The short answer is that if your PC got infected by Stuxnet last year, you were just collateral damage, unless you were operating a very specific set of uranium enrichment centrifuges. If you get Duqu this year, your network is under attack from a CIA/Mossad operation. They might seem a little outrageous, but bear with me while we get into the weeds of what Duqu is all about. I will lay out a set of assertions that lead to the conclusion that Duqu really is the “precursor to the next Stuxnet” as Symantec say in their whitepaper.

1. Stuxnet was created by the CIA and the Mossad

Although no one has officially claimed responsiblity for Stuxnet, both the U.S. and Israeli governments have done everything but take offical responsibility. Neither government has ever denied responsibilty, even when directly asked. In fact, officials in both governments have been reported as breaking out in big smiles when the subject comes up.

2. Duqu is from the same team that created Stuxnet.

The first clue that Duqu is from the Stuxnet team is the similarities between the rootkit components in both pieces of malware. The folks who have studied the two most closely are sure that Duqu is based on the Stuxnet component’s source code. Despite what you may have read on the internet, the actual source code to Stuxnet is not publicly available. Some folks have reverse-engineered some of the Stuxnet source code from the binaries that are available, for various technical reasons, I’m sure that these don’t serve as the basis for Duqu.

Duqu even has a fix for a bug in Stuxnet. Also, the only two pieces of malware in history to install themselves with as Windows device drivers with legitimate, but stolen, digital certificates are Stuxnet and Duqu. Both Stuxnet and Duqu were active in the wild and managed to evade detection for many months. While that’s not unheard of for malware, it is another point of similarity.

Stuxnet targeted a specific industrial control system (ICS) installation (the Siemens PLCs that were used to control the centrifuges at Natanz). Here’s the lastest on what Duqu targets:

Some of the companies affected or targeted by Duqu include the actual equipment that an ICS would control such as motors, pipes, valves and switches. To date, the vendors that make the PLC, controllers and systems/applications found in control centers are not yet affected, although this information could change as more variants are identified and these vendors look more closely at their systems.

There are no other instances of computer malware that target these sorts of installations.

3. Stuxnet was a worm, Duqu is not.

Stuxnet was a very aggressive computer worm. It had to be to jump the “air gap” that protects a secure ICS such as the system that ran the Natanz installation. When Stuxnet was discovered, the A-V vendors quickly discovered millions of computers had been (benignly) infected with Stuxnet. Duqu, on the other hand, has been found on only a handful of computers. Interestingly, no one has yet discovered the dropper, that is, the program used to place the Duqu rootkit on the infected machines. This is almost certainly because Duqu is being placed on these machines via a spear phishing attack. In spear phishing, specific targets are chosen and the attack is customized to the target.

4. Duqu is being used to download a RAT (Remote Access Trojan)

The rootkit component was used to download a standalone program designed to steal information from the computer that it has infected (including screenshots, keystrokes, lists of files on all drives, and names of open windows). Duqu is doing computer network reconnaissance. The information gathered by Duqu is very useful for planning future attacks. Before the command and control server was taken off-line, Symantec observed Duqu downloading three additional files to an infected machine.   The first was a module that could be injected into other processes running on the machine to gather some process-specific information as well as the computer’s local and system times (including time zone and daylight savings time bias). Another downloaded module was used to extend the normal 36-day limitation on Duqu installations. The last downloaded module was a stripped down version of the standalone RAT, lacking the key logging and file exploration functionality.

5. Put it all together and it adds up to a well-executed, highly targeted covert operation

For the last ten months, Duqu has been quietly stalking a small number of industrial manufacturers. No one even noticed before early September and it wasn’t until last week that the nature of the threat was clear to anyone. Duqu is spying on a handful of companies, gathering data that will be used for the design and development of the true Stuxnet 2.0. One thing we don’t know is who the target of Stuxnet 2.0 will be. But I have a suspicion. Nothing indicates that the ultimate target (i.e., Iran) of the Stuxnet team has changed. In August of this year, Iran announced that it had activated its first pre-production set of his newer IR-2m and IR-4 centrifuges. These are the successors to the centrifuges that Stuxnet attacked. If you wanted to do these centrifuges what Stuxnet did to the earlier IR-1 centrifuges, you would need a lot of specific data about the safe operating specs of the various components that go into making advanced centrifuges. If you knew or suspected who was supplying Iran with these components, you might want to gather some data from the internal networks of those suppliers. That’s what I think the point of Duqu really is.

[youtube]-Gf8NK1WAOc[/youtube]

Now that they’re dancing on Moammar Qaddafi’s grave (or would be, if the rebels would end the trophy show of his body so he can be buried), they’re no doubt faced with a dilemma.

How to get all the money they bribed Qaddafi with over the years back into circulation, paying for consultants on reconstruction and generating fees for their banks?

I expect we’ll see a series of articles like this one, expressing shock–shock!–that Qaddai managed to loot $200 billion from his country.

Moammar Kadafi secretly salted away more than $200 billion in bank accounts, real estate and corporate investments around the world before he was killed, about $30,000 for every Libyan citizen and double the amount that Western governments previously had suspected, according to senior Libyan officials.

The new estimates of the deposed dictator’s hidden cash, gold reserves and investments are “staggering,” one person who has studied detailed records of the asset search said Friday. “No one truly appreciated the scope of it.”

Oh, I’m sure some people “appreciated the scope of it”–like the Goldman Sachs banksters who “lost” almost all of Libya’s investment fund for it. And it’s not like our government hasn’t been fully aware this has been going on. That’s all before you assume we’ve been using SWIFT to monitor Qaddafi’s looting in the name of counterterrorism.

Better for those who want to continue to profit off this money to express shock, though, or Libyans and others might cop on that the big play here is to continue to profit.

(In related news, see this Real News Network video on the looting in Sub-Saharan Africa.)

A remarkable story in this morning’s Washington Post addresses a report released today from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.  The report details that the training of police forces in Iraq has been a failure:

Over the course of the eight-year-old war and military occupation, thousands of U.S. troops have spent considerable time and effort wooing and training police recruits, but Iraqi officials have often accused the United States of not providing much more than basic training.

In an August interview, Akeel Saeed, inspector general of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, said that in the past, the U.S. military was too often “implementing what they wanted, without acknowledging what the Iraqis wanted.”

The article discloses that despite all of this basic “training” that the US has provided over the years, now that the program has been handed over to the State Department, they will use the bulk of their $887 million budget this year on private security contractors.  That fact alone is all the proof we need that there is no confidence at all in Iraqi security forces, or there would be little to no need for the mercenaries:

But a government report set for release Monday found that the department is spending just 12 percent of money allocated for the program on advising Iraqi police officials, with the “vast preponderance” of funds going toward the security, transportation and medical support of the 115 police advisers hired for the program. When U.S. troops leave, thousands of private security guards are expected to provide protection for the thousands of diplomats and contractors set to stay behind. For security reasons, the State Department has declined to specify the cost and size of its anticipated security needs.

However, the SIGIR report (pdf) itself provides more background for understanding why such a large mercenary force is needed.  First, the report documents the handing over of responsibility for police training to DoD back in 2004 [INL is the Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs]:

Since 2003, the United States has spent about $8 billion to train, staff, and equip Iraqi police forces to maintain domestic order and deny terrorists a safe haven within Iraq. Within DoS, INL is responsible for developing policies and managing programs that strengthen law enforcement and other rule of law institutional capabilities outside the United States.

In 2003, INL was assigned initial responsibility for the Iraqi police training program and funded it. The Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigation Training and Assistance Program was also involved. However, program responsibility was transferred to DoD in 2004 due to the Iraq security situation, the scale of the task, and the need to ensure unity of command and effort. Specifically, on May 11, 2004, National Security Presidential Directive 36 assigned the mission of organizing, training, and equipping Iraq’s security forces, including the police, to the U.S. Central Command, until the Secretaries of State and Defense agreed that DoS should take on that responsibility.

But the reality is that first DoD, and now DoS refuse to provide a realistic assessment of the current capabilities of the Iraqi police forces:

INL has not currently assessed Iraqi police capabilities to the extent necessary to provide a sufficient basis for developing detailed program tasks and an effective system for measuring program results. Over two and-a-half years ago, a Joint Transition Planning Team made a three-week visit to Iraq to gain a baseline understanding of Iraq police forces’ capabilities, but noted that a number of follow-on steps would be required for program design. However, the follow-on steps for program design were not accomplished and a planned 2011 baseline assessment was not completed.

The report goes on to note:

In October 2010, SIGIR raised concerns that DoS would be assuming responsibility for a program to advise and assist Iraqi police forces when the capabilities of those forces had not been assessed in any comprehensive way. We reported that neither DoD nor DoS has fully assessed the capabilities of the Iraqi police. DoD carried out some assessments, but they have limited usefulness in evaluating the current capabilities of the Iraqi police services. SIGIR recommended that the Commanding General, U.S. Forces-Iraq, in consultation with the Assistant Secretary, INL, work with the MOI to help assess the capabilities of the Iraqi police and provide that assessment to INL. Although U.S. Forces–Iraq agreed with the report recommendation, the assessment was not completed.

The simplest explanation for why so many groups refuse to complete the task of assessing the capabilities of Iraq’s police forces is that the result is not one they wish to publish. The refusal to publish an assessment of Iraqi police capabilities, coupled with the DoS plan to rely on mercenaries rather than on the “trained” forces, can only lead to the conclusion that Iraq’s police forces cannot be counted on to function at a level that would protect DoS activities in Iraq after withdrawal of US troops.

Now that the most reasonable assumption is that US efforts to train security forces in Iraq have failed, it is notable that the Washington Post’s article today is missing one key piece of background. Since the handover of the training program to DoD in 2004, every time there have been claims about how well things were going in Iraq and/or how many security forces were being trained, the press has been careful to credit David Petraeus as being the driving force behind such efforts. In fact, one of the first times Petraeus burst onto the national scene was when in September, 2004 the Washington Post carried an op-ed from Petraeus in which he was allowed to make grandiose claims about progress in training Iraqi security forces. Later, in September, 2007, the kerfluffle over Move-On’s “Betrayus” ad diverted attention from the fact that during his testimony on the effectiveness of the “surge”, he was effectively starting over on training of Iraqi security forces, with his “progress” from 2004 having been wiped off the books and out of Washington’s memory. There was one ABC News report in 2005 that actually mentioned failures in Petraeus’ efforts training Iraqi police, but this particular report is very much in the minority.

Will any press reports this week manage to connect Petraeus’ name with the failure in training security forces in Iraq?  Don’t hold your breath waiting.

Having MoDo vouch for the “sangfroid” of Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir (who, she notes, once saved her from being punished by Saudi religious police for dressing inappropriately) is about as amusing as having David Ignatius announce the Scary Iran Plot must be true because the CIA is involved.

Jubeir stayed cool even when American officials informed him several months ago about the latest stunning chapter in the Saudi Arabia-versus-Iran Great Game for supremacy in the Middle East: an outlandish plot by an Iranian-American used-car dealer in Texas who said his cousin was a senior member of the Iranian Quds Force.

MoDo’s piece seems to do little but foster the illusion that a real plot had developed, as she describes al-Jubeir straining in secret to hide the news that a DEA Narc completely directed by the US government proposed bombing his favorite restaurant.

He had to force himself to live a normal existence for months, not telling family or staff, until a criminal complaint was unveiled and the Texas car dealer was before a judge.

MoDo’s piece also allows al-Jubeir to rebut a detail about him that the US Government’s own plot has emphasized–that he practically lives at Cafe Milano.

Over lunch at the embassy in his first interview since then, he told me in his whispery voice that he was surprised the plotters had assumed he’d be hanging at modish restaurants. These days, the slender, smartly tailored ambassador is more of a nester, spending time with the twins and his 9-month-old son.

“I work so much, I enjoy sitting at home doing nothing,” said the diplomat with the rough commute — 12-hour flights to Riyadh several times a month.

No wonder al-Jubeir chose this–rather than an interview with a real journalist–to be his first interview after the revelation of the plot.

Though there is this close for the piece.

As I left, I asked the ambassador about the painting in his office of Arab tribesmen riding horses and camels.

“It’s artistic license,” he noted with amusement. “Camels don’t ride with horses. They ride separately. Horses go faster and camels go longer.”

It’s as if, in addition to countering the common knowledge he lives at Cafe Milano, al-Jubeir also wants people to know that both Arabian ponies and camels can survive by eating aspen leaves that grow connected at the root.

Welcome to TebowWheel. We are done with that national security and legal shit; we’re going ALL TEBOW, ALL THE TIME baybee! Now, I hear Rosalind is fixing to riot this place or something because she can’t find a Trash post to trash up. Fine, riot away, just PLEASE do it very quietly, mmkay? Cause I gots a little severe head trauma going on here. Aspirin doesn’t help. Excedrin doesn’t help. Tylenol and Advil don’t help either. Freaking vicodin doesn’t even help. I am currently looking for a guillotine delivery service. That might work….

Okay, sorry about being so tardy here but things happened starting about happy hour time yesterday. Bad things; very bad things. Here are a few things I either learned or remembered the hard way during the ramble through the bramble:

1) I’m too old for the kind of party expedition work I used to easily do.

2) No matter how much mescal seems like a good idea at the time, it just never is. (after four decades, those worms are still nasty).

3) So, it turns out there is a bar in Scottsdale that has live singing and dancing midgets. The Britney Spears midget was every bit as nasty as the fucking mescal worm.

4) I may have to rethink that propofol shit Michael Jackson mainlined, cause nothing, I mean nothing, works for shit. Just blinking my eyes causes unimaginable excruciating pain.

5) Falling asleep on the pool diving board is not a sound plan. Don’t think I was there that long, but then the sun started coming up. Damn near rolled into the pool.

Okay, I’m a gonna post this now cause that uppity Wheel woman is bugging me. She called my telephone this morning. That was rude, sounded like a freaking air raid siren rattling in my head. Then she started asking me questions and stuff; that didn’t work well. So, Sparty just ran off about 16 points and took the lead against Russell Wilson and the Wisconsin Badgers. Great game so far. Except that grounding in the endzone crap. That wasn’t good. Aw ferchristsakes, freaking Sparty just blocked a kick and recovered the ball in the endzone for another touchdown right before the end of the first half. Jeebus.

So, MORE TEBOW to come. I’ll bet Baby Jesus could cure my head.

This post from Cannonfire reminded me how convenient for our country it is that Moammar Qaddafi was executed rather than captured alive and tried: he will not be able to tell anyone, now that he’s dead, how Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who under torture provided one of the casus belli for the Iraq war, came to be suicided in a Libyan prison just as Americans started focusing on torture in 2009.

That, plus the death of the Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz al Saud, made me think of another plot Qaddafi brings to his grave: that he had purportedly arranged to assassinate then Crown Prince now King Abdullah. The evidence to support that plot mostly came from Abdulrahman Alamoudi, a prominent American Muslim who was arrested in 2003 on charges he violated trade sanctions against Libya.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. A naturalized American citizen is arrested upon re-entry to the country and charged with a bunch of crimes. After a period of no bail, he confesses to participation in the assassination plot of a top Saudi.

Court documents said the assassination plot arose from a March 2003 conference at which Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and Prince Abdullah had a heated exchange. Angered at how Gaddafi was treated, Libyan officials recruited Alamoudi.

Even after he learned that the target was Abdullah, Alamoudi shuttled money and messages between Libyan officials and the two Saudi dissidents in London, the documents said. Although Gaddafi is not named as a planner, sources familiar with the case have said he appears in the documents as “Libyan government official #5,” who met personally with Alamoudi.

Mind you, though the judge considered the assassination plot in Alamoudi’s sentence, he plead guilty not to murder-for-hire, but to prohibited financial transactions with Libya (the kind of thing JPMC just got its wrist slapped for), unlawful procurement of naturalization, and tax evasion.

Anyway, thinking about the similarities between that case and the Scary Iran Plot led me to consult Alamoudi’s docket (most of which is not available online). What happens to a guy convicted in connection with plotting with a nasty African dictator as we launch the war to finally kill that dictator?

Well, it turns out that at about the time it was clear we’d stick around to ensure Qaddafi died in this kinetic action, a sealed document got filed in Alamoudi’s case. And, on July 20, 2011, Alamoudi got about 30% knocked off his sentence, from 276 months to 197.

Mind you, no one was hiding the fact that Alamoudi would continue to cooperate with authorities while in prison–so it’s no surprise his sentence got lowered. Nor does Alamoudi’s sentence reduction necessarily have anything to do with Alamoudi’s testimony in the assassination plot.

But I do expect, a decade from now, that’s what’s going to happen to Manssor Arbabsiar’s docket.

As part of a new ACLU project to FOIA and map all the racial profiling the FBI has been doing, it liberated a Detroit FBI document describing its efforts to set up a “Domain Management” assessment (which seems to be a nice euphemism for racial profiling). It describes what it claims is the distinct counterterrorism threats in Michigan.

There are more than forty groups designated as terrorist organizations by the US State Department. Many of these groups originate in the Middle-East and Southeast Asia. Many of these groups also use an extreme and violent interpretation of the Muslim faith as justification for their activities. Because Michigan has large Middle-Eastern and Muslim population, it is prime territory for attempted radicalization and recruitment by these terrorist groups. Additionally, Sunni terrorist groups always pose a threat of attack on U.S. soil since it is the stated purpose of many of these groups. The Detroit Division Domain Team seeks to open a Type IV Domain Assessment for the purpose of collecting information and evaluating the threat posed by international terrorist groups conducting recruitment, radicalization, fund-raising, or even violent terrorist acts within the state of Michigan.

Of course, MI is not just home to a lot of Arab-Americans and Muslims. It’s also home to a bunch of right wing militias and all-around nutjobs. So using racial profiling to find terrorists–the FBI admittedly uses State’s list of international terrorists, which of course excludes domestic right wing terrorist groups–would miss the white terrorists we have in MI.

To give you an idea of what that would miss, I checked out all the press releases the Detroit FBI Office and US Attorney’s Office has put out since this document was written on July 6, 2009 to see what kind of crimes related to or possibly related to terrorism we’ve had in the state. Here’s what it showed.

• October 28, 2009: 11 members of “Ummah” arrested, Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah killed. (Ultimately the FBI backed off their claim these folks had any tie to terrorism.)
• October 29, 2009: Mujahid Carswell (AKA Mujahid Abdullah) taken into custody by Canada’s RCMP for immigration violations.
• October 31, 2009: Mohammad Alsahli (aka Muhammad Palestine) and Yassir Ali Khan taken into custody by Canada’s RCMP for immigration violations.
• December 25, 2009: The Undie-Bomber tried to bring down a plane.
• January 22, 2010: Syrian Mohamad Mustapha Ali Masfaka lied to Customs and Border Patrol agents about his ties to Holy Land Foundation; he was later convicted.
• March 29, 2010: Nine white members of the Hutaree militia arrested for seditious plot to overthrow the government.
• June 7, 2010: A 73-year old white man, Russell Hesch, and his son sent a letter to Bart Stupak threatening to paint the Mackinac Bridge with his blood in retaliation for voting for Obama’s health insurance reform.
• April 21, 2011: A 42-year old white schizophrenic from the Upper Peninsula, Gary John Mikulich, planted a bomb outside the Federal Building.
• August 3, 2011: Someone left a Molotov cocktail outside an abortion clinic in Detroit.
• September 12, 2011: A Frontier Airlines flight was diverted because two men of Indian descent and a Saudi-Jewish woman, Shoshana Hebshi, had made a passenger suspicious.
• September 23, 2011: A white St. Joseph man, Reed Berry, was arrested for ramming an FBI surveillance car; the agents were investigating him for alleged ties to a Foreign Terrorist Organization. (This was no in DOJ press releases, but since he was accused to foreign terrorist ties, this clearly fits.)
• September 26, 2011: A white 64-year old man, John Lechner, arrested for having as much explosives as took down the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal building and talking about mercenaries. (Note, this was not in any FBI or DOJ press releases I could find.)

So while the FBI has been profiling Muslims (including, arguably, the African-American mosque the FBI labels the “Ummah”; while Shoshana Hebshi and the two Indian men were clearly profiled on 9/11, this was not by the FBI), 13 white people in Michigan have been alleged to engage in some kind of terrorism: The 9 members of the Hutaree, Russell Hesch threatening Stupak’s life, Gary Mikulich making a crazed bomb attack on the Federal building, John Lechner’s stash of 4000 pounds of explosives, plus the ties to a foreign terrorist organization the FBI alleges Reed Berry has (his attorney says they were surveilling Berry for protected speech). And that’s assuming the still unsolved clinic bomber was not white.

Not only will profiling result in the harassment of people like Hebshi and the extreme over-reaction of the FBI with Luqman.

But in MI, it also risks missing what–setting aside Luqman’s mosque–has actually been the majority of terrorists and alleged terrorists in recent years. That’s not just dumb. It’s dangerous.

Update: Added Lechner–h/t Lakeeffectsnow.

I had this naive hope that DOJ would use the opportunity of an indictment to fill in some of the holes in their case.

Like I said, naive hope.

The indictment appears to be the amended complaint, without the affidavit, with an arrest warrant for Gholam Shakuri.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaRKHVw4rUo[/youtube]

The high level meetings in Islamabad between US and Pakistani officials head into their second day today, after a marathon four hour session late yesterday.  The line-ups of officials present for the two countries is remarkable and reflects the seriousness with which the two countries view the current situation.  Pakistan’s Express Tribune provides a partial list of those present at the meetings:

Clinton was accompanied by US Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsy, Director Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) David Petraeus, US Special Envoy Marc Grossman and US Ambassador Cameron Munter, while Premier Gilani was assisted by Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, ISI chief Lt General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar and other senior officials.

Despite the pomp surrounding the meetings and the seniority of those present, there seems to be little prospect that positions on the major issue will change.   As I described yesterday, Clinton is delivering the “new” catchphrase for the US of “fight, talk, build”, meaning that the US places the highest priority on fighting the Haqqani network, seen by the US as the biggest current threat and unlikely to participate in meaningful peace talks.  By contrast, Pakistan’s Prime Minister has implored the US to “give peace a chance”.  From the same Express Tribune article:

A statement issued by the Prime Minister’s press office also confirmed that Pakistan has no plans to initiate a military operation in North Waziristan.

“Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani called upon US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to give peace a chance, as envisaged in the All Parties Conference’s resolution,” said the statement.

We learn from today’s Washington Post that Clinton is warning Pakistan that they will pay a price for this refusal to attack the Haqqani network in their safe havens:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stepped up the rhetorical pressure on Pakistan Thursday, warning Pakistani officials that there would be a “very big price” if they do not take action against militant groups staging attacks in Afghanistan.

Dawn provides more details, revealing that Clinton expects action by Pakistan to occur quickly:

“We look to Pakistan to take strong steps to deny Afghan insurgents safe havens and to encourage the Taliban to enter negotiations in good faith,” said Clinton after talks with Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar.

The United States was looking for operational action “over the next days and weeks, not months and years, but days and weeks because we have a lot of work to do to realise our shared goals,” emphasised Clinton.

In remarks today, Clinton responded to the “give peace a chance” challenge from Pakistan:

In a joint press conference held with Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar in Islamabad, Clinton urged the Pakistani government to show greater cooperation with the US to corner militants.

“You can’t keep snakes in your back yard and expect them to only bite your neighbours,” Clinton said, making a clear reference to the Haqqani network that the US has accused Pakistan of maintaining links with.

She added that US and Afghan forces have “successfully” responded to Pakistan’s legitimate concern regarding terrorists working from the Afghan side of the border, and that Pakistan is expected to do the same.

“If we want to give peace a chance, we have some work to do,” said Secretary Clinton, urging Pakistan to do more to crackdown on extremists operating from Pakistani territory.

And there is the stand-off.  Pakistan’s unchanging position is that now is the time for negotiations with the Haqqani network and the US maintains that it is necessary first to beat them into submission before they will negotiate “in good faith”.

A very important additional aspect of the ongoing meetings comes from the first Express Tribune story linked above, where we learn that new CIA chief David Petraeus will be sharing US intelligence linking Pakistan’s ISI spy agency with the Haqqani network:

The addition of Petraeus could be especially significant, political analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi told Reuters.

“America will produce evidence before the army chief, that you are involved (in supporting the violence in Afghanistan). With David Petraeus coming as well, they have definitely brought evidence,” he said. “He will provide evidence that you are involved, ISI is involved,” he added. “But nothing will come out in public.”

It seems especially noteworthy that it is believed that Petraeus will share this intelligence with Ashfaq Kayani, who heads Pakistan’s Army, rather than Ahmed Pasha, who heads the ISI.  The article notes separately that Petraeus will meet with Pasha but separates that meeting from the discussion of Petraeus sharing the ISI-related intelligence with Kayani.

There is a very interesting side note relating to the timing of these high level meetings in Islamabad.  Recall that Clinton’s visits to Kabul and then Islamabad were not announced in advance.  However, the arrival of the US delegation caused the leader of another country to reschedule a planned visit to Islamabad.  From Iran’s Mehr News:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has reportedly decided to defer his travel to Pakistan as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to arrived in Islamabad on Thursday.

A diplomat confirmed the postponement of the Iranian president’s visit but said it had nothing to do with Clinton’s visit and was only a matter of working out the schedule of the Iranian president, who would now visit Pakistan some other time in the near future, Pakistan Today said in a report on Monday.

It is worth noting that at the height of the US-Pakistan rhetorical battle, Pakistan had meetings with China.  These meetings were viewed by many as a signal to the US that Pakistan would consider seeking a closer relationship with China should US-Pakistan relations deteriorate further.  Did the US suddenly decide to pre-empt Ahmadinejad’s visit because they fear an Iran-Pakistan alliance much more than they fear a China-Pakistan alliance?

For those closely following Marcy’s coverage of the Scary Iran Plot, note also that Mehr News is carrying an article accusing Pakistan of being a new “conduit” for smuggling drugs into the Persian Gulf region.  The issue of illicit drugs seems to dance around the margins of Scary Iran Plot, so this accusation is worth noting while monitoring that evolving situation.

Okay, I don’t know for a fact that the Senior Administration Official Jake Tapper rather irresponsibly gave anonymity to is John Brennan. After all, Ben Rhodes loves to boast anonymously too.

But given the Administration’s past caution about describing Obama’s role in the Awlaki assassination, I find it interesting that John Brennan this SAO is now claiming credit, in Obama’s name, for Awlaki’s killing, too.

The president emphasized the internationality of the NATO effort, and that’s part of what a senior White House official tells ABC News is the way Obama looks at foreign policy.

“What we’re demonstrating is you can move to a more targeted use of US force and be more successful in achieving our objectives,” a Senior White House official tells ABC News. This means a “smaller footprint, a more targeted use of force. It means less of a cost to taxpayers and troops, and also clearly results in our ability to take care of our interests.”

“With al Qaeda, we’re going after them in a very targeted way,” the Senior White House official says. “With Libya, we identified the unique capabilities the US has to go after Gadhafi,” and then NATO took the lead. The US role from that point on was to be the “glue” of the operation “keeping the coalition together,” providing “targeting, intelligence, refueling, and command and control.”

“Bin laden, Awlaki, Gadhafi have all met their demise in some fashion because of decisions the president made” utilizing this foreign policy view, the senior administration official said. [my emphasis]

Not surprisingly, John Brennan this SAO didn’t boast about the internationality of our effort in Somalia, where al-Shabaab made a grisly display of the bodies of 70 Burundian soldiers serving in AMISOM yesterday; al-Shabaab said they had ambushed the soldiers. John Brennan this SAO only boasts about the victories, you see. Nor did John Brennan this SAO claim credit for killing an American teenager the other day. We’re still pretending that was an accident.

But for the record, John Brennan this SAO can no longer control himself. He’s gonna claim credit not just for Osama bin Laden and Qaddafi–even claim credit for providing the command and control in what was purportedly a kinetic action–but also boast that Obama’s orders resulted in the death of an American citizen.