة و الحقائق المصيرية الوجودية ، الكثير من هذه الأستفسارات بنقاطها المتفرعة معتم عليها و نتيجة هذا التعتيم واضح لأنه أوصل أمتنا لما حالها اليوم من دمار و خراب و ضياع و تفتيت و تشتت ، نتمنى من حضراتكم التمعن بها جيدا لأنها نابعة من ضمير انسان صادق يريد الوصول إلى الحقيقة لمعرفة مالذي جلب على أمتنا هذا الويل !! . نحن بدورنا سنجيب على كل هذه الأستفهامات و بالدليل العلمي القاطع الذي لا يبقي مجال للشك فيصبح اليقين هو السيد و يدخل كل منازل الامة كما أشعة الشمس عند الشروق لتزيل العتمة و تضيئ حياتنا . و هذه هي الرسالة
تحية طيبة للسيد ………. أتمنى لك دوام الموفقية والنجاح . خطر ببالي وقد جذبني قبل كل شيء الحُلم الكبير المُمثّل بخارطة الهلال الخصيب “العراق والشام (سوريا الكبرى)”، خطر ببالي أن أسألك عن فحوى وفكرة ما تنشره . عن الرموز المكوّن منها العلم ذي النجمة الرباعية ” الزوبعة ” ، عن الأسود والأحمر، عن.. عن.. وعن العراق. وهذا ما أقصده بشدة . انا من العراق وعربي الهوى والهوية وولدت وأنتمي حيث قوعدت ودُوّنت لغتنا السامية. لذا أسأل عن زوايا ومفاصل هذا الحلم . ما دخله بالعراق ؟ هل لعروبة ما ؟ هل لجذورٍ أعمق؟ آشور أو السوريان أم غيره ؟ سأتابع وأحاول أن أطلع على كل ما في الرابط والروابط الأخرى المتصلة به مع أني أود أن ترشدني لمنابع أكثر تفصيلا وأقرب لمتبني هذا المشروع . لأني مطّلع على حضارات ما بين النهرين القديمة . أخي ……. الكل يعرف أن تفتيت و الفصل العراق و الشام هو إفراغ لهذي الأمة من عناصر قوتها ، هل سنقع ضحايا الدين والمذهبية و … الخ ، في الهلال الخصيب المناذرة والغساسنة أو العراق والشام هما حضارة العرب !! ، الحقيقة موجوده لكنها في أعماقنا بمجرد أن نعي هل سنلتفت إليها !! ، العراق والشام “سوريا الكبرى” لا قيمة لهما منفصلان و سنكون ضعفاء هذا ما أدركه جنبا مع الترك والفرس . هل سوريا = سوريان الشعوب التي سكنت المنطقة وإليهم ترجع اللغة العربية في مراحل تطورها !! لم تكن سوريا من أموريون “بابليون” وآشوريون وفينيقيون ، الهلال الخصيب إذن أم سوريا . نحن كنا!! هل لنا أن نكون أيضا اليوم ؟؟؟ . أخيرا أقول لك ما قاله الجواهري ” من الأرض التي ائتلفت والشام ألفا فلا ملّا ولا افترقا ، مَن قال أن ليس من معنىً للفظتها بلا دمشق وبغداد فقد فسقا .
تحياتي ومحبتي لك عزيزي . سامر – العراق – متخصص بالتراث.
الغالي سامرابن أمتي أشكرك جزيل الشكر لثقتك ، جزيل الشكر لبصيرتك ، لمشاعرك و الشكر كل الشكر صديقي لشجاعتك في طرح الأسئلة لأنها أسئله محورية و الجواب عنها يغير الكثير من المفاهيم التي تعلمناها و يزيل الألتباس الذي تم زرعه في عقول أبناءها خلال قرون كاملة و ليس عقود ، لذلك صديقي سامر سندخل في العمق لكل طرح من هذه النقاط لجعلها محور ننطلق منه الى محاور أخرى . سنقدم بعض النقاط عن أخرى كي نجعل الموضوع سلس تتابعي متكامل، لا لبس فيه لأن الأنطلاق يكون دائما من القاعدة صعودا الى الأعلى للوصول إلى رأس الهرم و هو المعرفة و الحقيقة . ننطلق من العقيدة السورية القومية الأجتماعية التي أسسها أنطون سعادة و ماهيتها و غايتها و نربطها بشعارها أي الزوبعة لأن البعض سامر يعتقد أن هذه العقيدة هي حزب سياسي و هنا تكمن الخطيئة الكبرى أي بما معناه افراغ المحتوى الحقيقي لهذه العقيدة النهضوية لأنها قبل أن تكون حزب هي فكر و هذا الفكر هو علم قائم بحد ذاته قادر على تغير مجرى تاريخ هذه الأمة و التاريخ الأنساني للبشرية جمعاء فالحزب الذي لا يملك فكر و مفكرين ليس إلا إناء فارغ و الأناء صديقي الغالي سامر ينضح بما فيه دائما و أبدا ، لهذا كانت فكرة الأحزاب السياسية التي تضع لك أهداف و تقنعك أنها تريد الوصول اليها لكن كيف يمكن أن تصل ان لم تكن تملك مفكريين حقيقيين قادرين على صناعة الطرق و تعبيدها و رصفها للوصول الى هذه الأهداف ، من هو الحزب الذي يمتلك مفكرين قادرين على ابداع نهج علمي جديد يبنى عليه !!
، ما نريد أن نقوله ليس كل ما يلمع ذهبا و ليس كل مكان تتجمع فيه المياه يكون صالح للشرب حتى لو كان طعمه و مظهره جيد ، الاحزب السياسية التي تنتشر في العالم و في أمتنا لها مشاريع من نقاط محدد سلفا و تريد أن تصل الى غاية و لكن هذه الأحزاب هل تملك الفكر القادر على الأنتاج و الأبداع أي بما معناه هل هي من تصنع الفكر أم تستورد الأفكار استيراد كما هو حاصل اليوم فالبعض يتكلم بالأشتراكية و الأخر بالرأسمالية و أخر باليبرالية و الدينية و الطائفية و الغلوبال ” العولمة ” و الشيوعية و …….. الخ ، كل هؤلاء و بلا استثناء يقومون في الأساس بعملية استيراد محضة للأفكار ، أي يريدون وضع هندام مستورد على جسد الأمة و أبناءها و هذا الهندام ليس منها و لا يتلائم لا مع روحها و لا نفسيتها و لا خصوصيتها في حين ان العقيدة السورية القومية الأجتماعية هي فكر ولد من رحم هذه الأرض من أجلها و اليها ، هذا الفكر يشمل كافة نواحي الحياة من طفلها وصولا إلى رأس هرمها و من ذرة التراب على أرضها وصولا إلى وحدتها ترابها التامة ،
مجتمع و أرض و دولة و نهج من الفن الى العلم من الأنسان الى المجتمع من العامل و الفلاح و الرأسمال الوطني وصولا الى الأنتاج ، قوانين دستور شكل دولة وزارات رعاية تنمية ماضي مستقبل سيادة حرية ضوابط أطر نظرة ……. الخ ، و كل ذلك نابع من روح هذه الأرض و حقيقتها و نفسيتها و ليس مستورد لأن أمة صنعت الحضارة و التاريخ ليست أمة غبية و غير قادرة على انتاج فكر و نهضة و لهذا كان الفكر السوري القومي الأجتماعي و عقيدته و حزبه من المحرمات و يعتبر خط أحمر لأن المنظومة الدولية الحاكمة تريد منا أن نكون أغبياء و نستورد ما يكتبه الأخرين لنا ، هكذا نصبح تابعين أو عملاء لهذه الأمة أو تلك أي بما معناه نصبح رجالات لتلك الأمم المتصارعة لكن هذا الصراع ليس على أرضهم و ترابهم لأنهم لا يريدون دمار و خراب أراضيهم و أهلهم، بل على أرضنا كي تدمر و تسحق و تذبح كما هو حالنا اليوم و سنغوص أيضا في ماذا يعني أن تكون مستورد فكر و لست صانعه ، لذلك و منذ نشأت السورية القومية الأجتماعية فكرا و عقيدة و حزب عملوا على استئصالها و اجتثاثها و اضطهادها بأبشع الوسائل التي يكمن تتخيلها و التي لا يمكن أيضا و هذا الأمر مستمر حتى يومنا هذا لكن تتغير الأساليب و الهدف واحد ، سأعطيك مثل بسيط حدث قبل بضعة أيام و منه تفهم كيف تخاف الأمم من هذه العقيدة ، وجدنا على احدى صفحات الفيس بوك التي تتغنى بالفكر السوري القومي الأجتماعي زورا و عمالة انهم يضعون لهذا البروفيل صورة لأحد دعاة الطوائف ذهبنا و تقصينا لنعرف من هو هذا الطائفي لأننا نحن لا نتغنى و لا نمجد الطوائف لأن في ذلك اساءه محضة لنا و يبعد بقية أبناء الأمة عن هذا الفكر و هذه العقيده، لأنه يظهرنا و كأننا فكر طائفي تابع ، ذهبنا و تقصينا عن هذا المعتوه من خلال رفقاءنا و تبين أنه ليس إلا صفحة خلبية، أنشأتها أحد الأذرع الأممية الطائفية ذاتها التي تخشى انتشار هذا الفكر لأن به تعود هذه الأمة إلى وحدتها و قوتها إلى مجدها و السلام الداخلي لدى أبناءها و من هنا ننطلق في ماهية الفكر و العقيدة و الحزب و لكل الأستفسارات و ننطلق من مفهوم الزوبعة و معناه .
«««يتبع»»»
1982: Hama massacre in photos?
Posted on: December 20, 2016
30 Years Later, Photos of Hama massacre Emerge From Killings In Syria
Why now? Why never shown before? Political alliances then? Where are the bodies in these pictures? The world was more prude? Facts were known? By whom?
In 1980, the Syrian Moslem Brotherhood launched a series of bloody attacks on Syrian army and police forces. Hafez Assad was in contact with Turkey and Egypt (hotbed of Moslem Brotherhood) in order to reach a negotiated settlement. At no avail. Hama was then surrounded and the insurrection put down. The Syrian Brotherhood was persecuted for decades after the insurrection and many fled to Turkey and the Gulf Emirates.
Currently, No Gulf States or Saudi Kingdom are willing to welcome Syrian refugees, although they were the ones who funded all these extremists factions and armed them with Western weapons
Wikileaks has recently divulged documents testifying that Turkey’s Erdogan is the power behind ISIS and supported its expansion in Iraq in order to control the Kurds there and to impress on Syria to include the Brotherhood in the government.
Syria’s President Hafez Assad brutally crushed an uprising in the central city of Hama in 1982. The event was remarkable not just for the scale of the violence, but also because virtually no photos were published.
As Syrians mark the 30th anniversary, some long-hidden photos are emerging on the Internet, but their origins are difficult, if not impossible, to trace.
In some instances, the photos are of well-known sites in Hama and former residents confirmed the locations. In other instances, there was virtually no information available.
A former Hama resident, Abu Aljude, provided some photos and directed NPR to others.
Syria’s protest generation is obsessed with images.
Thousands of videos have been posted on YouTube during the 10-month revolt against President Bashar Assad’s regime, even as regime snipers take deadly aim at the photographers.
The smugglers who carry critical medical supplies to underground clinics in protest cities also smuggle in cameras hidden in baseball caps and pocket pens. The obsession comes from the conviction that documenting the brutality will stop it — this time.
This is all part of the legacy of the Hama massacre of February 1982, the last time Syrians rose up against the rule of the Assad family.
The facts of that event are well-known, but the photographic evidence has been scant. Then, Syria’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood led an uprising centered in Hama, a central city of around 400,000.
In response, President Hafez Assad, the father of the current president, ordered 12,000 troops to besiege the city. That force was led by Hafez Assad’s brother Rifaat. He supervised the shelling that reduced parts of Hama to rubble. Those not killed in the tank and air assault were rounded up. Those not executed were jailed for years.
To this day, the death toll is in dispute and is at best an estimate.
Human rights groups, which were not present during the slaughter, have put the toll at around 10,000 dead or more. The Muslim Brotherhood claims 40,000 died in Hama, with 100,000 expelled and 15,000 who disappeared. The number of missing has never been acknowledged by the Syrian leadership. (Was it acknowledge by any international institution?)
Details Emerged Slowly
In the weeks and months that followed, news of the events in Hama dribbled out. But there were virtually no photos or any international reaction.
Yet Hama stands as a defining moment in the Middle East. It is regarded as perhaps the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East, a shadow that haunts the Assad regime to this day.
And now, three decades later, photos from Hama in 1982 are beginning to circulate on the Internet. One of the people compiling photos of Hama is Abu Aljude, who was a 16-year-old living in Hama at the time of the slaughter.
“It took three weeks. We stayed in school overnight because we couldn’t walk back home. We walked over dead bodies. There were bodies in the streets,” says Abu Aljude, now a medical technical expert living in California.
“I wonder if dying then is less painful than surviving it and living the memories,” he says. Abu Aljude still has relatives in Hama and fears they could face reprisals if his full name were revealed.
Many of the Hama survivors fled to the United Arab Emirates, including Firas Tayar.
“When the soldiers came, they took my father, then they came back to take my brother. They killed them,” says Tayar. “My mother cried and said, ‘Please leave me the rest of my children.’ ”
Tayar says the images of burning bodies in the streets are burned into his memory. “They hammered it, they ended it,” Tayar says of the regime’s scorched-earth policy that put down the rebellion.
While the Syrian army was still laying siege to Hama, Abu Aljude and other members of his family fled for Saudi Arabia. As he was preparing to go, a neighbor handed over snapshots of the savage destruction to Abu Aljude for safekeeping.
“I had pictures,” says Abu Aljude, “but I didn’t know what to do with them.”
Daily Videos Of Current Violence
These photos are part of the slim documentation of Hama. But these days, the yellowed pictures of Hama in 1982 are making it to the Internet, along with the current cellphone videos of the latest assaults by the security forces on Hama and other restive towns.
A new generation under siege has modern tools to document and distribute recordings of regime brutality, but increasingly wonders whether the images make any difference as the world looks on.
“Politically, it has affected the Assad regime. But does it bring in the cavalry? No,” says Andrew Tabler, a Syrian expert and author of a recent book, In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria.
(Note: The siege of Hama coincided with the pre-emptive invasion of Israel to Lebanon. Israel even entered the Capital Beirut and remained in south Lebanon till 2000)
He believes the thousands of videos have constrained the Assad regime to some degree.
When President Hafez Assad unleashed the air force on the Syrian population in 1982, he had no real worries about “outside interference.”
But with the Arab uprisings of the past year, it has been a very different story. When Arab autocrats have employed brutal tactics, these actions have immediately been turned into videos and photographs that have stirred up additional opposition, both domestically and abroad.
In Syria, more than 5,000 people have been killed since last spring, according to human rights groups and the Syrian opposition. The daily death toll has been at a level that has provoked considerable outrage inside the country and around the world. But so far, there’s been no direct intervention from a divided international community.
A widely circulated tweet from the current uprising, which refers to the restive city of Homs, makes the point: “Homs 2011 = Hama 1982, but slowly, slowly.”
In his book, Tabler writes that after the 1982 assault on Hama, “the regime also launched a sweeping campaign of arrests — not only of suspected Brotherhood members but virtually all regime opponents, including communists and Arab nationalists who hated the Brotherhood as much as the regime.”
Hama Crackdown A Warning To Others
The Hama revolt began as a sectarian challenge, with the Sunni Muslims of the Brotherhood against the minority Alawite sect that dominates the regime and the upper ranks of the military. After it was crushed, it then became a lesson to any challenger to Assad family rule.
The “Hama example” stood firm until the spring of 2011. A new generation, armed only with cameras in the early days of the revolution, gambled that images could help them succeed where the Hama uprising had failed.
“This is revolutionary karma. It’s payback,” says Tabler, who explains that this new generation has a direct link to the events in Hama years ago. (A direct link to Turkey’s Erdogan expansionist dreams into Syria and Iraq)
After the decisive crackdown back then, the Syrian economy plunged into a deep recession. A terrorized population dared no further unrest and did not speak about the events, even in whispers.
“Many Syrians were forced to stay home,” writes Tabler, “causing a decade-long increase in birthrates.” Every Arab country has a youth bulge, but the “Hama effect” put Syria in the top 20 fastest growing populations in the world, which created a population “time bomb.” The generation on the streets today, says Tabler, is a demographic wave, “the residue from that crackdown has come to haunt the country.”
After 10 months, grass-roots organizers of this uprising issued a joint statement ahead of the anniversary of the Hama massacre. For the first time in 30 years, “We hold a remembrance for this anniversary and the Hama victims inside Syria.”
The protests, scheduled for Friday around the country, are being called “Pardon, Hama … Forgive Us.” The aim is to show that a memory, even if long suppressed, is as powerful as a current image.
Adonis Diaries 