Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's Blog, page 2

CIA torture addiction is about justifying endless war

The grizzly details of CIA torture have, finally, been at least partly aired through the release this Tuesday of a landmark Senate intelligence committee report.
The extent of the torture has been covered extensively across the media, and is horrifying - unless you’re a FOX News pundit.
Torture victims, who had been detained by the US national security apparatus entirely outside any sort of recognizable functioning system of due process, endured a litany of extreme abuses normally associated with foreign dictatorships: 180 hour sleep deprivation, forced ‘rectal feeding’, rectal ‘examinations’ using ‘excessive force’, standing for dozens of hours on broken limbs, water-boarding, being submerged in iced baths, and on and on and on.
Yet for the most part, it has been assumed that the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation program’, originated under the Bush administration after 9/11, was a major “aberration” from normal CIA practice – as one US former military prosecutor put it in The Guardian.
On BBC Newsnight, yesterday, presenter Emily Maitlis asked former National Security Adviser under Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski about the problem of “rogue elements in the CIA,” and whether this was inevitable due to the need for secrecy in intelligence.
High-level sanction
But the CIA’s torture program was formally approved at the highest levels of the civilian administration. We have known for years that torture was officially sanctioned by at least President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA directors George Tenet and Michael Hayden, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Yet while the UN has called for prosecutions of Bush administration officials, much attention has been focused on the belief that Obama banned domestic torture in 2009, and reiterated the ban abroad this November. Dan Froomklin of The Intercept congratulated the latest move as a “win” for the “good guys.” With the release of the Senate report, Obama’s declaration that he has ended “the CIA’s detention and interrogation program” has largely reinforced this narrative.
Rehabilitating the torture regime
Yet Obama did not ban torture in 2009, and has not rescinded it now. He instead rehabilitated torture with a carefully crafted Executive Order that has received little scrutiny. He demanded, for instance, that interrogation techniques be made to fit the US Army Field Manual, which complies with the Geneva Convention and has prohibited torture since 1956.
But in 2006, revisions were made to the Army Field Manual, in particular through ‘Appendix M’, which contained interrogation techniques that went far beyond the original Geneva-inspired restrictions of the original version of the manual. This includes 19 methods of interrogation and the practice of extraordinary rendition. As pointed out by US psychologist Jeff Kaye who has worked extensively with torture victims, a new UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) reviewof the manual shows that a wide-range of torture techniques continue to be deployed by the US government, including isolation, sensory deprivation, stress positions, chemically-induced psychosis, adjustments of environmental and dietary rules, among others.
Indeed, the revelations contained in the Senate report are a mere fraction of the totality of torture techniques deployed by the CIA and other agencies. Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born and raised in Germany who was detained in Guantanomo for five years, has for instance chargedthat he had been subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, repeated beatings, water-dunking, electric shock treatment, and suspension by his arms, by US forces.
On January 22nd, 2009, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, then Obama’s director of national intelligence, told the Senate intelligence committee that the Army Field Manual would be amended to allow new forms of harsh interrogation, but that these changes would remain classified:
“We have large amounts of unclassified  doctrine for our troops to use, but we don’t put anything in  there that our enemies can use against us. And we’ll figure it out for this manual… there will be some sort of  document that’s widely available in an unclassified form, but  the specific techniques that can provide training value to  adversaries, we will handle much more carefully.”
Obama’s supposed banning of the CIA’s secret rendition programs was also a misnomer. While White House officials insisted that from now on, detainees would not be rendered to “any country that engages in torture,” rendered detainees were already being sent to countries in the EU that purportedly do not sanction torture – where they were then tortured by the CIA.
Obama did not really ban the CIA’s use of secret prisons either, permitting indefinite detention of people without due process “on a short-term transitory basis.”
Half a century of torture as a system
What we are seeing now is not the Obama administration putting an end to torture, but rather putting an end to the open acknowledgement of the use of torture as a routine intelligence practice.
But the ways of old illustrate that we should not be shocked by the latest revelations. Declassified CIA training manualsfrom the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, prove that the CIA has consistently practiced torture long before the Bush administration attempted to legitimize the practice publicly.
In his seminal study of the subject, A Question of Torture, US historian Prof Alfred W. McCoy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison proves using official documents and interviews with intelligence sources that the use of torture has been a systematic practice of US and British intelligence agencies, sanctioned at the highest levels, over “the past half century.” Since the Second World War, he writes, a “distinctive US covert-warfare doctrine… in which psychological torture has emerged as a central if clandestine facet of American foreign policy.”
The psychological paradigm deployed the CIA fused two methods in particular, “sensory disorientation” and so-called “self-inflicted pain.” These methods were based on intensive “behavioural research that made psychological torture NATO’s secret weapon against communism and cognitive science the handmaiden of state security.”
“From 1950 to 1962,” found McCoy, “the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually.”
The pinnacle of this effort was the CIA’s Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogationhandbook finalized in 1963, which determined the agency’s interrogation methods around the world. In the ensuing decade, the agency trained over a million police officers across 47 countries in torture. A later incarnation of the CIA torture training doctrine emerged under Freedom of Information in the form of the 1983 Human Resources Training Exploitation Manual.
Power… and propaganda
One of the critical findings of the Senate report is that torture simply doesn’t work, and consistently fails to produce meaningful intelligence. So why insist on its use? For McCoy, the addiction to torture itself is a symptom of a deep-seated psychological disorder, rather than a rational imperative: “In sum, the powerful often turn to torture in times of crisis, not because it works but because it salves their fears and insecurities with the psychic balm of empowerment.”
He is right, but in the post-9/11 era, there is more to the national security apparatus’ chronic torture addiction than this.
It is not a mere accident that torture generates vacuous intelligence, but nevertheless continues to be used and justified for intelligence purposes. For instance, the CIA claimed that its torture of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) led to the discovery and thwarting of a plot to hijack civilian planes at Heathrow and crash them into the airport and buildings in Canary Wharf. The entire plot, however, was an inventionprovoked by torture that included waterboarding, “facial and abdominal slaps, the facial grab, stress positions, standing sleep deprivation” and “rectal rehydration.”
As one former senior CIA official who had read all KSM’s interrogation reports told Vanity Fair, “90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” Another ex-Pentagon analyst said that torturing KSM had produced “no actionable intelligence.”
Torture also played a key role in the much-hyped London ricin plot. Algerian security services alerted British intelligence in January 2003 to the so-called plot after interrogating and torturing a ‘terrorist suspect’, former British resident Mohammed Meguerba. We now know there was no plot. Four of the defendants were acquitted of terrorism and four others had the cases against them abandoned. Only Kamal Bourgass was convicted after he murdered Special Branch Detective Constable Stephen Oake during a raid. Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has also blown the whistle on how the CIA would render ‘terror suspects’ to the country to be tortured by Uzbek secret police, including being boiled alive. The confessions generated would be sent to the CIA and MI6 to be fed into ‘intelligence’ reports. Murray described the reports as “bollocks,” replete with false information not worth the “bloodstained paper” they are written on.
Many are unaware that the 9/11 Commission report is exactly such a document. Nearly a third of the report’s footnotes reference information obtained from detainees subject to ‘enhanced’ interrogation by the CIA. In 2004, the commission demanded that the CIA conduct “new rounds of interrogations” to get answers to its questions. As investigative reporter Philip Shennon pointed out in Newsweek, this has “troubling implications for the credibility of the commission’s final report” and “its account of the 9/11 plot and al-Qaeda’s history.” Which is why lawyers for the chief 9/11 mastermind suspects now say after the release of the Senate report that the case for prosecution may well unravel. Not surprising if a third of the report is merely ‘bollocks.’
That torture generates false information has long been known to the intelligence community. Much of the CIA’s techniques are derived from reverse engineering Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training, where US troops are briefly exposed in controlled settings to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemy forces, so that they can better resist treatment they might face if they are captured. SERE training, however, adopted tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes, according to a Senate Armed Services Committee reportin 2009.
Torture: core mechanism to legitimize threat projection
By deploying the same techniques against ‘terror suspects,’ the intelligence community was not seeking to identify real threats: it was seeking to manufacture threats for the purpose of justifying war. As David Rose found after interviewing “numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic,” their unanimous verdict was that “coercive methods” had squandered massive resources “false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts.” Far from exposing any deadly plots, torture led only to “more torture” of supposed accomplices of ‘terror suspects’ “while also providing some misleading ‘information’ that boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq.” But the Iraq War was not about responding to terrorism. According to declassified British Foreign Office files, it was about securing control over Persian Gulf oil and gas resources , and opening them up to global markets to avert a portended energy crisis.
In other words, torture plays a pivotal role in the Pentagon’s posture of permanent global war: generating spurious overblown ‘intelligence’ that can be fed-in to official security narratives of imminent terrorist threats everywhere, in turn requiring evermore empowerment of the security agencies, and legitimizing military expansionism in strategic regions.
The Obama administration is now exploiting the new Senate report to convince the world that the intelligence community’s systematic embroilment in torture was merely a Bush-era aberration that is now safely in the past.
Do not be fooled. Obama has rehabilitated and recalibrated the covert torture apparatus, and is attempting to leverage the torture report’s damning findings to claim moral high ground his administration doesn’t have. The torture regime is alive and well – but it has been put back in the box of classified secrecy to continue without public scrutiny.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. Formerly of The Guardian, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest. If you found this article useful, you can support Nafeez’s journalism via his upcoming project, Insurge.

EXCLUSIVE - Whistleblowers: IRS officials behind 'fraudulent' multi-billion dollar corporate tax giveaways

A couple of weeks ago I dropped a big but suppressed story on how senior IRS and US Treasury executives are deliberately facilitating illegal tax giveaways to powerful corporations, especially energy companies, to the tune of billions of dollars. 
The story is based on courageous whistleblowing from three IRS sources, two of them active IRS attorneys in the Office of the Chief Counsel, one of them a former senior IRS attorney and current lawyer representing myriad corporate whistleblowers to the IRS. 
The main source is Jane Kim, who has worked for the IRS in the Office of the Chief Counsel for 10 years, and who has just written to Senate and Congress demanding an audit of the IRS due to mounting evidence that executives are systematically neutering the IRS' own Whistleblower office. 
The story shows that accusations about the IRS targeting conservative and Tea Party groups is merely the tip of the iceberg, but there has been little interest in the mainstream media in digging deeper into the ramifications of this. 
The story first broke via Raw Story, was then put out by Truthout, and quickly went viral as it was picked up by a range of different news groups and activist networks. The US Uncut movement put out the above meme on Facebook, eliciting thousands of shares, likes and comments.
The story was then picked up by Mint Press News, Law 360, the newswire for business lawyers, Western Journalism, the major populist right wing news website, and from there began trending across Tea Party and conservative online communities.
A few days later, Politico ran this piece by two Senators (including Grassley), familiar with Jane Kim's whistleblowing allegations. Curiously, they didn't mention the allegations made by the IRS whistleblowers quoted in my piece which at the time was trending, but they did criticise the IRS heavily for their approach to whistleblowing at the agency. Given the timing of the Politico piece, it's likely my story helped up the pressure somewhat. But more is needed if the IRS and Treasury are to be held accountable for what so many IRS employees believe amounts to high-level institutional corruption due to incestuous 'revolving door' relationships with corporate lobbies.

Behind ISIS - the "Islamic State"

My coverage of the rise of ISIS began with my Guardian op-ed, which was closely followed by a similar piece which, however, takes a slightly different tack, published via my Al-Arabiya English column.

Sadly, the general media's approach to ISIS/ISIL/IS/Islamic State/ whateverthef*ckuwannacallem has been largely lacking much critical or investigative values. If we've not had to endure the usual jingoistic cheerleading, we've instead been subjected to shallow and frivolous criticisms that often miss the point entirely.

At risk of flogging a dead horse, I decided to tackle this by undertaking two projects - firstly, a long form analytical piece that would examine the evidence in the public record around ISIS and its emergence in the context of geopolitical realities; secondly, an investigative piece to contextualise the apparent "intelligence failure" to anticipate the rise of ISIS, in the context of the way ISIS has been exploited to kill surveillance reform and justify the expansion of the military-industrial complex. 

This led to two, in-depth long-form articles. The first, 'How the west created the Islamic State.... with a little help from our friends', first published on Medium, then by Counterpunch, Truthout, and many other outlets, expands on my long-articulated (and well-documented) thesis that the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism is a co-creation of both the Western and Muslim worlds. That is somewhat of a simplification, admittedly - but I endeavour to avoid simplistifications by digging deep into the public record to piece together where ISIS actually came from: the nexus of US-UK led covert operations mobilising Islamist extremists affiliated with al-Qaeda through the financial, logistical, and military support of regional states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Turkey, Jordan and Israel. As Vice President Joe Biden himself confirmed (without, however, admitting western complicity - note, btw, the obligatory mentions in the coverage of this that Biden never said these state intended to arm terrorists....

No they did not burst out of the blue into Iraq from nowhere. No they did not spontaneously generate the ability to self-finance themselves in a way that would make most entrepreneurs salivate. No they do not even today operate as a purely non-state entity with no outside support. All these myths, routinely adopted by mainstream media pundits and even the talking head experts who court them, serve to obfuscate the reality of the unfolding crisis across Iraq-Syria and the wider Middle East. 

The next piece was first published in the stellar British magazine, Ceasefire, under the title 'Story of a War Foretold: Why We're Fighting ISIS', then printed by Counterpunch who ran it as 'How the Pentagon Exploits ISIS to Kill Surveillance Reform and Re-Occupy Iraq'. This investigative piece looked at how the Pentagon was using the spectre of ISIS to justify  the surveillance machine, the re-invasion of Iraq-Syria, the massive consolidation and expansion of intrusive new powers globally to crackdown on 'terror suspects' - including the administrator of the Pentagon's Minerva initiative. She tried to justify Minerva's co-optation of academia to develop models that might predict "insurgencies" by the intelligence community's alleged inability to predict the rise of ISIS.

This investigation showed that the intelligence community had ample warning of the rise of ISIS, knew it was coming, but did nothing - further, that the current military strategy in Iraq-Syria is bound to fail according to a range of military and intelligence experts, some active; and finally, that this failure in turn is very likely to elicit a prolongation of military operations in the region for the foreseeable future, with a great probability of ground troops. I used a range of source material - public record, press reports, official Congressional testimony, interviews with former and active British, American and Iraqi officials in military and government. 

If you want to understand what's going on in the region right now, I consider these two articles to be definitive and comprehensive primers that'll get you up to speed in an hour or so.

Are you an activist? Your tweets could kill you. I'm not joking

So I've not had a chance to update this blog as I've been up to my neck in it, but I've realised doing so has meant some of my readers haven't been able to keep up with my work. To make up for it, while I've got a few moments between sessions at the IARU Sustainability Science Congress in Copenhagen (where I gave a talk this morning), here are some updates.

First order of business is the continuation of my investigation, that began in The Guardian, into the Pentagon's co-optation of social science and academia to create new tools to track activists and political dissent. 

I followed that up with an extensive four-part investigation published by Occupy.com, which dug deeper in the activities of the Pentagon's Minerva Research Initiative, to unearth its role in funding new, cutting-edge, data-mining tools and algorithms that could be used by the intelligence community - most specifically the NSA and CIA - to analyse and track activism, political dissent and ultimately predict social unrest, via social media. 

The overarching aim is to enhance the intelligence community's capacity to automatically assess threats using these algorithms, based on integrated analysis of a person's or organisation's social media usage combined with what can be gleaned from their private communications, to create an overall picture of behavioural patterns and political propensities. 

The most worrying thing of all about all this is that according to former senior NSA executive Thomas Drake, the celebrated whistleblower who inspired Edward Snowden, these algorithms and data-mining tools are precisely the sort of algorithms used to generate targets for the CIA's drone-strike kill lists. The upshot is that if you tweet something that can be categorised as "extreme" via the dubious and imprecise threat-classifications schemes being developed for Pentagon use, you could end up on a terror watch list somewhere - or worse.

And just because you're American, don't think you'll be ok because drone strikes currently take place abroad in certain Muslim-majority countries. The other line of inquiry I explore in this in-depth series is the ongoing efforts to militarise the US homeland with drones. By September 2015, Obama has demanded that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finalise its drone regulations, so that drones can fly in US skies. Police units are already using drones borrowed from border control in places like Seattle to conduct surveillance and assist with active on-street operations. But that's not all. Apart from the police actively lobbying to arm drones with so-called "non-lethal" weapons - riot control stuff, tear gas, rubber bullets, etc. - a little-known Pentagon executive directive last year now formally gives domestic agencies the authority to use armed drones on US soil in the case of major "civil disturbances" or "emergencies" - whether natural disasters, economic or food shocks, or a terrorist attack. 

My investigation ties up the Minerva initiative in the context of the wider national security apparatus and the drive to accelerate state-military control in the face of the increasing danger of civil unrest at home and abroad, due to the escalating probability of climate, energy, economic and food crises. 

The issues uncovered in my investigation demonstrate that we are well on the path to the consolidation of the surveillance-state, with the US leading the new model of state consolidation - our every move under the watch of militarised drones; our behaviours public and private the subject of routine but extensive data-mining and behavioural analytics to predict our predisposition and gauge our threat-level to US "national security"; and the danger of political dissent being characterised as a "threat" as the state loses its legitimacy as climate, energy, economic and food crises deepen. 

Think Skynet (Terminator), meets Hydra (Captain America: Winter Soldier), meets Pre-Crime (Minority Report).

So sure, your Facebook posts, tweets, Flickr photos, etc. etc. might not be an issue right now. But they're already being mined, wholesale, to gauge your organisational affiliations and "threat-potential." In a few years time, they might just get you on that drone-strike kill list. 

Read the opening of ZERO POINT, a near future science fiction thriller

Prologue
London, United Kingdom1st February. 3:14PM GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)
            Trafalgar Square. The crowd was massive. And squeezed.  Fortified rows of riot police wielding batons, tucked behind long plastic shields, surrounded angry, squashed civilians, heaving and rolling and shouting.             “We want work! We want work!” they chanted, some shoving fists into the air, others waving banners emblazoned with pound signs crossed with skulls.            The crowd was everywhere. Swathes of angry, shouting demonstrators were hemmed in all over central London and the City. Regents Park. South Kensington. Hyde Park. Westminster, outside the Houses of Parliament. Canary Wharf. Kings Cross. It was the biggest mass protest in the UK, ever.            What had begun as a series of disparate demonstrations inspired by the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon - supposedly defeated decades ago - had spontaneously snowballed from a single occupation of Parliament Square into an unprecedented, city-wide mass rally.              Then riot police were in amongst the writhing crowd, shoving with shields and lashing out with batons. People ran and screamed, some drenched in blood, others throwing bottles and cans at the officers. Cars were aflame, shop windows cracked.             London was ablaze.           










PART I: THE FIRST CASUALTY
"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."An unnamed major in the US Army on the decision to bomb and shell the town of Ben Tre, Southern Vietnam New York Times (8 February 1968)
"The same commander who had given us the mission issued an order that everyone wearing a black distasha [long garment] and a red headscarf was automatically displaying hostile intent and a hostile action, and was to be shot. An hour or two later he gave another order, this time that everyone on the streets was considered an enemy combatant."Sergeant Jason Lemieux, US Marine Corps infantry officer serving three deployments in Iraq 2003-2006









1
2nd February. 8.32 AM
On Marylebone Road, my police motorcycle raced off the A40 minutes ahead of the Prime Minister’s car, clearing the traffic so the convoy could travel without the disruption endured by normal commuters. Two other bikes were hot on my heels.       Tensions were high. The previous day, authorities had used rubber bullets, water cannons and tear gas to disperse the new-fangled "Occupy" protestors. The operation had been a success - in the sense it had temporarily cleared the streets. But there were dozens of casualties, seven young people in critical condition, and two deaths. And the police were out in force – not just heavily armoured riot units, but even rapid response fire-arms units were on the streets, setting up check-points around the city where Occupy protests had originally gathered.             We turned left off the main road onto Lisson Grove, accelerating up the street. The third and last bike slowed, separating from the two speeding on ahead, then braked to block off the first right-junction leading toward Park Road. Its rider held out his arms, signalling the traffic to stop from both directions.             I soared past him down the road. We’d soon be caught up by a stream of heavily armed specialist police vehicles, large black Range Rovers, a couple of BMW 7-series, plus more police motorcycles, forming a moving square round the Prime Minister’s limousine.             As I drove, my radio crackled in my right ear, “Control to Charlie Echo Team. Assume your positions to clear Lisson Grove and Abbey Road. Over.” “Roger that, Delta Alpha out”, I replied, tensing over, sweating inside a florescent police jacket as my motorbike accelerated, then slowed to a halt at the main junction where Lisson Grove crossed over St. Johns Wood Road. My bike blocked the incoming lanes to the right. I held up my arm. The cars coming toward me slowed to a halt, as another officer parked his bike on the other side of the road, blocking the traffic from the opposite lanes. Within a minute another police bike sped past us to head off Abbey Road.             I waited, glancing down at my watch. 8.36 AM. Two more minutes before they’d catch up.










2                        "Latest estimate is over 2 and a half million people." Timothy Bunton leaned against the leather backseat inside the Jaguar, fingers sliding away at the tablet on his lap. He was a thin, wiry man, in his late-forties, with half-moon glasses that kept sliding down to the end of his nose, and greying hair that was receding. He pushed his glasses an inch back up his nose.            Prime Minister Daniel Carson shook his head and sighed, leaning back as his chief of staff re-played the footage of yesterday's riots. At forty-two he was younger than Timothy, with brown wavy hair and sharp, dark eyes. “This was the biggest protest we've had all year,” said Daniel. “What is it, the tenth one? When is it going to end?”            “I don't know but it's making the markets jittery," said Tim.            Daniel looked away and gazed out the window, trying to focus on the trees and the passersby. Although the riots were now the big thing on the political agenda, there were deeper things at play that required his attention. “So you were going to tell me about the consultant's latest report. What exactly is he forecasting?”             Timothy grimaced. “Nothing new, except he's now revised forward his original projections. He thinks we have anything between a few months to a year before a catastrophic supply short-fall could destabilise the economy. If he's right it would make this year’s stock market slump look like a walk in the park.”             Daniel sat very still. "A few months? I thought that kick-starting Iraqi oil production again would alleviate the problem, at least a little. That's what the Working Group told us. How wrong they were."             Daniel Carson didn't blame the public for their anger. Over the last decade - on his watch - far from recovering, the economy had sunk into the deepest depression the country had ever known. Unemployment was rocketing at 12 million. Inflation was at record levels. And the country's national debt had more than quadrupled to £5 trillion - 200 per cent of a diminishing GDP. Now it looked like all that was merely a bitter foretaste of worse to  come.             "Can it really be a coincidence that the Working Group keeps getting it wrong, every time?" continued Daniel. "I've told you this before. They’re compromised."            Timothy coughed to clear his throat, before speaking carefully. “Possibly. The consultant warned us the Group's forecasting was too conservative, but as you know sir, I had no remit to do anything.”             Daniel glared. "We should've disbanded the Group. Set up a new one."            "Little chance of that. Roy is besotted with their findings. He would've vetoed any such move, and as Home Secretary he'd have the clout to make it stick."            "Fair enough. But that's why we've got to make this meeting a success. We have to fast-track our negotiations. Otherwise, this country is going to implode. Look at what’s happening. We need to buy more time, and Iran can help us do that. The stick isn’t working. It’s time for carrots.”            Tim nodded. "Well let's just hope the Iranians see sense this time."            “They will. It's in their interests to accept a deal. Don't forget, they came to us. They're tired of isolation. This is their ticket into the international community, if not global leadership. We strike this deal now, we can craft that outcome, and be well-positioned in the aftermath.”            Tim froze. The tablet slid off his lap, clattering to the floor of the car.             "Tim?" Dan reached over, alarmed. "Are you alright?"










3
            It was damn good weather for mid-February. The sky was clear blue, bright with sunshine, the air sharp and cool, but not uncomfortable – which made a change as recently the British winters had seemed longer and stormier, the summers shorter but hotter. It was normal to get a lot of snow this time of year, though so far we'd been lucky. Passers-by on the pavement had stopped, staring to see what lay behind the police presence, as they always did. I watched them watching me, talking amongst themselves, two guys dressed in jeans and anoraks, a group of three women pushing prams across the road. Long, serene oak trees along the sidewalk loomed overhead, their leaves swaying in the breeze, concealing the apartment blocks that lined the road.             I took a deep breath and glanced at my watch again. Thirty seconds and counting. I’d been with Specialist Protection, SO1, for two years now, and it was the only job in security I could just about stand. Far more comfortable than roughing it out in the Gulf as I’d done years ago in Army intelligence, it still made some use of my skills without being too stressful. Most importantly, it didn't involve killing people. I was done with that. Instead, I was just keeping my country safe. The pay was crap, of course, but I figured I was better off than most. Though it was all too easy to get bored. Which was exactly how I liked it.            I glanced at my watch again, frowning beneath my visor. 8:39, plus 47 seconds. A little late. Not outside the security time buffer, but rare for the transport to be more than 45 seconds late for a check point - unless something came up. I glanced around, turned back and gestured at my fellow officer, Sergeant Brian Turner, on his motorbike on the opposite side. Brian just pointed at his watch and shrugged.             Then my earpiece crackled.             “Control?” I said. “Control?” I looked back at Brian and pointed at my right-ear. He just patted the side of his head, a quizzical expression on his face. I inspected my watch again. 8:40, plus 32 seconds. Almost a minute had gone. Where was the Prime Minister’s car?             “Control? Delta Alpha to Control, come in, can you hear me?” I kept pressing my earpiece. The line was dead.            I turned back to Brian and waved at him, wondering what had happened to my earpiece. Something was wrong. If there was a delay, it was protocol for us to be immediately informed by HQ. Instead the radio had gone down. I flipped up my visor. “Brian! All channels are down on my radio.”             Brian, keeping one arm facing the traffic on his side, flipped up his visor with the other hand, looked at me, and shouted, “Yours too? What the hell’s going on?”            “I don’t know”, I shouted back, glancing at my watch again. One minute and thirty. “Where the hell’s the PM’s car?”Brian shook his head. “Something’s wrong, Dave,” he shouted. I reached into my leg pocket, pulled out my mobile phone to call Control. Tyres screeched. I glanced back in surprise, then watched, stunned, as the white sedan at the traffic lights behind Brian’s bike lurched forward into him. Brian catapulted into the air as his bike tumbled to its side, skidding across the ground. The white car swerved round his bike and disappeared down Lisson Grove in a cloud of dust. Brian landed headfirst on the ground with a crack, his body bending unnaturally. I kicked my engine into gear, slammed the phone into my leg-pocket, and grabbed the handlebars. People were screaming as my bike shot forward, its roaring engine drowning out their cries. I flipped on my sirens, then flicked my wrist, careening the bike up the road. I glimpsed the white car, an old Mitsubishi Lancer, already several hundred yards ahead. Still clutching the handlebar with my left arm, I reached under for my holster with my right and swung out my Glock 19 pistol. The Mitsubishi swung expertly round two police Range Rovers heading toward us, then hurtled toward the Prime Minister’s black Jaguar behind them. The Range Rovers braked and skidded, one smashing into the other, conjoining in a mass of twisted, wailing metal that plunged onto the right-hand pavement. The wind stung my eyes. I knocked down my visor with the butt of the gun, then aimed ahead. I steadied my arm, right-eye lining up my sights, barely noticing the panicking passers-by scrambling frantically from the scene. I roared past the wreck of police vehicles on my right, squeezed the trigger, once, twice, thrice. The back window of the Mitsubishi shattered as I closed in. Too late. A deafening boom reverberated out as the car crumpled into the black limousine in front. For a moment, all I could see was a blinding white light as my ears went blank. Then a ball of fire exploded upwards and outwards, shards of black, white and blue ricocheting into the sky as the shockwave drove the air from my chest. I instinctively swerved the bike to the right and threw myself off as a river of flame cascaded across the road. The heat engulfed me as I braced myself for the impact, anchoring my arm round my chest and rolling as I hit the ground. I rolled about fifteen to twenty metres before staggering to my feet, waves of smoke and heat whipsawing around me. I heard yelling and screaming as I tripped over something and fell through a hedge. I collapsed onto the ground, hitting grass and soil, rolling around in a frenzy trying to put out the flames, coughing and spluttering. I struggled to my knees, pulling off my helmet, and looked around. I was next to a large apartment block standing in a front garden area behind a broken hedge. I shoved through the hedge back into the road and peered at the inferno about 50 yards away. Suddenly the ground erupted, blood and soil filled my mouth, and everything went black.















4           
            It was a matter of minutes before dozens of police cars, ambulances and fire engines had congregated around the explosion zone. Police helicopters circled overhead as St. John’s Wood was cordoned off by groups of armed officers wielding MP5 submachine guns. Twenty minutes on, and an even larger circumference - a huge swathe of northwest London - was locked down by police barricades. Intertwining sinews of static traffic rippled out from around the area, amidst a mass of terrified, frenzied people running, shouting, crying, standing agape.             Chief Superintendent Heather Jones watched the chaos unfold on a wall-mounted monitor from her office in Scotland Yard, as she screamed down the phone, “All available units to round up the cabinet for transport to PINDAR. Once they’re safe, all standby armed units to deploy immediately as per emergency protocol Clean Sweep to every Potential Target Area.”             She slammed down the phone, grabbed her body armour from the rack against the wall, and ran out the room. Whether or not the Prime Minister had survived the attack, there could be further attacks. Standard procedures meant that the number one priority for Specialist Operations was the protection of all ministers. As Heather slipped on her body armour, her mobile rang. She slapped the phone against her ear and snapped, “Commander Jones.”            “Heather it’s Paul.” Paul Stuart was Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Anti-Terrorism Branch.            “I’m on it, Paul”, she said, running down the corridor. “What I want to know right now, is how the hell did this happen?”            “I don’t know Heather, obviously we’re trying to figure that out.”            “It doesn’t make any sense. Who else knew about the Prime Minister’s route today?”            There was a pause on the other end. “Well, frankly, I was about to ask you the same thing.”            “What’s that supposed to mean?”            “Well, you’re Specialist Protection. If anyone’s going to have an idea how this happened, it’s you.”            “You know as well as I do that we run a tight ship here. The only way this got out is through someone Prime Minister Carson knew. It could be anyone - his advisers; hell, it could have been the people he was en route to meet.”            "Perhaps. And who were they exactly? Who was he meeting?"            She cleared her throat. "The Iranian Ambassador."             "The Iranians? Bloody hell. Well you make sure you’ve got your house in order, because someone’s going to take the fall for this - if the shit's gonna stick, it better not be on our bloody arses.”            “OK Paul. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”








5                        I opened my eyes. Shapes blurred and shimmered, before coalescing. I was on the ground.  I squinted against the burning sunlight. The back of my skull ached. I lifted my head, and winced as a sharp pain travelled down my neck.             So much for my hopes for a life of boredom. What I'd give to have that life back.            I groaned as I lifted myself, slowly, gingerly, from the cool grass. I was on the communal lawn of an apartment block. I rose to my feet and I peered over the hedge in front of me.            The street ahead looked like it had been ploughed up from underneath, a wreckage of shattered concrete and rubble. In a flash, everything rushed back. Brian, his body broken, in the air. The white Mitsubishi smashing through the Prime Minister’s escort convoy. The blast, rippling out, incinerating the Prime Minister’s car.            I stepped out, feeling slightly dazed, onto the unstable, cracked pavement into a bustling crowd of onlookers. Some of them covered in blood, wailing, crying, or just staring into space. The emergency services were obviously overwhelmed, still finding victims, casualties, in the rubble. The sight re-conjured familiar images from Iraq and Afghanistan – scattered limbs, heads, torsos. The war’s coming home. I shook my head vigorously, trying to clear my mind. Ahead, I could see the police line around the crash site where Carson’s car had exploded. There wasn’t much left. Apart from some large twisted shards of white and black metal scattered around the centre of the blast zone. Smoke and steam rose from the crumpled mounds of steel and aluminium where firefighters were still putting out the last remnants of persistent flames.            I glanced at my watch. I’d been out for about an hour. I probably hadn’t been found by the paramedics while I was unconscious because of the sheer number of casualties.This shouldn’t have happened. I needed answers. I was probably in shock. Probably concussed. As I stepped through the crowd toward the police line, I tried dialling HQ on my phone – the line was busy. Not completely surprising, but frustrating. I plunged the phone back in my pocket. A group of police officers beside a row of four police cars, armed with HK MP5K submachine guns, stood in front of the lines keeping people at bay.             I pulled out my ID as I walked toward them. One of them stepped toward me as I approached.             “Constable”, I nodded. The guy peered at my ID. “Sergeant David Ariel”, I told him. “With Specialist Protection.”             “Come through Sarge”, he said, letting me pass. I darted under the white and blue tape toward the smouldering mess that was left from the collision.             A forensic team was already on the scene, photographing the area. I walked up to the woman firing orders to her co-workers, while speaking intermittently into a small audio recording device, who I assumed must be the lead investigator. Like her colleagues, she was clothed in a stark white crime scene suit, complete with goggles, gloves, and a mouth and nose mask which she’d pulled underneath her chin.            “Excuse me, Ma’am”, I said from behind her. She stopped speaking into her mic and turned to me. I flashed her my badge.            “Hi, I’m Sergeant David Ariel.”“Sergeant,” she nodded. I could barely see her brown eyes from behind the reflective glare of her goggles. “I’m Dr. Meria Stafford, Special Investigator from the counter-terrorism forensic team. You’re not the SIO here so what can I do you for?” She spoke sharply. SIO was the senior investigating officer.“Look I was here when it all happened. I’m a member of Carson’s escort unit. Do me a favour and let me know what the hell’s going on here.”She shrugged. “We’re still trying to find that out Sergeant. Bomb disposal only secured the area about 20 minutes ago. Now I need to get on with this.” She turned back toward the wreckage.“Wait. Have you identified the bodies yet? Is anyone alive?”Her demeanour softened and she glanced back at me. “It’s a mess, Sergeant. We haven’t been able to recover bodies from the wreckage yet. Let alone identify them.”“Shit”, I muttered. It was all I could say. I wasn’t just thinking about the Prime Minister. What about the rest of our convoy? The blast radius was several dozen metres – enough to have probably hit most of my colleagues in the escort team around the PM. “Any idea about the explosives? Who could've done this?”She shrugged again. “Like I said, I’ve been working the scene for 20 minutes. I know nothing. Literally. What I can tell you is that whoever did this knew what they were doing.” She paused and gazed at the scorched crash site in front of us. Most of the scattered remnants of car that blossomed out from the crater in the road were charcoal black. What looked like soot or ash was caked all over the area. “Funny you ask about the explosives. I don’t think they were conventional.”“What do you mean?”“Look at the way the metal has melted and burned. I mean it’s all scorched through, and a lot of it has disintegrated.”I thought about it. “Why’s that weird?”“Even a tonne of conventional military-grade explosives won’t do that. There’s either some kind of added accelerant, or this is a different type of bomb entirely. I’m not sure. Maybe DU? Obviously DU isn't an explosive, but if added to a conventional explosive, it might have this sort of effect. But I'm just guessing.”Depleted uranium? I scoured the scene around me in disbelief. And then I was on the outskirts of Baghdad. I’d just exited our Challenger-2 battle tank to investigate an electrical fault with our communications equipment, putting my engineering degree to good use. “C’mon Davey, for Chrissakes get on with it,” moaned Jeff in my earpiece. Jeff Donald was the staff sergeant of our unit, but we’d been on duty together so long we were virtually on first name terms, though we still addressed Jeff as sir. “Yessir”, I said. I was a young infantry soldier and the 2003 Gulf War had already started. The sun was an unyielding blaze against an empty desert sky as I grappled with the cable on the side. I could hear the drone of an incoming American F-117A stealth fighter as I tried to identify the cause of the problem. A minute later, the craft swept over us and sliced open the horizon with a wave of bombs. I ran for cover as I screamed into my radio.“Sir, incoming! Get out of the tank! Get out of the fucking tank!” They didn’t make it. Three soldiers were incinerated by a wall of liquid flame, trapped in cages of twisted metal that boiled them like obscene ovens. I watched, unscathed.It was hours before we were found by another patrol. I don’t remember much, except the carnage that the attack had left behind was nothing but a blackened, smouldering lump. Months later, we learned that the attack was another case of mistaken friendly-fire. The stealth-fighter had dropped a load of depleted uranium shells on us, which had been used to obliterate Saddam’s ground forces – or what little he’d had of them. The internal inquiry had blamed a faulty laser targeting system. Perhaps that was true, but as far as I was concerned, it was besides the point. What the hell were we doing in Iraq in the first place? Why were we bombing the shit out of the place with depleted uranium? “Sergeant?” Dr. Stafford’s voice echoed in my head and the vision of Baghdad faded. I was back in London, but the scene before me hadn’t changed a great deal, and the horror of having watched my fellow soldiers killed by friendly fire was a permanent echo reverberating around the inside of my skull.The war had definitely come home. “Depleted uranium?” I repeated. “Are you serious?”“Well like I keep telling you, right now we just don’t know. It’s a guess, possibly a bad one. We’ll only know for sure after testing samples.”“Sorry Sergeant, can you come with me?” a voice came from behind me. It was the constable who’d let me through the police line.“Yes constable?”“Sarge, I’ve been asked by the SIO to request you to leave the crime scene. Only authorised investigators are allowed on scene. Apologies, Sir.”I wasn’t surprised, but I had hoped to learn a bit more while I was here. “That’s fine by me, constable.” “Thanks for your help”, I told Dr. Stafford, who nodded and hurried back to her colleagues. “Who’s the officer in charge, if you don’t mind me prying?” I asked as we strolled back to the police line.The constable nodded discreetly toward my right at two blokes in dark pinstripe suits at the far-end of the blast-zone, just inside the police line. “SO15, Sarge. Bloke called Wilson.” SO15 was Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism Command. “He wants a chat with you, Sir, not right now but in a bit – I told him you were with Specialist Protection. So I’m going to ask you to hang around a bit if that’s okay.”I could tell the constable felt awkward passing on the orders – I had senior rank to him. “Alright mate, I’m good,” I reassured him. “I wanted to talk to him anyway.” I sat myself down on a relatively stable piece of broken pavement, and waited in the midst of the carnage, my head still reeling. I began to worry about the flashback. I hadn't had any for at least a year. I really shouldn't be having them now. I blinked, as if each squint of my eyelids would squeeze my anxieties away. The truth is, I knew what had just happened was a major trigger.Shit. I'd assumed this job was going to be run-of-the-mill. I really didn't need this. Across the road, I noticed another dishevelled copper sitting on the ground, leaning against a half-shattered red brick wall. It was John Croft.  I got up and jogged over to him.            “John!” I yelled, then coughed, my throat dry.             John looked up at me in a daze. His forehead was covered in a bandage going half-way round his skull. “Dave.” He clambered to his feet and placed a hand on my shoulder. “How’s it going mate?”            “I’m alright, all things considered. You don’t look too good man. What happened?”             “Not sure. After the radios went down I came straight back. Something hit my head in the explosion. It knocked me out for a bit, but the paramedics sorted me out. I might have to go the hospital later, get checked out properly, but right now they’re overwhelmed. Too many victims.”             “Your radio went down, too?” I asked.            “Yeah”, he grimaced. “Doesn’t make any flipping sense. What d’you make of it?”            My frown deepened, but I shrugged. “It doesn’t add up. Whoever did this took our radios down to make sure our internal comms were fucked. I’m not sure we could’ve done anything anyway, but that guaranteed our response would be slow and confused. My question is, who could do that?”            “We need to speak to HQ. Talk to the super.” He was referring to Superintendent Heather Jones, our boss and the head of Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Protection unit.             “Shall we call her now?”            John paused. “What about Julia? You should call her asap.”              “You’re right – but let’s call Jones first.”Julia Stephenson was my girlfriend, a journalist I’d met by accident during my stint in Iraq. But the priority was getting in touch with HQ.            I pulled out my phone and noticed that Julia had texted me.             it read            I typed back: Then I pulled up the number for HQ. “I haven’t seen anyone else from our unit Dave”, said John. “Do you think -”“We don’t know”, I interrupted, slapping the phone against my ear as it started ringing. “I spoke to forensics earlier. They’re still trying to find people. We just don’t know yet.” John rubbed the palms of his hands over his face and sighed. Despite my attempts to avoid the issue, we both knew most of our unit had probably been killed in the explosion. It was difficult to believe. “Heather Jones”, came the super’s voice over the phone.“Ma’am, this is Sergeant Ariel. I’m calling you from the scene of Carson’s assassination.”“Ariel? Thank God you’re alive. What the hell happened?”“Not sure, Ma’am. Someone just collided with Carson’s car. They broke through our formation and just went for it.”“What about everyone else? How’s the team?”Once again, for a few moments I was lost for words. “There’s me and Croft here”, I stuttered. “We can’t find the others. We’ll know more soon I’m sure.”There was an unnerving silence for about half a minute.“Ma’am,” I said. “The radios went down before it happened.”“What?”“The radios. They went down before the car came through. I was right there. Brian was in front of him, then the guy just smashed into him and went past us. About a minute before that all our radios went down, just like that.”“Oh my God. Brian..." For a moment, there was silence. "Ma'am?""It's okay. Still here. Well no, the radios going down - that doesn’t make sense. I’ll look into it. Maybe it's a technical problem from our end?""Maybe. Kind of convenient timing though." "Yes, very odd." She paused again. "Look, you and Croft, get some rest. I’m coordinating the escort operation to get the Cabinet underground. I’ll be in touch later.”“Yes, ma’am.”“Listen, before I go. You should know, they’ve cordoned off a whole chunk of St. Johns Wood. It’s all locked-down. They’re not letting anyone in or out.”“What, you mean, not just the crime scene?”“No, not the crime scene, I’m talking about the local area, it’s all been locked down. I’ve been told there are lines of riot police making sure no one leaves. They’re trying to secure the area and interview as many people as possible before they let people go.”“Really? That’s heavy.”“I agree. But what’s just happened is heavier. Anyway, you guys will obviously be fine getting in and out, but I just thought you should know. We’ll speak soon.”




6
Balad, Iraq 9:45 AM GMT / 12.45 PM AST (Arabia Standard Time)                        Julia Stephenson wiped the sweat from her brow as she stalked down the corridor of the American military base, her holdall clutched in her right arm. Her dark, shoulder-length locks were tied up tight into a bun and concealed beneath a black baseball hat. A pair of fake designer glasses rested on the bridge of her nose. She shuffled in her disguise - a grey jumpsuit, standard uniform for junior staff of the contractor which provided technical services for the base.            Backing up her cover as a junior contractor, the ID pass she'd been sent by her source had worked so far. Her contact had rigged the system from inside to grant her the highest level of security clearance on the base. She wasn't surprised about that, as her source had turned up trumps several times recently. But this story, she'd been told, was big. Really big. And that was all she'd been told. The information was too sensitive to be shared in any way. If she wanted it, she'd have to get it herself. All her informant could do was give her a helping hand, and she'd have to do the rest herself.            Everything she'd needed to infiltrate the facility had been arranged, piecemeal, by her contact on base - a senior US military officer. The plan seemed foolproof, but Julia had no illusions that things could go pear shaped fast if she wasn't careful.             She nodded at the group of officers in fatigues strolling down the corridor in the opposite direction, their voices raised in casual banter. One of them winked at her, grinning. She smiled back, continuing down the corridor.            It took her a couple of minutes to arrive at the temporary intelligence archive room that had been set-up for the local JSOC unit - Joint Special Operations Command. She glanced at her watch.            12.47 PM. She exhaled, and wiped her brow again. She was on time. She'd been guaranteed that the room would be empty for an hour - all JSOC officers would be at a mission brief at a separate part of the facility. She whipped out her pass again and swiped it through. The reader beeped, and the little square flat screen beside the door flashed bright green. She leaned forward, allowing it to read her right eye. It beeped again, and the door hissed, sliding open.             She stepped in and glanced around. The door slid shut behind her. It was a small room, packed with dozens of filing cabinets. There were a couple of computer terminals on desks in the centre, but apart from that there was little else in the room.             Julia strode toward the far end and scanned the subject-headings on each filing cabinet drawer. Electronic storage was all well and good, her source had told her. But it was a legacy of the long defunct Wikileaks movement that for the most sensitive communications and memoranda, any form of electronic transfer was viewed with extreme suspicion, and files were transported in secret by armed courier.             She stopped.             NATO Allied Command Transformation. She tried to ignore the pounding sensation in her chest as she pulled open the drawer and began flicking through the internal dividers, searching for the right header.             United Kingdom - okay, nearly there. She kept flicking. UK: Threat Assessments. Okay, okay. Ah hah. She found the section dated this month, and snatched the file out of the drawer, slammed it shut, then smacked the papers onto one of the desks. She opened the file and began reading.             Her eyes widened.             She should really read this somewhere else - preferably far away from here. She unzipped her holdall, and carefully planted the file inside.            Then the door opened.             Julia froze. 

BREAKING: Security Expert & Guardian Journalist’s New Book Predicted Iraq Crisis. Author Now Warns of Intervention’s Bold Threat to Homeland Security

Having contributed to both the 9/11 Commission and the 2005 London bombings Coroner’s Inquest, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed has a unique and authoritative insight into the knock-on effects of military intervention. ‘Zero Point’, his critically-acclaimed new Sci-Fi thriller, predicted the United States’ recent bombings in Iraq and provides an alarming warning of how further US-UK military intervention could spark deadly global unrest.


For Immediate Release  London, UK – While many haven’t given the United States’ recent bombing in Iraq anything more than a passing glance through their TV, investigative journalist and international security scholar Dr Nafeez Ahmed is steadfast in his belief that the nation’s Islamic Insurgency could fight back against further UK-US action. But his research shows something far more chilling; this retaliation could destabilise the entire Middle East, North Africa, and even the West. Dr. Ahmed predicted western intervention in his gripping upcoming novel, ‘Zero Point’, and it has already become a reality.
This eagerly-awaited new science fiction thriller, inspired by true events, weaves a chillingly plausible narrative of a near future dystopia following a Fourth Iraq War, in which Britain and the United States intervene repeatedly in Iraq to crush an Islamist insurgency there and defend Western oil interests. The narrative draws on Dr. Ahmed’s first-hand experience as a security journalist, academic and government adviser to explore the self-defeating hubris of an all-powerful national security state in an era of converging environmental, energy and economic crises.

“The short-term is hope is that air strikes will save some lives from the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but the reality is that the west actually created this crisis,” explains Dr. Ahmed. “Since the 2003 Iraq invasion the US and UK have broken up large concentrations of power in the Middle East for their own gain. Coupled with their short-sighted support for al-Qaeda affiliated rebels in Syria and elsewhere backed by the Gulf regimes, things are looking pretty bad.”

Continuing, “The old adage that “it all comes down to oil” is also absolutely true. My research has shown that more military action could be put in place to simply protect our oil interests, which will inflame the crisis in the long-term and lead to possible global unrest.”

The novel stands as a fictional exploration of the current predicament and its challenges. Dr. Ahmed knows that it’s extremely timely.

“People currently have huge anxieties over the threat of terrorism, mass surveillance and the rising possibility of major civilizational crisis. The recent recession tested these fears and my narrative speculates how such civil liberties could actually be cracked down on if Iraq and wider Middle East insurgents threaten terrorist attacks on our home soil. The results could affect the entire world. Although frighteningly close to reality, my narrative does also have its exciting, fun and fantastical elements – it’s not just a story of looming destruction!” Dr. Ahmed adds.

Former NASA engineer Boyd Morrison, now an international bestselling thriller author of The Ark, The Vault, Rogue Wave, The Catalyst and The Roswell Conspiracy, is raving about Ahmed’s new book:

“Nafeez Ahmed has mined his extensive background in international security to create a fast-paced thriller that combines conspiracies, terrorism, and cutting-edge technology. Prepare to hold on for a wild ride!”

ZERO POINT will be published on 14thAugust by Curiosity Quills Press in DC, and officially launched in New York City on 18thAugust at The Henley Vaporium, 23 Cleveland Place, New York, NY 10012, United States at 7-9PM. Ahmed will be joined by journalist and philosopher Daniel Pinchbeck, founding director of the Center for Planetary Culture, and Alnoor Ladha, board member of Greenpeace International and director of The Rules.
For more information, check out the ZERO POINT website and trailer at zro.pt . Nafeez Ahmed will be touring New York City between 18th August and 1st September 2014, and Washington DC from 21st and 22nd August, and is available for interviews. Contact him on iprdoffice@gmail.com

Official Synopsis:
Mass riots
Economic meltdown
Black outs

And a new oil war in Iraq to keep the world economy afloat.

Fourth Iraq War veteran and war crimes whistleblower, David Ariel, is sick of violence, and trying to make ends meet working for police specialist protection. But after Prime Minister Carson is brutally assassinated by extremists on Ariel’s watch, he is covertly targeted by a compromised police investigation.

When forensics discover that Carson’s assassination inexplicably defied the very laws of physics, bodies drop like flies. Key witnesses are murdered in impossible circumstances.

Fleeing for his life while London is locked-down under martial law, Ariel gets a phone call from Iraq he will never forget: his estranged girlfriend, journalist Julia Stephenson, warns that the Carson killing is just the beginning of a wider plot to bring the west to its knees. Then she disappears.

Ariel’s blood-soaked race against time to track the terror cells behind Carson’s death tumbles into the cross-fire of a hidden battle between mysterious rogue intelligence agencies. Their goal: to monopolise black budget technologies which could unlock the universe’s darkest, arcane secrets.
As the world he thought he knew unravels, Ariel faces off against bent coppers, double-crossing agents, psychic killers and super soldiers to complete a black ops mission like no other: Stop Quantum Apocalypse.

About the Author:
Through his books, films and journalism, Ahmed argues that a combination of political repression, failed economic models, young disenfranchised populations and escalating resource scarcity due to energy, food and water crises are contributing to what he calls a “new age of unrest.” Instability in far apart locations from Brazil to Ukraine to Thailand – as well as Syria, Egypt and beyond – are symptoms of an accelerating “global riot epidemic” due to the end of cheap oil and intensifying climate disasters.
In March 2014, Ahmed made global headlines with his exclusive Guardian report on a NASA-funded model of the risks of civilisational collapsewhich identified how widening economic inequalities and looming resource shortages due to ecological stress could precipitate a collapse of global industrial civilisation. In a further series of exclusives this summer, Ahmed exposed how the Pentagonand UK Ministry of Defence are funding social science and data-mining projects to develop tools to track political dissent and public opposition to fossil fuels. His exclusive reporting has also included revelations on the link between NSA mass surveillance, environmental crisis, and political activism; and how US-UK covert operations and foreign policies have empowered Gulf state-backed jihadists, fanning the flames of Middle East unrest from Iraqto Egyptto Syria.
A former lecturer in international politics at Sussex and Brunel universities, Ahmed is the bestselling, award-winning author of five books on international security issues, the latest of which is A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010) – the first peer-reviewed academic work to analyse the intersection of climate change, energy depletion, food crisis, economic turbulence, international terrorism, and state-militarisation. Ahmed wrote, co-produced and presented the documentary feature film inspired by the book, The Crisis of Civilization.
Contact:Nafeez Ahmediprdoffice@gmail.com

EVENT: CRISIS AS OPPORTUNITY - ZERO POINT BOOK LAUNCH

I'm thrilled to announce that I'm launching my debut science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT, in New York on 18th August 2014, at The Henley, 7-9PM, at an exclusive dialogue event hosted by Daniel Pinchbeck, founding Director of the Center for Planetary Culture! 



An Exclusive Discussion and Book Launch with Dr Nafeez Ahmed, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alnoor Ladhna

The coming decades may look bleak at first glance - humanity stands on the brink of a precipice consisting of multiple, overlapping crises: escalating climate change, the melting Arctic, rocketing inequality and persistent poverty, a deepening and looming global food crisis, the proliferation of extremism whether it be far right fascism or religious fundamentalism, ongoing military interventionism, and the rise of the global police state and mass surveillance in the name of fighting a seemingly endless 'war on terror'.

In this exclusive dialogue, author, journalist and philosopher Daniel Pinchbeck - director of the Center for Planetary Culture, Alnoor Ladhna - director of The Rules and Greenpeace board member, and investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed - Guardian writer, security expert, explore how the crisis of civilization offers unprecedented hope for a transition to a new, thriving form of post-carbon, post-capitalist prosperity. What can we do, as individuals and communities, to grasp the reigns of history and, collectively, change the direction of our civilization?

The event is also a launch for Ahmed's new science fiction thriller opus, ZERO POINT, set after a Fourth Iraq War in which the US and UK governments intervene repeatedly in Iraq to put down an al-Qaeda insurgency, with devastating unforeseen consequences at home and abroad. Copies of ZERO POINT will be for sale, and Nafeez will be signing them.

Watch the ZERO POINT official trailer:





About Nafeez Ahmed:
Nafeez (http://nafeezahmed.com/) is a bestselling British author , international security scholar and investigative journalist. He writes for The Guardian on the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises, and has contributed to two major terrorism investigations in the US and UK. His latest book and film on The Crisis of Civilization can be found at http://crisisofcivilization.com/ Nafeez's books, journalism, and films aim to catalyse social change in the public interest by harnessing radical, systemic approaches to understanding the interconnections between the world's biggest problems, while developing holistic strategies for social transformation.



About Daniel Pinchbeck:
Daniel is an American journalist and philosopher applying vision, creativity, and systems thinking toward the shaping of an ethically and ecologically viable society. His latest book is Notes from the Edge Times (Penguin, 2010) He has written widely on contemporary crises and opportunities for transition, and has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, ArtForum, The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, among many others. He is founding Director of the Center for Planetary Culture (http://planetaryculture.com/), a new hybrid think tank advancing ideas and solutions to our most challenging ecological, social and political issues.



About Alnoor Ladha:
Alnoor Ladha is a co-founder of The Rules, a global collective of activists and organisers focused on addressing the root causes of inequality and poverty. He is also a board member of Greenpeace International, USA, and Partner/Head of Strategy at Purpose, an incubator for new types of social movements. Alnoor has created pro-social organizational strategies for Amnesty International, MTV Exit, Google, the United Nations Foundation, the Gates Foundation, among others. He has written for The New York Times, Fast Company, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and The Economist, among others.



Location: The Henley, 23 Cleveland Place, New York, NY 10012, United States
Date/Time: 18th August, 7-9PM

Mass surveillance, political dissent, and the coming open source revolution

Over the last two weeks, I've authored a series of investigative Guardian articles connecting up the increasing propensity of the national security system to criminalise political dissent with the growing recognition of environmental, economic and energy crises. My latest post follows up those somewhat disturbing stories with an immensely powerful and positive vision for 'open source everything', articulated by former senior CIA spy Robert David Steele, widely recognised in the international intelligence community as the pioneer of the practice of Open Source Intelligence. 
The first piece in this series focuses on the US. The story investigates how a little-known Pentagon-funded social science research programme partnering with universities up and down the United States (and around the world) is sponsoring academic research to track the danger of new threats in an age of uncertainty due to new risks. Most prominent in this programme is the tendency of the research to view all political dissent as a source of potential terrorism. Social science is being co-opted to develop innovate new research, analytical and data-mining tools that can be mobilised quickly in field operations to track peaceful activists, social movements, and NGOs. 
The second story extends this investigation to the UK, highlighting how Britain's major research councils have been co-opted by Ministry of Defence and related UK government officials, once again with a view to fund research which is demonstrably concerned with generating information that can be operationally useful for government defence priorities, as opposed to supporting the sort of sound, critical and independent scholarship so sorely needed in the social sciences (and particularly in social science research on government counter-terrorism policies). As with the US case, analysis of little-known official government planning documents demonstrates that the Ministry of Defence's thinking in response to the convergence of major global environmental, energy and economic crises is increasingly regressive. Lacking a holistic, systemic and causal approach to gauging the nature of these crises, the MoD ends up projecting anti-capitalist activists, black and ethnic minority groups, immigrants, Muslim minorities, and Muslim-majority populations abroad all as potential security threats to the integrity of the functioning of global capitalism.
The third story in this series is an extended interview with Robert Steele, former CIA case officer and co-founder of the US Marine Corps Intelligence Command, where he was civilian deputy director. Steele, the author of The Open Source Everything Manifesto (North Atlantic Books, 2012), offers his insights on what he believes are the preconditions for revolution in the US and UK (and much of the west), and the prospects for challenging state corruption and corporate domination of the global commons. Steele's vision is an exciting one, and demonstrates that the counter-movement of open source everything holds the real possibility of transforming the current order for the benefit of all. Most striking is his expert assessment that the pre-conditions for revolution in the west already exist - all we need, he says, is our 'Tunisian fruitseller'.

Who the hell are the Henry Jackson Society?

When I tell people about the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), most of them give me a blank look. Henry who? And why should a whole society be erected around some dude called Henry?

When I explain to them that HJS is actually a little known but powerful right-wing British think-tank set up with the support of American neoconservatives, understanding begins to dawn. 

Except, just how much influence HJS wields in policymaking circles is an open question, the fact that it is extremely well-connected with the financial, business, political, security and energy industry elite in the US and UK speaks volumes about their agenda and objectives.

While touting their support for freedom, liberalism and democratisation as their core organisational remit, in practice they appear to be a neocon trojan horse for the very opposite: state-expansionism, state-militarisation, interventionism, rampant market deregulation and privatisation in the interests of Western investors, coupled with anti-Muslim hostility and white supremacism. 

What's particularly shocking is that their pursuit of the latter is not exactly something deeply hidden, but is - for the most part - easily verifiable from the public record, with a little digging. The kind of digging that sadly my media colleagues seem to have not considered to be very important.

Recently, I've put out three major pieces linked to the Henry Jackson Society's dubious 'freedom promotion' via The Guardian. I collect them all here for your reference as they form a coherent whole that demonstrates HJS' pivotal coordinating role within a wide Anglo-American web of neoconservative power which is increasingly attempting to steer the ideology and policy decisions of global leaders in the regressive and counterproductive direction that apparently suits a tiny minority, but not the rest of us. 

The first, 'What climate denial, oil addiction and xenophobia have in common: neocons', points out the connection between HJS and the American far-right nutty 'news' service known as 'Breitbart'. The second, 'Think tank behind Tory foreign policy promotes Arab world fossil fuel hegemony', focuses squarely on HJS, the neocon social networks it represents, and the narrow interests it caters for. The third, 'Inclusive capitalism is Trojan Horse to quell coming global revolt', drives a stake into the heart of HJS' claims to be seeking meaningful economic 'reforms' in the public interest, as opposed to token PR schemes to continue corporate profit-maximisation while manufacturing public consent. Many didn't know that HJS was a key coordinator of the 'Initiative for Inclusive Capitalism' which brought together global financial leaders from across the spectrum to voice recognition of the urgent need for change (notably without, however, offering meaningful mechanisms for actual change beyond flowery verbiage).

That is not to say that everyone associated with HJS necessarily understands or agrees with their narrow, regressive and xenophobic vision. Indeed, part of the problem here - one that those who have studied the rise of the neoconservative movement in the US are well aware of - is that there has been a concerted effort by this disparate network of movers and shakers to influence public policy in the direction of their favoured ideology. That neocon movement continues to be active in the Obama administration, despite its Democrat colours, precisely due to the success of this neocon endeavour over the last decades to consolidate access to key institutions and structures. 

This is why it is hugely important to understand that HJS and the interests it represents are so out of whack with not only what the vast majority of the public would agree with or desire, but even what most policymakers would want to see happening in the world.

ZERO POINT Official Trailer and Website Launched!

I'm excited to announce that the official trailer for my forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT, is now up, along with the rather spiffing new website right here at zro.pt.

And I'm equally excited to let you know that ZERO POINT is now available for pre-order direct from my publisher, Curiosity Quills Press. Yes, you can order your paperback copy of ZERO POINT right now and make sure it's shipped to you before the official launch date of 14th August.

ZERO POINT is a somewhat different kind of novel to what you might normally read. It's inspired, thoroughly, by true events. Even the wackiest stuff that happens takes inspiration from little-known real world craziness. It offers a plausible scenario of near future political intrigue and social polarisation that aims to unearth, using the tools of speculative fiction, the risks and dangers of continuing business-as-usual on a finite planet. It's also, as I hope the trailer conveys, a lot of fun.

You can watch the trailer here:



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