• Dramatic confrontation builds between EU and Hungary
• Report: Greece is nearing a deal with a 68% haircut for investors
• Turkey issues nationwide terrorist alert from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard
• Indonesia will use concrete balls to keep people of train roofs
• China and India set up a PR ‘working mechanism’ on border management

Dramatic confrontation builds between EU and Hungary

Thousands of citizens protested on January 2 against the ‘Viktator’ Orban, who was celebrating inside the Budapest Opera House

The European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, on Tuesday sent three “Letters of Formal Notice” to Hungary, thereby launching “infringement proceedings” against three laws that took effect on January 1 allegedly violating EU treaties. The three laws allegedly reduce the independence of Hungary’s central bank, discriminate against judges, and violate requirements to protect citizens’ personal information online. EU President José Manuel Barroso said: “Hungary, like all Member States, is obliged by the EU Treaties to guarantee the independence of its National Central Bank and its Data Protection Authority and the non discrimination of its judges. The Commission is determined to take any legal steps necessary to ensure that the compatibility with European Union legislation is maintained.” Europa

Two weeks ago, Hungary’s Premier Viktor Orbán appeared to be backing down in the face of warnings from the EU, including the EU’s refusal to discuss a bailout of Hungary unless the laws are rescinded. But now, Orbán has struck back by demanding to speak to the European Parliament on Wednesday presumably to refute the charges. The last time that Orbán spoke to the European Parliament was a year ago, over a new media law that allegedly limited political free speech. The visit provoked an extremely vitriolic debate, and Orbán was forced to back down. Associated Press and Financial Times (Access)

Report: Greece is nearing a deal with a 68% haircut for investors

Bruce Richards, CEO of Marathon Asset Management LP, a hedge fund firm heavily invested in Greece’s bonds, says that Greece is nearing a deal with private investors that calls for them to take 32 cents per euro, or a 68% haircut, near the low end of the 60-70% range that I reported yesterday. According to Richard, Greece won’t make its €14.5 billion bond repayment scheduled for March 20, but that won’t be necessary because of this deal. Does anyone want to set up a pool to pick the day when this new deal will fall apart? Bloomberg

Bruce Richards’ “leak” may have come about because of a perceived need to bolster market confidence in reaction to statement earlier in the day from Fitch Ratings Service that Greece is insolvent and probably won’t be able to honor its March 20 bond payment. According to Fitch, “The so-called private sector involvement, for us, would count as a default, it clearly is a default in our book. So it won’t be a surprise when the Greek default actually happens and we expect it one way or the other to be relatively soon.” Bloomberg

Turkey issues nationwide terrorist alert from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

Intelligence units in Turkey’s Security General Directorate (EGM) have warned police across the country to be prepared for a possible bomb attack on United States assets, such as the Embassy or the Consulate General, conducted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard or the Quds Force. Lebanon-based Hizbollah may also plan to participate. Iran is becoming increasingly angry at Turkey for three reasons:

• Turkey has agreed to host a Nato early-warning radar system, apparently as protection from Iran’s missiles;
• Turkey is supporting opposition leaders against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime, while Syria is a crucial ally to both Iran and Hizbollah.
• Turkey, a Sunni state, has been criticizing sectarian violence in Iraq by the Shia-led government, and has been accused of meddling in Iraq’s affairs.

Iran has interpreted Turkey’s role in the international community as a threat against its interests, and is convinced the US and Israel are its archenemies seeking to destroy Iran. Turkey is concerned that Iran is leading a new rise of the Shiite Crescent in the region, supporting Shia-backed political blocs in other countries, such as Syria, while creating chaos in those ruled by Sunni leaders, such as Bahrain. Concerns are being expressed on both sides that “the brotherhood of Iran and Turkey, which spans centuries, [may] fall apart.” Zaman (Istanbul)

Indonesia will use concrete balls to keep people of train roofs

Top: Commuters cover the roof and hang from doorways. Bottom: Authorities install concrete balls that will knock people off the roofs. (Daily Mail / AP)

After numerous failed attempts to persuade people to stop riding on the roofs of train cars, officials are hoping the threat of injury, or even death, will put a stop to the already dangerous practice. The railway announced on Wednesday that it planned to install hanging deterrents in the form of rows of concrete balls that will stop anything — living or dead — in its tracks. A railway spokesman said the concrete balls would be hung at rooftop height at several stations, and at train crossings. “With this method, we hope the passengers will no longer sit on the train roof, as it is dangerous,” said an official. Can you believe this? Jakarta Globe

China and India set up a PR ‘working mechanism’ on border management

Border disputes between China and India have been getting increasingly vitriolic in the last few years. India and China on Tuesday agreed to set up “a working mechanism on border management” to deal with important affairs related to maintaining peace and tranquility in the border areas. However, it appears to be nothing but a public relations stunt, since it will “undertake other tasks that are mutually agreed upon by the two sides, but will not discuss resolution of the Boundary Question or affect the Special Representatives Mechanism.” The Hindu

The alert goes out from a taxi driver or a street vendor, equipped with a high-end handheld radio and paid to work as a lookout known as a “halcon,” or hawk.

The radio signal travels deep into the arid countryside, hours by foot from the nearest road. There, the 8-foot-tall (2-meter-tall) dark-green branches of the rockrose bush conceal a radio tower painted to match. A cable buried in the dirt draws power from a solar panel. A signal-boosting repeater relays the message along a network of powerful antennas and other repeaters that stretch hundreds of miles (kilometers) across Mexico, a shadow communications system allowing the cartel to coordinate drug deliveries, kidnapping, extortion and other crimes with the immediacy and precision of a modern military or law-enforcement agency.

The Mexican army and marines have begun attacking the system, seizing hundreds of pieces of communications equipment in at least three operations since September that offer a firsthand look at a surprisingly far-ranging and sophisticated infrastructure.

Current and former U.S. law-enforcement officials say the equipment, ranging from professional-grade towers to handheld radios, was part of a single network that until recently extended from the U.S. border down eastern Mexico’s Gulf coast and into Guatemala.

The network allowed Zetas operatives to conduct encrypted conversations without depending on the official cellphone network, which is relatively easy for authorities to tap into, and in many cases does not reach deep into the Mexican countryside.

“They’re doing what any sensible military unit would do,” said Robert Killebrew, a retired U.S. Army colonel who has studied the Mexican drug cartels for the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. “They’re branching out into as many forms of communications as possible.”

The Mexican army said on Dec. 4 that it had seized a total of at least 167 antennas, 155 repeaters, 166 power sources, 71 pieces of computer equipment and 1,446 radios. The equipment has been taken down in several cities in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz and the northern states of Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, San Luis Potosi and Tamaulipas.

The network was built around 2006 by the Gulf cartel, a narcotics-trafficking gang that employed a group of enforcers known as the Zetas, who had defected from Mexican army special forces. The Zetas split from the Gulf cartel in 2010 and have since become one of the nation’s most dominant drug cartels, with profitable sidelines in kidnapping, extortion and human trafficking.

The network’s mastermind was Jose Luis Del Toro Estrada, a communications expert known as Tecnico who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine in federal court in Houston, Texas, two years ago.

Using millions of dollars worth of legally available equipment, Del Toro established the system in most of Mexico’s 31 states and parts of northern Guatemala under the orders of the top leaders in the Gulf cartel and the Zetas. The Gulf cartel boss in each drug-smuggling territory, or plaza, was responsible for buying towers and repeaters as well as equipping his underlings with radios, according to Del Toro’s plea agreement.

Del Toro employed communications specialists to maintain and run the system and research new technology, according to the agreement.

Mexican authorities, however, presented a different picture of the cartel radio infrastructure, saying it was less monolithic than the one described by U.S. authorities. A Mexican military official denied that the army and navy have been targeting one network that covered the entire Gulf coast. The operations had been focused on a series of smaller, local systems that were not connected to each other due to technical limitations, he said.

“It’s not a single network,” the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic. “They use it to act locally.”

In recent years, reporters traveling with the Mexican military have heard cartels using radio equipment to broadcast threats on soldiers’ frequencies. The military official told the AP that the signals are now encrypted, but cartels are still trying to break in.

At least until recently, the cartel’s system was controlled by computers that enabled complex control of the radio signals, allowing the cartel to direct its communications to specific radios while bypassing others, according to Grupo Savant, an intelligence and security consulting firm in Washington that has firsthand knowledge of Mexico’s cartel operations.

The radio system appears to be a “low-cost, highly extendable and maintainable network” that shows the Zetas’ sophistication, said Gordon Housworth, managing director of Intellectual Capital Group, LLC, a risk- and technology-consulting firm that has studied the structure and operations of Mexican cartels and criminal groups.

Other Mexican criminal organizations maintain similar radio networks, including the Sinaloa cartel, based in the Pacific coast state of the same name, and the Barrios Azteca street gang, which operates in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, a U.S. law-enforcement official said. The Zetas’ system is the largest, however, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

The Mexican raids are “a deliberate attempt to disrupt the business cycle of the cartels,” said one former law-enforcement official with direct knowledge of the network. “By going after command and communications you disrupt control.”

Law-enforcement officials and independent analysts described the operations against the Zetas’ communications system as significant short-term victories in the fight against the cartel.

“The seizures show that the organization is scrambling,” said Steven Dudley, co-director of InSight, a group that analyzes and investigates organized crime in Latin America.

The longer-term impact is unclear. The cartel has had little difficulty in replacing radio gear and other equipment seized in smaller operations in recent years. And contacts among the highest-ranking Zetas operatives tend to take place in highly encrypted communications over the Internet, according to Grupo Savant.

Certainly, cartel radio equipment is a near-ubiquitous presence for Mexicans living along the front lines of the drug war.

In the state of Tamaulipas, across the border from eastern Texas, many antennas are concealed in the foliage of the rockrose, an invasive shrub that has spread across much of the state’s open land.

Even from a few feet (meters) away it’s nearly impossible to see the towers or their power cables.

In Nuevo Laredo, the Zetas’ first stronghold, antennas sprout from rooftops and empty lots. One soldier told the AP that even when authorities took down an antenna there, it was swiftly replaced.

—

Associated Press writers E. Eduardo Castillo in Mexico City and Efrain Klerigan in Victoria, Tamaulipas, contributed to this report.

AQIM regularly funds its operations through criminal activity in Europe and the kidnapping of Western tourists and aid workers in north Africa, and it is now in possession of weapons galore from the fallen Gadhafi regime. It is also actively involved in courting north African immigrant communities in the west.

Though its list of targets originally included only the Algerian military and France, in recent years AQIM has expanded the list—to the government of Mauritania, for example. It has also taken to vocally supporting extremists in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Somalia, and has launched attacks against European, American and other Western targets across Africa. According to Abdelmalek Droukdal, AQIM’s founder and former leader, “Our goals are the same as al Qaeda the mother.”

European counterterrorism officials are reportedly increasingly worried about AQIM’s Europe-based cells, in particular in Spain and France. Spain is often mentioned in AQIM statements because of its “occupation of Ceuta and Melilla,” two small autonomous Spanish ex-clave cities on the north coast of Morocco. AQIM urges its followers to “take back Ceuta and Melilla by force, because they were taken by force.”

In the last few years, AQIM has increasingly targeted French interests. The group has made a financial windfall by kidnapping and later ransoming citizens of France and the EU. After five French nationals were kidnapped in Niger in 2010, Osama bin Laden declared in an audio message that the incident was in response to “France’s unjust treatment of Muslims,” and he linked the event to French military operations in Afghanistan.

Counterterrorism experts consider the group to be small—it numbers anywhere from 500-1,000 members—but they believe it has growing capabilities. Authorities have arrested militants with suspected ties to AQIM throughout Europe (including the U.K., Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands) and the United States. This, coupled with the organization’s own rhetoric, is perhaps an indication of its ever-increasing footprint and its attempt to broaden its ability to carry out attacks.

AQIM’s growing ties to other radical organizations in west and east Africa, along with its influence in the drug trade, should also be of major concern to European counterterrorism officials. The group has deepened its links with criminal organizations and militant groups involved in local conflicts in places such as northern Mali, between the Malian government and the Tuareg tribe, and in Niger, where a similar situation exists.

AQIM has increasingly expanded its capabilities beyond its traditional area of influence. The group has gone on the offensive by reaching out to Muslim communities in Europe and throughout Africa, and its influence among immigrant and second-generation Muslims in Western European cities is increasing. It is believed to be meddling in Nigeria’s Muslim-Christian conflict, and there is the potential for AQIM to collaborate with al-Shabab, the other major African al Qaeda affiliate that has wreaked havoc in Somalia.

There are several steps European officials could take to curb AQIM’s growth and highlight the issue internationally. Australia, Canada and the U.S. have blacklisted the group as a terrorist organization. By following their lead, the EU could demonstrate its understanding that AQIM is a terrorist outfit that threatens its own stability and that in north Africa.

European law-enforcement officials, at both the supranational and national levels, should increase cooperation with their north African counterparts in operations and intelligence sharing. Europol, whose mission is to assist member states “in their fight against serious international crime and terrorism,” has an important role to play.

Finally, AQIM is almost certainly using the formal and informal banking systems to move money, both within Africa and outside the continent. There are reports that it is using commodities and cash couriers to shift both value and actual funds into and out of Europe. As Europe develops a strategy to pursue AQIM, an attack on its financial networks and money-laundering capabilities will be key.

Keeping AQIM at bay and curbing its ability to operate must be part of Europe’s efforts to protect its nationals—both at home and abroad.

Avi Jorisch, a former U.S. Treasury Department official, is Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.

**Originally published in the Wall Street Journal (Europe) on 20 December 2011

Terrorists remain hard at work attempting to penetrate our borders, forging operational relationships with drug cartels for this purpose.  Authorities continue to uncover networks of underground tunnels at the U.S.-Mexico border, constructed with alarming sophistication, in some instances complete with railcar systems, electric lighting, and other advanced features.

Given the established record and ongoing efforts of terrorist organizations to cross into the United States through our borders, now hardly seems like a good time to substantially diminish our detection and apprehension capabilities in this area.  And yet, The Washington Times is reporting:

“Citing budget cuts, the Obama administration early next year will cut the number of National Guard troops patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border by at least half, according to a congressman who was briefed on the plan.

The National Guard said an announcement will be made by the White House ‘in the near future,’ but Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who has learned of the plans, said slashing the deployment in half is the minimum number, and he said it will mean reshuffling the remaining troops along the nearly 2,000-mile border.

In California, that will mean going from 264 guard troops down to just 14, he said.

Mr. Hunter said the pending cuts are another reason Congress and President Obama should revisit the automatic defense spending reductions that kicked in with the failure last month of the deficit supercommittee.

‘What’s apparent now is that a decision not to continue their deployment, even though it might be in the national interest to do so, would be based entirely on budget constraints on the Defense Department,’ Mr. Hunter said.”

With severe national security budget cuts lurking just around the corner, the National Guard drawdown at the border is an important reminder.  Continued cuts to the national security budget will affect our ability to project power and deter aggression not only in the Middle East or Asia, but also much, much closer to home.

You can hear the rest of Agent Scott’s interview here and at www.securefreedomradio.org

Listen here:

Lopez Obrador: I can fix things, really

His message is clear:  stop focusing on border and security issues and instead give us more aid so we can get our economy to grow.  ”It is more effective and humane to implement cooperation in order to reach development, rather than insisting on giving priority to police and military cooperation,  as we do now,”  he said.

“It is not with military assistance or intelligence work, helicopters or weapons shipments that we will remedy the insecurity and violence problem in our country,” he said during his speech in Washington (you can watch his speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center here).  Lopez Obrador wants the United States to return to the “good neighbor policy” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt which emphasized economic development.  That would be nice.  Of course, during FDR’s time illegal immigration was not an issue, and who had heard of drug cartels?  But those are just inconvenient details, right?

His solution, according to IPS, is “to incorporate young people back into Mexican society by giving them jobs and schools to continue their studies.”  Mexico has tried socialism for decades and it has failed miserably.

Lopez Obrador is not just an ex-politician or talking head.  In 2006 he represented the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution in the heated presidential election.  And this was not just a lecture tour.  As the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies points out, high on his agenda was trying to “reach Mexican immigrants or other potential electoral supporters” in the United States.  The former mayor was clearly looking to play politics with the Mexican community here in the hopes of having them influence elections in Mexico and the United States.

Mexico has Presidential elections coming up and Lopez Obrador may very well be a factor.  Things in Mexico are bad right now.  But they could get even worse if someone like Lopez Obrador comes to power.

Plans by the hacker collective Anonymous to expose collaborators withMexico’s bloody Zetas drug cartel – a project it dubbed “#OpCartel” – have fallen into disarray, with some retreating from the idea of confronting the killers while others say that the kidnap of an Anonymous hacker, the incident meant to have spawned the scheme, never happened.

The apparent climbdown by the group came as one security company, Stratfor, claimed that the cartel was hiring its own security experts to track the hackers down – which could have resulted in “abduction, injury and death” for anyone it traced.

You can find the full story here.

“You have made a great mistake by taking one of us,” the group said in a video.  ”Free him.”

Los Zetas: watch out for the hackers, hombre

And if the Zetas don’t?  Anonymous members are threatening to post photos of Zetas collaborators in the police and business community.   The biggest threat to these collaborators,  if they are exposed,  is not from the police but from rival drug cartels,  who will undoubtedly target them.

The Zetas are known for their brutality. But if they go to war with Anonymous,  I’m putting my money on the hacktivists.

The truth is, if we had chosen to understand the religion and the dedication of it’s adherents in a way that is consistent with how they have identified themselves -over and over again, COIN would never have been on the table in the first place. Instead; we chose to ignore the obvious in deference to our westernized vision of “harmony among all peoples” and this, to our detriment.

This is also an indictment of the very “nation building” nonsense that has plagued this country at least since the end of World War II. Here’s a little wisdom for the folks inside DC:

1. No nation on earth is responsible for the political vision of another people.
2. No nation is responsible to eradicate the evil that another people have brought upon themselves.
3. No nation is responsible to “convince” another society to “play nice with others” unless that society is jeopardizing that nation.

We did not have any responsibility to cause Afghanistan to “transform” itself into any vision or version of a “democratic” society and it is the height and breadth of ignorance to think we could overcome what is for far too many, the core religious belief that all men are not created equal but instead either compliant and brothers, or apostate and worthy of death.

Many of us have tried to convince Congress to review the selection of COIN in this theater of operations and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s willful ignorance of the historical and spiritual truths of Islam but largely, to no avail. The fruit of this systematic dereliction of the duty of the various offices of the Federal government to protect the populace of this country and it’s holdings with a clear understanding of this current enemy, ripens every day.

There is no more clear evidence of our failure to understand this enemy than in the most recent statement by Hamid Karzai this past weekend. From the story and Karzai’s own mouth:

“Against all the Pakistan establishment has done to Afghanistan, Afghanistan is still a brother,” he said. “Afghanistan will never forget, will never forget the welcome, the hospitality, the respect and the brotherhood shown by the Pakistan people to the Afghan people.”

His comments ignited a wave of angry calls to radio talk shows in Kabul on Sunday. Many Afghans, particularly in the north, consider Pakistan the source of much of its current troubles. One caller said, “When the president calls them brother and the nation calls them enemies, then there will be a conflict between the president and the nation.”

It is clear that many who live near the Pakistani border disagree with Karzai’s comments for practical reasons. However, the most substantive element of that comment is what needs to be understood; “Against all the Pakistan establishment has done to Afghanistan, Afghanistan is still a brother,” And that is what we have been trying to hammer home these last nearly three years.
While there is no doubt that there are Afghan’s who live a more secular life, the fact is the vast majority of Afghan’s, as all other Muslims, see the world through the prism of Islamic teachings and in the end, the brotherhood of Islam trumps fanciful and temporary arrangements with the Infidel community of the world.

Saying this is no different than saying all Christians see things through the prism of Biblical teachings. While it is true that many Christians do not live a life that is completely in lockstep with Biblical teachings, all Christians never-the-less, see the world as taught through Scripture. The difference is, there isn’t one single New Testament Scripture that commands, recommends, alludes to or tolerates the murder of another person – especially for non-compliance with Biblical teachings. There is also no teaching which abrogates earlier Biblical truths as there is in the Koran. If a “Christian” murders, he has done so without authority of Scripture and is in fact, in violation of it.

It is also unlikely that one “Christian” nation will project it’s military might in defense of another “Christian” nation based simply on religious compliance. Karzai’s “brother” comment, clearly says he sees things differently and in spite of all of the “help” we have given him in eradicating the “unwanted” Taliban and in spite of our unilateral restraint and associated increased cost in American lives, through COIN.

Karzai’s comments tell a story which exemplifies what is exactly the core of the argument against assuming a less robust role in a country of this type. Here; religion inevitably trumps all other alliances. Assuming you can exploit tribal differences indefinitely and in your favor, is to simply ignore historical and ideological proof to the contrary.

The whole point of this discussion has not been to simply cross swords over differing understandings of this religion but to remember that our “theories” about the religion hold dire ramifications for those ordered to perform under COIN and it’s damnable ROE. It is also to remind those who are making decisions about strategy and will not have to face the dangers of IED’s set by the local population or ignored by them, that someone will pay the ultimate price in this environment because of our less aggressive posture under COIN.

And in case the most salient point in this is missing on some; I will spell it out: This latest statement from Karzai, whether immature prattle or doctrinal exhortation, will surely make the environment in Afghanistan far more lethal for our Warriors. Let’s keep in mind that an ever growing percentage of our footprint there is now dedicated to training ANA and ANP and they, technically, answer to Kabul.

Whether the average Afghan soldier or policeman actually sees himself as a patriot or not isn’t going to be as great a factor as his shared distaste for the “pigs and swine” of the “Great Satan” he is forced to train with.

In a land where acts of treachery are commonplace and even seen as signs of reverence for your deity, this new exclamation of support for things “not American” is certainly going to make things even less stable than they have been for our Warriors.

If that is possible…

Semper Fidelis;

John Bernard