Showing posts with label MOSSAD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MOSSAD. Show all posts

Sunday, 15 May 2016

ISRAEL IS THE ORGAN HARVESTING AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING GLOBAL RINGLEADER, WITH COMPLICIT HELP FROM US AND TURKEY

The problem exists in Lebanon as well.  A young man Syrian refugee named Raïd, shown here, recently sold his kidney as part of a growing illegal organ trade in Lebanon.

ED Noor: Every major war in the last two decades from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya to Ukraine has been visited by bloodthirsty body snatching ghouls out to make a grotesque profit.  And, of course, top of the list, the Israeli holding cell for fresh parts, Palestine, although Haiti and anywhere else Israeli teams have landed to give "aid" have suffered according losses of both children and body parts.

Several years ago I did a series called “Beyond Disgust” in which I presented a great deal of evidence and information about the international organ dealing business.  Several wars later, the criminals have only become much more skilled, wealthy and untouchable, in their horrific business. There are about 30 sections to the series not all involved with this particular issue.  To learn more, I recommend you do a search for “Snippits and Snappits, Beyond Disgust” and just go from there. Two are listed below to get you started. 

These matters are, indeed, grisly beyond imagination but right up the Talmudic alley that believes in absolute ownership of the chattel.  Interestingly enough, regarding my own posts on organ trafficking, some still regularly receive requests for organ donations in the Comment section. I post them all. I will also add that many articles point ONLY to the "Islamic Savages" factors as leading in this sick trade but we know who is behind it all and has been from the beginning. 

The blackness of the Takfiri "soul" is as foul as that of the Talmudic, so it should be no surprise that these two seemingly opposing types embrace slavery in a similar fashion because they are, in reality, founded in the same deep black hole of negativity. 
 
I am also going to go out on a limb here and suggest that for many of the migrants who have fled their war-torn countries to make new lives elsewhere, perhaps like the young man shown above, a Syrian refugee in Lebanon, their immigration attempts legal or otherwise, were financed by organ sales from at least one desperate family member.

The Turkish surgeon on both his blog as well as meeting in person with a New York Times reporter in 2011 while sipping Turkish red wine even boasted that he's performed over 2,400 organ surgeries and been awarded a commendation letter he's framed from the Israeli Ministry of Health thanking him for his life-saving work.

Turkish doctors confirmed that out of the 62,000 wounded Syrian civilians and soldiers treated in Turkish hospitals, over 15,600 of them had internal organs removed and were returned dead on arrival to Syria for burial.
 
By Joachim Hagopian
Sott.net

A couple years ago I wrote an article on the growing global problem of human trafficking and the sex slavery trade. Another related ongoing shameful practice that's also increasing globally is the harvesting of human organs from war victims and selling them on the black market. This presentation will focus on this deplorable crime being committed regularly on each of the current warfronts and beyond, who the profiteering perpetrators are and the beneficiary nations where organs are trafficked.

With the war in Syria still raging in its fifth year, the Damascus university medical doctor heading the newly formed Medical Forensics department Dr. Hussein Nofal estimates that at least 18,000 Syrians have had organs removed during the war thus far. Since the outbreak of war in 2012, 6.5 million people have been displaced within Syria and another 4.8 million have become refugees forced to flee to neighboring countries like Turkey and Lebanon or 10% have migrated to Europe. With another 386,000 estimated dead, that's 11.7 million humans in Syria who have violently lost their lives or homes ~ stunningly over half the total prewar population of 22 million Syrians.

All this tragic human horror only occurs because of an overly aggressive, imperialistic US-Israeli foreign policy creating a path of chaos and destruction across the Middle East and North Africa secretly supporting Islamic terrorists to fight US-Israeli proxy wars to illegally overthrow sovereign national governments like Assad's. The ruling elite behind the Greater Israel Project deploys US Empire to manufacture unlawful wars and the subsequent largest migration crisis since WWII to willfully and methodically destabilize the world generating such dire human living conditions that expedite formation of a one world government.

The all too common human story is that thousands of Syrians unable to find work trapped in inhumane conditions at migrant refugee camps in adjacent countries have opted to desperately sell their organs in order to support their families. Parasitic criminal gangs and international cabal rings opportunistically set up thriving predatory operations exploiting the surplus of war refugees by organizing intricate organ trafficking networks throughout countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.
ED Noor: "The chairman of the Syrian doctor’s association reported last week that five members of his organization lost their licenses because it turned out they were engaging in such trade. A new method of selling children begins while they are still in utero. Pregnant Syrian women are transferred to Lebanon, where they are promised comfortable birthing conditions. Immediately after birth, the children are taken from them and sold to adoptive parents for thousands of dollars. In other instances, their organs are removed for transplanting. Sometimes these women get pregnant after being raped or engaging in prostitution, so selling their children is a convenient socioeconomic solution, which can also save them from a so-called honor killing." ~ Haaretz 

Ironically but also by criminal design, the two closest neighboring countries most powerful in the region that are most directly responsible for the Islamic terrorists and the MENA wars ~ Israel and Saudi Arabia ~ refuse to even take in a single refugee from the very same wars they both create and promote. Note that Israel, Saudi Arabia along with third wheel Turkey as part of the US Empire-led axis-of-evil, longtime regional ally and fellow NATO member Turkey received a $6.6 billion bribe from the bankrupted EU to "manage and control" the migration crisis, only to then turn around and unleash yet more waves of refugees pouring into Europe to this day. And it's Turkey and Israel that both also play the most prominent role in the soaring organ trafficking epidemic as well. But more on that later.

Similar to Syrians, Palestinians in Israel have also been known to donate kidneys and other organs to feed their impoverished children. See a pattern here? Create extreme economic hardship purposely engineered to manipulate desperate parents trying to provide for their families, endangering themselves to give up their own body parts for sorely needed survival money. According to Dr. Nofal, donors in Turkey can earn $10,000 for a kidney while in war torn Iraq the price may be as low as $1,000 whereas in Syria and Lebanon the going rate for selling a kidney is around $3,000.

More than a half dozen years ago the largest Swedish daily newspaper the Aftonbladet reported that Israel engaged in systematic harvesting of organs belonging to Palestinians being killed by the bloodthirsty apartheid government. After the usual anti-Semitic charges from Israel denying such accusations, the Swedish newspaper standing by its original story was then further corroborated by the release of an interview in 2000 with Israel's forensic institute Abu Kabir head Dr. Yehuda Hiss who stated that in the 1990's the institute harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from deceased Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as foreign workers and Palestinians without legal consent from their families. Finally the Israeli Defense Forces admitted the illegal practice but insisted that organ harvesting ceased in 1999 and that family permission is now legally secured prior to any harvested organs for transplants.

Meanwhile a number of Palestinian families have registered formal complaints over the years upon observing the returned bodies of their family members conspicuously missing body parts. A pro-Israeli magazine the Forward confirmed that Israel had been routinely stealing Palestinians' organs for Israeli citizens' spare parts. Finally even the pro-Israeli New York Times has called out the Tel Aviv regime for its "disproportionate role" in organ trafficking since 2000.

UC Berkeley professor, anthropologist, activist-author and head of the watchdog group Organ Watch Nancy Scheper-Hughes who released the 2000 Dr. Hiss interview implicated Israel's nefarious organ harvesting and trafficking program:

Israel is at the top. It has tentacles reaching out worldwide... [Israeli organ traffickers] had and still have a pyramid system at work that's awesome... they have brokers everywhere, bank accounts everywhere; they've got recruiters, they've got translators, they've got travel agents who set up the visas.

Hughes has bluntly described organ harvesting as "paying the poor and the hungry to slowly dismantle their bodies." A 2001 BBC report disclosed that Israel per capita stands as the world's largest recipient nation for organ transplants yet is the country with the fewest organ donors.

The problem is additionally compounded by the fact that the Tel Aviv government including the Minister of Defense has historically encouraged the practice, only making organ harvesting and trafficking illegal in 2008. For years the Israeli healthcare system subsidized transplant holidays up to $80,000 in reimbursement for organ recipients to travel abroad for transplants. Insurance carriers customarily paid the tab on all remaining costs.

ED Noor: ISIS was here. Although many doctors are working in the industry for profit, ISIS, on the other hand, simply threatens any doctors who refuse to obey them in the removal of organs from unwilling victims. I wonder how many of those organs end up in Israeli hospitals repairing injured ISIS fighters.
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Hughes has described Israel's leading role in the international crime syndicate that is "organized through a local business corporation in conjunction with a leading transplant surgeon, operating out of a major medical center not far from Tel Aviv." Additional connections include transplant surgeons in Turkey, Russia, Moldova, Estonia, Georgia, Romania, Brazil and New York City.

With Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman originating from the poorest nation in Europe Moldova, it's no accident as Scheper-Hughes says "hundreds of Israelis have created a production line that starts in the villages of Moldova, where men today are walking around with one kidney." Despite organ trafficking being a flagrant international violation of law, Israeli crime rings are still actively harvesting organs from the world's poorest countries.

It's a crime condoned in large part by wealthier nations like Israel and America where the affluent can afford to pay "extra costs" to get bumped up on multiple waiting lists for livers, kidneys and corneas. Wealthy nations predatorily feed off poor nations and corruption at the highest deep state levels ensure that the guilty parties are never brought to justice.

Frequently the criminal body snatchers end up not even paying poor donors the quoted price promised. It bears resemblance to poachers killing endangered species like African hippos and elephants for their ivory tusks or cutting off shark fins and then leaving the animals bleeding to death. To the traffickers, internal human organs are just another precious commodity worth far more than any donor's human life.

A 1984 law made human organ trafficking illegal in America. But the first case in the US occurred in July 2009 when an Israeli citizen living in New York who paid donors in Israel $10,000 was arrested trying to sell them for $120,000 each to three Americans in need of kidney transplants. After making millions trafficking in kidneys, he was not deported because his crime was not deemed "of moral turpitude" and after the organ peddler served a brief two and a half year prison sentence, he was released in December 2014. 


The convicted Israeli trafficker carried a gun on him and if he encountered misgivings by a potential donor, the kidney smuggler would allegedly point his finger at the donor's head simulating he was pulling the trigger. His illegal racket became the biggest corruption case in New Jersey state history as it uncovered a money laundering scheme into the millions. A former state assemblyman who was the current NJ Commissioner of Consumer Affairs resigned over his involvement and the supervising FBI agent concluded:
New Jersey's corruption problem is one of the worst, if not the worst, in the country. Corruption is a cancer that is destroying the core values of this state and this great nation.

Considering how widespread the Israeli crime syndicate rings are that continue harvesting and trafficking organs at will to this day, it appears the US judicial system's over-the-top leniency in this case amounts to complicit condoning of the international crime operation and undoubtedly is taken as a greenlight for business as usual by the crime cabal responsible for global harvesting and trafficking of both body parts as well as human slavery.

Corruption at the top of the international government crime cabal keeps this sordid criminal epidemic in operation and immune from any accountability, not unlike the obscene profiteering from illegal wars or the international drug trade enjoyed by the US government and the most powerful central banks laundering dirty fed drug money. These blatant high crimes are but symptomatic of a decaying, fast crumbling US-Western Empire nearing its final stages of collapse. 

ED Noor: Image of this arrest. It cannot be seen here but from dress and style, and body movements, it is obvious that this man, Jew Boris Walker, is the ultimate lowlife thug unlike Rosenbaum (referred to previously who was the quintessential "goodly godly" small "R" rabbi but who employed equally violent methods of extracting body parts from suddenly recalcitrant victims/donors. 

Last December another Israeli organ trafficker was arrested by Interpol police at the Istanbul airport. After forty days in Turkish custody, he was extradited back to Israel to face charges. The organ smuggler had made arrangements to tap the large destitute Syrian migrant population in Turkey to coordinate illegal organ surgeries with local doctors in small private hospitals. He already had charges against him for his illicit operations amongst impoverished organ donors in Kosovo, Azerbaijan and Sri Lanka from 2008-2014. He had also placed ads in Russian newspapers in search of potential donors. As is typical, no information or medical follow-up is ever given to donor victims who often suffer complications. For example one boy in Kosovo was paralyzed after his kidney removal.

Consistent with the evil crime cabal forces that operate in coordinated unison, the US-NATO-EU-Israel-Turkey-Saudi-Gulf State axis-of-evil that is overwhelmingly guilty of not-so-covertly financing, training, supplying and supporting global terrorism in the form of the Takfiri Wahhabis' Islamic State terrorists (IS/ISIL/ISIS/Daesh/al Nusrah/al Qaeda). And since Russia in support of the Syrian Army have literally blown up the IS terrorists main source of revenue funding ~ stolen oil from Iraq and Syria on its way to Turkey and Israel, the business of organ harvesting and trafficking on that same black market is now becoming big business.

Several weeks ago the Spanish daily El Mondo claimed that the Islamic State terrorists are cutting out bodily organs of captured Syrian and Iraqi soldiers as well as civilians and refugees while still alive for transplants for either their own wounded jihadists or selling them as a needed source of revenue. ISIS is also reported to be killing even its own seriously injured militants for organ harvesting and trafficking.

Additionally the terrorists are extracting large volumes of blood from Mosul prisoners. Personnel at one Mosul hospital claimed that they have witnessed at least 183 corpses with missing body parts. ISIS has set up a medical team with a German doctor said to be in charge that transports fresh organs to the Syrian and Iraq Kurdistan fronts for transplants into wounded terrorists or sold on the black market. The UN Iraqi ambassador last year made these same accusations, reporting that the terrorists have executed a dozen doctors for refusing to harvest organs. It was confirmed when shallow mass graves of mutilated bodies missing kidneys were discovered outside Mosul.

As recent as last November the Palestinian ambassador to the UN once again accused the Israeli regime with harvesting Palestinians' organs killed in clashes with occupying forces. Then as far back as October 2012 reports that the US backed Free Syrian Army had been engaging in this same heinous practice of kidnapping-murder of Syrian civilians for organ harvesting.

And then it was confirmed by a January 2011 Council of Europe report that once again another US-NATO backed ally the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) led by current president of Kosovo ran a "mafia-like" operation smuggling guns, drugs and Serbian body parts into Europe for profit from the 1990's through the first decade of this century. Recall that the US and CIA financed and deployed al Qaeda terrorists as KLA partners-in-crime during those same 1990's balkanizing Yugoslavia into a half dozen fragmented US puppet states. Instead of being tried and convicted of war crimes, two months ago the Kosovo parliament rewarded Hashim Thaci by electing him as the current Kosovo Republic president with his claims he has "nothing to hide" from the new crimes court in Hague.

Returning to the Turkish-Israeli connection in organ harvesting and trafficking, probably the two most notorious gangsters involved in this despicable crime is a highly skilled Turkish surgeon named Ysef Somnez and the Israeli middleman "fixer" Moshe Harel with ethnic Turkish ties responsible for matching donor organs with recipients and the electronic transfers of millions upon millions of dollars. Both of these criminals were actively involved in the extensive Kosovo smuggling operations with the Turkish doctor performing thousands of surgeries on both money-starved donors from Moldova, Turkey, Kosovo and Russia and wealthy recipients from Israel, the US, Canada and Germany. They also have been indicted in Kosovo, Israel, Turkey as well as by Interpol and despite being international fugitives on the run for nearly a decade with both having repeatedly been arrested and then released in Israel and Istanbul, both managed to elude prosecution to remain at large.

Both Erdogan's Turkish government and Netanyahu's Israeli government are known to be extremely lax towards enforcing organ harvesting and trafficking laws and it's believed that both nations with US Empire blessings have sheltered and allowed the crime duo to remain free. The Turkish surgeon on both his blog as well as meeting in person with a New York Times reporter in 2011 while sipping Turkish red wine even boasted that he's performed over 2,400 organ surgeries and been awarded a commendation letter he's framed from the Israeli Ministry of Health thanking him for his life-saving work. Again, instead of being behind bars where they belong, this crime pair are super-wealthy jetsetters flying around the world living large as psychopathic criminals with powerful friends allowing them to literally get away with murder.

Both Somnez and Harel have cashed in on the Syrian refugee bonanza cutting out Syrian kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs and corneas to make their mass killing in Turkey. Just as Turkey and Israel have bought up the bulk of stolen black market oil from the terrorists they love, so do they profit from stealing human organs from hospitalized Syrian civilians brought to Turkey for treatment. After the surgery, young Syrian victims minus their vital organs are cruelly left bleeding to death. Turkish doctors confirmed that out of the 62,000 wounded Syrian civilians and soldiers treated in Turkish hospitals, over 15,600 of them had internal organs removed and were returned dead on arrival to Syria for burial. The mass murderers Somnez and Harel left their infamous mark in the multibillion dollar organ trafficking industry in Kosovo, Turkey and Tel Aviv.

Every major war in the last two decades from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya to Ukraine has been visited by bloodthirsty body snatching ghouls out to make a grotesque profit. Tony Cartalucci writing for New Eastern Outlook drives home the hypocrisy that the US-led axis-of-evil screams foul play with "human rights abuses" whenever any force (like Russia) attempts to stop the menacing Western sponsored terrorists yet when the Nazis of Kiev are literally ripping the hearts, lungs and kidneys out of residents in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, not a peep is heard from that axis-of-evil.

Firsthand accounts from eyewitnesses reporting the rampant killing of civilians in the breakaway provinces by organ snatching mass murderers are totally blacked out or quickly dismissed by Western mainstream media. The international airport personnel in Boryspil observed many small aircraft chartered with refrigerators for organ transplant storage. A kidney bought for ten grand quickly gets turned over for 150 grand. The overlapping crime ring fingerprints of the same greedy body snatchers from Israel, Turkey and Kosovo keep surfacing whenever and wherever investigators begin poking around on every war-front.

The barbaric crimes of a multi-billion dollar gangster business sanctioned and protected by the likes of Israel, Turkey and the United States is yet one more crime against humanity committed daily by the mass murdering cabal. Rather than accept the evils of global slavery and organ trafficking perpetrated by power and profit driven psychopaths with total impunity, the corrupt, criminal victimization of preying on and murdering poor humans to keep a few rich humans alive is morally reprehensible. The perps need to be held accountable while their victims need justice.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled "Don't Let The Bastards Getcha Down." It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master's degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/

ADDED READING:

BEYOND DISGUST #17 ~ ORGAN TRAFFICKING ~ 10 FACTS FEW BELIEVE ARE TRUE

BEYOND DISGUST ~ BUTCHERS ~ THE HIDDEN TRUTH OF ISRAEL'S KIDNEY THEFT RING

Report: ISIL Kills Its Wounded Militants to Sell Body Organs

Wednesday, 7 September 2011

CIA AND MOSSAD HIT INDIA?


"Somehow they have succeeded in destabilizing Pakistan and now want to create instability in India also..."

They are at it again in India, working hard to raise the barrier of hatred between India and Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, Hindu versus Muslim, even higher. The numbers of the victims varies because the injuries were so severe that many of the wounded are just not surviving.
 
A high intensity briefcase bomb rocked the crowded reception area in the Delhi High Court killing 11 people and injuring 76 today in a major terror attack that struck the Capital after a gap of three years.

The blast occurred at 10.14 AM when around 200 visitors, mostly litigants, were waiting in queue to get passes to enter the premises. Several lawyers were also present at that time.

Severed limbs and pieces of flesh lay strewn on the ground where there were pools of blood after the deafening explosion that dug a small crater outside the reception area. CCTVs to monitor visitors were not reportedly installed.

Media houses received a mail purportedly written by Bangladesh-based terror outfit Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islami(HuJI) claiming responsibility. The mail claimed the blast was carried out to demand repeal of death sentence of Afzal Guru, a condemned prisoner in Parliament attack.


CIA AND MOSSAD HIT INDIA?

Aangirfan

September 07, 2011


On 7 September 2011, at least 9 people were killed and 45 injured in a blast outside the High Court in Delhi, in India.  (ED: This number keeps rising)
In May 2011, there was a blast outside the same courthouse.


In July 2011, a series of bombs ripped through crowded shopping areas in Mumbai, killing 20 people.


In 2008, bombs in shopping centers and a flower market in Delhi killed 22 people.


Responsibility for the shopping centre blasts was claimed by the Indian Mujahideen, a group linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba.


Both these groups are reported to be run by the CIA.

HUJI CLAIMS RESPONSIBILITY FOR DELHI HC BLAST

 
 Asif Mohammad Khan
*
Indian politician Asif Mohammad Khan said of the July 2011 Mumbai attacks: "Israeli and American intelligence agencies connections can't be ruled out."
Khan said that Mossad and the CIA wanted to derail the on-going dialogue between India and Pakistan, which was stalled after 2008 Mumbai attack in which 166 people were killed.

(The 2008 Mumbai attack was planned by American agent David Headley)

According to Khan: 
"They (the Mossad-CIA) want to destabilize the region by driving India and Pakistan to war with each other.

"Somehow they have succeeded in destabilizing Pakistan and now wanted to create instability in India also...

"They... want to drag India further into the deadly embrace of their imperialism".

Bush with 'David Headley's half-brother', Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani.

Reportedly, David Headley is the half-brother of Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani. (Kiss and Tell: Intimacies with David Headley`s Ex-Wife, Faiza Outalha)


On 10 December 2009, Indian Express (Hotel owner blames cops for Headley's missing form) reported that two ISRAELIS, along with David Headley, visited the Oasis Hotel in Pushkar in India in March 2009.
Kailash Parashar, the owner of Oasis Hotel, said, “I clearly remember Headley’s visit here on March 11 because it was Holi on that day and I was in charge of the reception.
"Headley and two Israeli tourists checked in on that day”.
He added that he collected the three C-Forms and delivered them to the CID office in Pushkar.

“The CID has the C-Forms of the other two that day, how come only Headley’s is missing?”
 
 David Headley, American mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
 
On 18 October 2010, at Countercurrents.org, Feroze Mithiborwala explains that David Colemann Headley is a CIA-FBI agent

According to this Countercurrents article:
1. The CIA-FBI has infiltrated sections of the Indian political leadership and security services, and sections of the Pakistan establishment.
2. The US occupation of the South Asian region is deepening by the day.

3. The US keeps on increasing the tensions between India and Pakistan, and India and China.
It is an old imperial ploy of divide and rule along religious and sectarian lines.
4. In the news report that appeared in the Indian Express (10/12/09), the hotel owner is openly blaming the police for having 'misplaced' Headley's 'C-form'.

5. Indian Intel was hard on the heels of Headley and were about to arrest him.
It was then that the FBI whisked away Headley to protect him.

6. It is in the strategic interests of the US and Israel to create a warlike situation across South Asia. The USA wants India to be opposed to Pakistan and Iran.

7. Headley's repeated entries into India were managed with the connivance of the authorities at the highest levels.

 

DELHI BLAST A TERROR ATTACK; 11 KILLED, 85 INJURED



New Delhi

A powerful bomb went off outside the Delhi High Court at 10.17 am on Wednesday. At least 11 persons are confirmed dead, while more than 85 others are injured.

The National Investigating Agency (NIA) has confirmed that the blast was a terror attack and has taken over the probe.

Union Home Secretary RK Singh said the blast was of “medium to high intensity” and created a “deep crater” at the site.
Asked whether the blast was a terror strike, Singh said, 
“It had all the makings of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) set up by a terror group.”

As per eyewitnesses, the blast was very loud and powerful. The bomb is believed to have been placed in a briefcase and left near gate number five of the court.

Amid pandemonium, the injured were rushed to nearby hospitals like Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, Safdarjung Hospital and Lady Hardinge Medical College and Hospital. The death toll may increase further as many of the injured are in a serious condition.

Gate number five of the High Court is near the reception and is very crowded in the mornings as people queue up to gain entry into the court. Around 200 people are said to have been at the spot at the time of the blast.
Delhi Police Commissioner BK Gupta is at the spot. The entire area has been cordoned off by the Indian Army; forensic teams, including from the NSG, are already at work to collect evidence, while NSG commandos are on standby.

NIA sleuths are also at the spot. Investigators are suspecting the use of potassium nitrate, unconfirmed reports claimed.

An emergency was convened by Union Home Secretary RK Singh at the Home Ministry to take stock of the situation.

Speaking to Zee News, UK Bansal, Secretary (Internal Security) in the Ministry of Home Affairs, said,
“As of now, no details about the nature of the blast have emerged. The investigating agencies are probing every aspect of the blast.”
When quizzed by reporters whether it was an intelligence failure, Bansal said, 
“There was no specific intelligence input regarding today’s blast but this aspect will certainly be probed by investigating agencies.”
“It would be too early to say anything as to who is behind the blast as all important cites are generally on terror hit list,” Bansal said, adding, “An alert has been sounded in the entire city.”
On May 25, a blast had ripped through the parking lot of the High Court, but the police are yet to crack the case.

As per the people who were present in the court that day as well, today’s blast is more powerful than the last one.

News Gathered by India News

Saturday, 13 August 2011

MOSSAD’S MIRACLE WEAPON–STUXNET VIRUS OPENS NEW ERA OF CYBER WAR


August 10, 2011
By Holger Stark

The Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, attacked the Iranian nuclear program with a highly sophisticated computer virus called Stuxnet. The first digital weapon of geopolitical importance, it could change the way wars are fought ~ and it will not be the last attack of its kind.

The complex on a hill near an interchange on the highway from Tel Aviv to Haifa is known in Israel simply as “The Hill.” The site, as big as several soccer fields, is sealed off from the outside world with high walls and barbed wire ~ a modern fortress that symbolizes Israel’s fight for survival in the Middle East. As the headquarters of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, this fortress is strictly off-limits to politicians and journalists alike. Ordinarily, it is the Mossad that makes house calls, and not the other way around.

The agency’s strict no-visitors policy was temporarily relaxed on a Thursday in early January, when a minibus with darkened windows pulled into a parking lot in front of a nearby movie theater. The journalists inside were asked to hand over their mobile phones and audio recorders. Meïr Dagan, the powerful head of the Mossad, had invited them to the facility. It was his last day in a position he had held for seven years. On that January day, the journalists were there to document his legacy: the Mossad’s fight against the Iranian nuclear program.

He spoke passionately about the risks of a possible military strike against Iran, saying that he believed that such an attack would lead to a conflagration in the region that would include a war with Hezbollah and Hamas, and possibly with Syria. And anyone who believed that a military strike could stop Tehran’s nuclear program was wrong, said Dagan. It could slow down the program, he added, but only temporarily. For this reason, the outgoing Mossad chief was against bombs ~ but in favor of anything that could set back the Iranian nuclear program without starting a conventional war.

Delay was the new magic word. And to that end, the Mossad head had created a miracle weapon that everyone in the room on that January day knew about, but which Dagan did not mention by name: Stuxnet.

Stuxnet, a computer virus that can infiltrate highly secure computers not connected to the Internet, a feat previously believed to be virtually impossible, entered the global political arena more than a year ago, in June 2010. The virus had attacked computers at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, where scientists are enriching uranium, and manipulated the centrifuges to make them self-destruct. The attack penetrated into the heart of the Iranian nuclear program.

Stuxnet is the world’s first cyber-weapon of geopolitical significance. Frank Rieger of the legendary German hacker organization Chaos Computer Club calls it “a digital bunker buster.”
The virus represents a fundamentally new addition to the arsenal of modern warfare. It enables a military attack using a computer program tailored to a specific target.
One year later, there is not an Internet security firm or government of a major country that is not addressing Stuxnet and its consequences, as well as taking action as a result. To learn more about Stuxnet and understand what is behind the virus, SPIEGEL traveled to Israel ~ the country where the cyber-weapon was invented.

FOLLOWING THE TRAIL

The Israeli branch of the US computer security firm Symantec is housed in a nondescript modern complex in Tel Aviv, a 15-minute drive from Ben Gurion International Airport. Sam Angel, the head of Symantec Israel, meets visitors in the underground garage and takes them to the conference room on the fourth floor.

At the beginning of his PowerPoint presentation, Angel says: “Stuxnet is the most sophisticated attack we have ever seen. This sort of an attack, on a mature, isolated industrial system is completely unusual.” He projects a map onto the wall, showing the countries where such an attack has taken place: Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Belarus, where a man named Sergey Ulasen discovered Stuxnet.

Ulasen, who works in the research and development department at the VirusBlokAda security firm in Minsk, received what seemed to be a relatively mundane email on June 17, 2010. An Iranian firm was complaining that its computers were behaving strangely, shutting themselves down and then rebooting. Ulasen and a colleague spent a week examining the machines. Then they found Stuxnet. VirusBlokAda notified other companies in the industry, including Symantec.

When the engineers at Symantec got to work, they came across two computers that had directed the attacks. One of the servers was in Malaysia and the other was in Denmark, and they were reachable through the addresses www.todaysfutbol.com and www.mypremierfutbol.com.

They had been registered, under a false name and with a forged credit card, through one of the world’s largest Internet registration companies, a firm based in the US state of Arizona. Symantec rerouted the incoming and outgoing communication at the two servers to its computer center in Dublin, which enabled it to monitor the activity of the virus.

Whoever had launched Stuxnet had gotten away, but at least Symantec could follow the trail they had left behind.

The rerouting of communication made it possible to obtain an overview of the countries in which the virus was active. According to that analysis, Stuxnet had infected about 100,000 computers worldwide, including more than 60,000 in Iran, more than 10,000 in Indonesia and more than 5,000 in India. The inventors programmed Stuxnet so that the virus, as a first step, tells the two command-and-control servers if the infected computer is running Step 7, an industrial software program developed by the German engineering company Siemens. Step 7 is used to run the centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz facility.

The plant near Natanz, located in the desert 250 kilometers (156 miles) south of Tehran, is protected with military-level security. The aluminum centrifuges, which are housed in bunkers, are 1.8 meters (5 foot 10 inches) tall and 10 centimeters (four inches) in diameter. Their purpose is to gradually increase the proportion of uranium-235, the fissile isotope of uranium. There is a rotor inside the centrifuges that rotates at a speed of 1,000 times per second. In the process, uranium hexafluoride gas is centrifuged, so that uranium-235 accumulates in the center. The process is controlled by a Siemens system that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system.

PART 2: SECURITY HOLES AND RED HERRINGS

The ruse that makes the attack possible is as simple as it is ingenious. Stuxnet takes advantage of a security hole in Windows that makes it possible to manipulate the system. As a result of this programming error, the virus can be introduced into the system through a USB flash drive, for example. As soon as the drive is connected to a computer in the system, the installation begins unnoticed.

Stuxnet initially searches for anti-virus programs. The code is designed to circumvent them or, if this is not possible, to de-install itself. For a long time, one of the priorities was to leave no traces.

In a second step, Stuxnet lodges itself into the part of the operating system that manages USB flash drives, where it establishes a checksum, the exact purpose of which is unclear. The infection stops when this sum reaches the value 19790509. Symantec speculates that this is some sort of code. When read backward, the number could represent May 9, 1979, the day Habib Elghanian, a Jewish businessman, was executed in Tehran. Is this a coincidence? A provocation? Or a deliberately placed red herring?

It is still unclear how exactly the Israelis were able to get the virus into Natanz. In the jargon of computer experts, previously unknown security gaps like the hole in the Windows operating system are called zero-day exploits. Searching for these vulnerabilities is a combination of hacker challenge and business model. Knowledge is valuable, and there is a black market in which a previously unknown vulnerability can be worth $100,000 (€70,000) or more. Stuxnet exploits no fewer than four of these digital jewels.

 ’A BLUE-AND-WHITE OPERATION’

Symantec manager Sam Angel believes that it is impossible to write a code like Stuxnet without having intimate knowledge of the Siemens system. “There is no black market for exploits involving Siemens software,” he says. “It’s not used widely enough.” How, then, did the Mossad acquire the information about the technology in use at Natanz?

It has been openly speculated that the Americans may have helped the Mossad. There is a US government research institution in Idaho where scientists study the Siemens control technology used in Iran; the basic research for Stuxnet could have taken place there. After that, the virus could have been tested at Israel’s nuclear research center near Dimona in the Negev Desert.

Israeli sources familiar with the background to the attack insist, however, that Stuxnet was a “blue-and-white operation,” a reference to Israel’s national colors ~ in other words, a purely Israeli operation. They believe that a secret elite unit of the military intelligence agency programmed a portion of the code, leaving the Mossad to do the rest. The Mossad was also apparently responsible for smuggling the virus into Natanz. The same sources claim that the Mossad tried to buy a cascade of centrifuges on the black market, without success. In the end, an Israeli arms manufacturer, with the help of foreign intelligence agencies, supposedly managed to build a model of Natanz where Stuxnet was tested.

The operation was ready to begin in the summer of 2009. The attackers unleashed Stuxnet at 4:31 p.m. on June 22, 2009. The attack targeted five Iranian organizations and was launched in three waves. After the first wave, a second strike took place in March 2010, dealing a heavy blow to the Iranians. The third wave followed in April. According to Symantec, the targets were not directly related to Iran’s nuclear program, but some of the target organizations were on United Nations sanctions lists. Some 12,000 computers were infected in the five organizations alone.

Stuxnet is programmed to delete itself from the USB flash drive after the third infection, presumably to prevent it from spreading explosively, which would have been noticed immediately. The goal of the cyber-weapon is to sabotage its targets in a sustainable, rather than spectacular, manner.

Another trick, which gives the virus the semblance of legality, shows how complex the design is. It involves digital certificates, which are issued on the Internet by companies that test the activity of a server or a program and certify that it is not malicious. If a program can show that it has such a certificate, then it is allowed access to a system. The Taiwanese firms Realtek Semiconductor and JMicron Technology are among the firms that issue such certificates.

In January 2010, a version of Stuxnet turned up that had been signed with a digital certificate from Realtek. This was followed, in July 2010, by a version signed with a JMicron certificate. Both certificates had been stolen. This theft alone is an operation that requires either a physical burglary at the headquarters of either companies, or the kind of hacker attack that very few programmers worldwide are capable of performing, because these certificates are additionally secured and encoded.

ONLY A STATE COULD PRODUCE STUXNET

An analysis by a European intelligence agency classified as “secret,” which SPIEGEL has seen, states that it would have taken a programmer at least three years to develop Stuxnet, at a cost in the double-digit millions. Symantec, for its part, estimates that the tests in the model facility alone would have occupied five to 10 programmers for half a year. According to the intelligence analysis, “non-governmental actors” can be “virtually ruled out” as the inventors of Stuxnet. Members of Germany’s Federal Security Council, a government committee for defense issues whose meetings are secret, felt the same way when the council met in Berlin on Nov. 25, 2010.

Stuxnet shows what can happen when potent attackers are at work, said then Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, who is now German defense minister. Anyone who is willing to invest that much money and resources, Maizière added, knows what he is doing. The council members agreed that a sovereign state had to be behind the virus.

De Maizière’s staff noted that 15 vulnerabilities are found in standard computer programs every day, and that tens of thousands of websites are infected worldwide on a daily basis. At the end of the meeting, the council decided to establish a national cyber defense center. “The experiences with the Stuxnet virus show that even key areas of industrial infrastructure are no longer safe against targeted IT attacks,” a government cabinet paper later stated.

The virus has fundamentally changed the way we look at digital attacks. The US government recently issued a new cyber war doctrine that defines a cyber-attack as a conventional act of war. The Stuxnet code, which is now accessible to the public, could inspire copycats, Roberta Stempfley of the US Department of Homeland Security warned last week.

Last year the British government adopted a new security strategy, for which it approved funding of 650 million pounds (€565 million or $1,070 million). The cyber world will become “more important in the conflict between nations,” Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor said in a speech in Jerusalem in February. “It is a new battleground, if you like, not with guns but with something else.”

PART 3: SUCCESS COMPARABLE TO CRACKING ENIGMA
 
The Mossad views Stuxnet as a great success, comparable to the cracking of Germany’s Enigma cipher machine by the Poles and Britons in World War II. The Israeli military isn’t as euphoric. It argues that the fact that Stuxnet was discovered was a high price to pay, despite the setback it dealt to Iran’s mullah-led regime.

And it was a painful setback indeed. An Iranian IR-1 centrifuge normally spins at 1,064 hertz, or cycles per second. When the rotors began going haywire, they increased their frequency to 1,410 hertz for 15 minutes and then returned to their normal frequency. The virus took over control again 27 days later, but this time it slowed down the rotors to a frequency of a few hundred hertz for a full 50 minutes. The resulting excessive centrifugal force caused the aluminum tubes to expand, increasing the risk of parts coming into contact with one another and thereby destroying the centrifuges.

Six cascades containing 164 centrifuges each were reportedly destroyed in this manner. Authorities on the Iranian nuclear program, like David Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), believe that Stuxnet destroyed about 1,000 centrifuges. Iran has admitted that its nuclear program was set back. According to Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s civil defense organization, the program suffered “potentially major damage.”

Former Mossad chief Dagan achieved his goal of sabotaging the nuclear program without triggering a new war in the Middle East. But Iran still has 8,000 other centrifuges, and the more modern, second-generation IR-2 centrifuges, which are equipped with carbon fiber rotors, can operate smoothly even at 1,400 hertz. They are not affected by the existing version of the sabotage software. The Mossad could be in need of a new virus soon. Using it would constitute the next round in a clandestine cyber war.

 ’PEOPLE HAD NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE STUXNET BEFORE’

Two young Israelis who work indirectly for the government are sitting in one of Tel Aviv’s modern cafés. The men run a company that handles jobs for the Mossad and Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency. They smile and say that digital attack, not defense, is their discipline. They are part of a global hacker elite. According to rumors circulating in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the men did some of the groundwork for the Mossad in the development of Stuxnet.

“People had never seen anything like Stuxnet before, except in movies,” says one of the hackers. “Now they can see that it’s real.” His voice is filled with pride when he says: “In the small community of attackers, none of this was really new.” Almost all of the vulnerabilities had already been used in a past attack, the hacker says, but they had never been used at the same time. He explains that the real challenge in staging an attack with a virus like Stuxnet is to penetrate into a system that is not connected to the Internet.

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES OF STUXNET?

The two men are silent for a moment; they see things from the attacker’s perspective. “The discovery of Stuxnet was a serious blow to us,” one of them says. “We find it particularly upsetting, because a successful method was disclosed.”

The inventors of Stuxnet apparently had many more plans for their product. Symantec has since discovered another version of the Stuxnet virus, which contains even more complex code and is designed to target modern Siemens control technology, but which had not been activated yet. Stuxnet, say the people at Symantec, “is the type of threat we hope to never see again.”

That wish is unlikely to come true.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan