U.S. intercepts Iranian order for attack on U.S. interests in Iraq: report

The American embassy in Baghdad was a likely target, according to unnamed U.S. officials quoted by the newspaper. The Journal said the officials did not describe the range of potential targets indicated by the intelligence.

In addition, the State Department issued a warning on Thursday telling U.S. citizens to avoid all but "essential" travel to Iraq.

President Barack Obama has asked the U.S. Congress to back his plan for limited strikes in response to a chemical weapons attack on civilians that the United States blames on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

The Journal reported that the Iranian message was intercepted in recent days and came from the head of the Revolutionary Guards' Qods Force. The newspaper said the message went to Iranian-supported Shi'ite militia groups in Iraq.

The Journal reported that the message informed Shi'ite groups to be prepared to respond with force after any U.S. military strike on Syria.

"Travel within Iraq remains dangerous given the security situation," according to the State Department's warning, which replaced an earlier one "to update information on security incidents and to remind U.S. citizens of ongoing security concerns in Iraq, including kidnapping and terrorist violence."

The department said that numerous insurgent groups, including al Qaeda's Iraq affiliate, remain active and "terrorist activity and sectarian violence persist in many areas of the country at levels unseen since 2008."

It added: "The ability of the embassy to respond to situations in which U.S. citizens face difficulty, including arrests, is extremely limited."

The State Department declined immediate comment. The CIA declined comment.

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria; Reporting by Will Dunham and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Eric Walsh)

Report: Iran plots reprisals if U.S. acts

An Iranian official reportedly orders militants to attack U.S. interests in Baghdad in the event of a strike on Syria.
Intercepted message

World leaders at the G20 summit on Friday failed to bridge their bitter divisions over US plans for military action against the Syrian regime, as Washington slammed Moscow for holding the UN Security Council "hostage" over the crisis.

Despite not being on the original agenda of the summit hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin outside Saint Petersburg, the leaders discussed the Syria crisis into the early hours of the morning over dinner amid the splendour of a former imperial palace.

Putin has emerged as one of the most implacable critics of military intervention against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over an alleged chemical weapons attack on August 21, saying any such move without UN blessing would be an aggression.

There was no breakthrough at the dinner as leaders, including US President Barack Obama, presented their positions on the Syria crisis which only confirmed the extent of global divisions on the issue, participants said.

"The differences of opinions of the leaders were confirmed during the dinner," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

"Some states were defending the view that rushed measures should be taken, overlooking legitimate international institutions. Other states appealed not to devalue international law and not to forget that only the UN Security Council has the right to decide on using force," he added.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin wraps a blanket around German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Peter …

A high-ranking source close to the talks said there was a disappointing lack of ambition at the dinner on the Syria issue, noting that Putin as host was keen not to aggravate tensions further.

But a French diplomatic source said the objective of the dinner "was an exchange between the top world leaders and not to come to an agreement".

The dinner went on into the small hours of the morning and even after a late-night opera show, Putin and British Prime Minister David Cameron had a meeting to discuss the Syria situation, the Kremlin said.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon Friday also warned that military strikes could spark further sectarian violence in the country which he said is suffering from a humanitarian crisis "unprecedented" in recent history.

"I must warn that ill-considered military action could cause serious and tragic consequences, and with an increased threat of further sectarian violence," Ban said.

The Syria crisis and prospect of military intervention has overshadowed the official agenda of the summit of leaders of the world's top economies and emerging markets to stimulate growth and battle tax avoidance.

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US President Barack Obama attends the first working meeting at the G20 in Saint Petersburg on Septem …

It was not immediately clear if the leaders would have another chance to discuss Syria on the summit's second day or if the main session would focus on purely economic issues.

Several Western states share Putin's opposition to military action and after the British parliament voted against strikes, France is the only power to have vowed it will join American intervention.

Obama is seeking backing from Congress for military action, putting back the timetable for strikes which had been anticipated even before the two day-summit got under way on Thursday.

The US president held a bilateral meeting Friday morning with President Xi Jinping of China, who like Russia vehemently opposes military action against Syria.

Even as the leaders were setting out their arguments at the dinner, the US ambassador to the United Nations in New York launched a lacerating attack on Russia for holding the Security Council "hostage" over its backing of Assad.

"Even in the wake of the flagrant shattering of the international norm against chemical weapons use, Russia continues to hold the council hostage and shirk its international responsibilities," Samantha Power told reporters.

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Fireworks and laser effects during a musical aqua show in Peterhof palace during the G20 summit near …

Amid a new low in US-Russia tensions, no bilateral meeting as been scheduled between Putin and Obama although officials have left the door open for some informal contact.

According to US intelligence, more than 1,400 people living in rebel-held suburbs of Damascus were killed in the August 21 chemical weapons attack, which involved the use of sarin nerve gas.

The US says the Assad regime was responsible, a claim not accepted by Russia.

Cameron told BBC TV from the G20 summit that Britain had further evidence of the use of chemical weapons in the attack in samples its experts had tested.

With the clock ticking down to strikes, Russia said Syria's Foreign Minister Walid Muallem would travel to Moscow for talks on Monday.

The two-and-a-half year conflict between Assad and rebels, which began as a popular uprising, has left more than 100,000 people dead.

About a third of Syria's pre-war 20.8 million population has fled abroad or have been forced from their homes, according to the UN refugee agency.


World powers fail to heal Syria rift at G20

Leaders discuss the crisis until the early hours over dinner but can't overcome deep divisions.
U.S. says Russia holding U.N. 'hostage'

Suspected Taliban in Afghanistan shot dead Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, whose book about her dramatic escape from the militants in the 90s became a Bollywood film, police said on Thursday.

Police in insurgency-hit Paktika province, in the east of Afghanistan, said they found the body of the 49 year old on Thursday morning, after the militants dragged her out of her husband's home late in the night and shot her repeatedly.

"We found her bullet-riddled body near a madrassa on the outskirts of Sharan city (the provincial capital) this morning," provincial police chief Dawlat Khan Zadran told AFP, confirming earlier reports from Indian media.

Banerjee's book "Kabuliwala's Bengali Wife", about her escape from the Taliban, was made into a Bollywood film in 2003.

Police suggested the book may have been the reason the militants went after her.

"Our investigation... indicates that the militants had grievances against her for something she had written or told in the past," the provincial police chief said.

"She had been shot 20 times and some of her hair had been ripped off by the militants," Zadran said, adding that masked men had tied up the writer and her Afghan husband before executing her.

The Taliban, who have been waging a bloody insurgency since the toppling of their regime in late 2001, were not reachable for comment.

Banerjee was married to local businessman Jaanbaz Khan and had recently moved back to live with him in Paktika, reportedly to run a health clinic for women there.

Sanjana Roy Choudhury, a publisher from Hay House India, told AFP: "It was courageous of her to have written about her escape from Afghanistan.

"She married an Afghani and in trying to live a life with her husband there, this is the price she paid. It's a brave voice that's been quietened."

Bengali writer Samaresh Majumdar added: "Her book recounting her life in Afghanistan and her escape revealed the situation in the country.

"She risked her life by returning to Afghanistan. It was akin to committing suicide."

In an article Banerjee wrote for Outlook magazine in 1998, she said that she went to her inlaws' village in Afghanistan in 1989 but was trapped there after her husband made an urgent business trip to India and failed to return.

"Life was tolerable until the Taliban crackdown in 1993", when the militants ordered her to close a dispensary she was running, she said.

Banerjee made several attempts to escape Afghanistan and in 1994 she made it to Pakistan's capital Islamabad, but her husband's family tracked her down and took her back to Afghanistan.

"They kept me under house arrest and branded me an immoral woman. The Taliban threatened to teach me a lesson. I knew I had to escape," she wrote.

She later made another attempt to escape the family village.

"One night, I made a tunnel through the mud walls of the house and fled. Close to Kabul, I was arrested. A 15-member group of the Taliban interrogated me. Many of them said that since I had fled my husband's home, I should be executed," she wrote.

"However, I was able to convince them that since I was an Indian I had every right to go back to my country.

"The interrogation continued through the night. The next morning I was taken to the Indian embassy from where I was given a safe passage.

"Back in Kolkata I was reunited with my husband. I don't think he will ever be able to go back to his family."

Award-winning Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi said Banerjee's death "is a loss to Bengali literature. Her life was threatened in Afghanistan. She should not have risked her life".

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Security Agency, working with the British government, has secretly been unraveling encryption technology that billions of Internet users rely upon to keep their electronic messages and confidential data safe from prying eyes, according to published reports based on internal U.S. government documents.

The NSA has bypassed or altogether cracked much of the digital encryption used by businesses and everyday Web users, according to reports Thursday in The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and the nonprofit news website ProPublica. The reports describe how the NSA invested billions of dollars since 2000 to make nearly everyone's secrets available for government consumption.

In doing so, the NSA built powerful supercomputers to break encryption codes and partnered with unnamed technology companies to insert "back doors" into their software, the reports said. Such a practice would give the government access to users' digital information before it was encrypted and sent over the Internet.

"For the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies," according to a 2010 briefing document about the NSA's accomplishments meant for its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Security experts told the news organizations such a code-breaking practice would ultimately undermine Internet security and leave everyday Web users vulnerable to hackers.

The revelations stem from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who sought asylum in Russia this summer. His leaks, first published by the Guardian, revealed a massive effort by the U.S. government to collect and analyze all sorts of digital data that Americans send at home and around the world.

Those revelations prompted a renewed debate in the United States about the proper balance between civil liberties and keeping the country safe from terrorists. President Barack Obama said he welcomed the debate and called it "healthy for our democracy" but meanwhile criticized the leaks; the Justice Department charged Snowden under the federal Espionage Act.

Thursday's reports described how some of the NSA's "most intensive efforts" focused on Secure Sockets Layer, a type of encryption widely used on the Web by online retailers and corporate networks to secure their Internet traffic. One document said GCHQ had been trying for years to exploit traffic from popular companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook.

GCHQ, they said, developed "new access opportunities" into Google's computers by 2012 but said the newly released documents didn't elaborate on how extensive the project was or what kind of data it could access.

Even though the latest document disclosures suggest the NSA is able to compromise many encryption programs, Snowden himself touted using encryption software when he first surfaced with his media revelations in June.

During a Web chat organized by the Guardian on June 17, Snowden told one questioner that "encryption works." Snowden said that "properly implemented strong crypto systems" were reliable, but he then alluded to the NSA's capability to crack tough encryption systems. "Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it," Snowden said.

It was unclear if Snowden drew a distinction between everyday encryption used on the Internet — the kind described in Thursday's reports — versus more-secure encryption algorithms used to store data on hard drives and often requires more processing power to break or decode. Snowden used an encrypted email account from a now-closed private email company, Lavabit, when he sent out invitations to a mid-July meeting at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport.

The operator of Lavabit LLC, Ladar Levison, suspended operations of the encrypted mail service in August, citing a pending "fight in the 4th (U.S.) Circuit Court of Appeals." Levison did not explain the pressures that forced him to shut the firm down but added that "a favorable decision would allow me to resurrect Lavabit as an American company."

The government asked the news organizations not to publish their stories, saying foreign enemies would switch to new forms of communication and make it harder for the NSA to break. The organizations removed some specific details but still published the story, they said, because of the "value of a public debate regarding government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of Americans and others."

Such tensions between government officials and journalists, while not new, have become more apparent since Snowden's leaks. Last month, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said that British government officials came by his newspaper's London offices to destroy hard drives containing leaked information. "You've had your debate," one UK official told him. "There's no need to write any more."

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Associated Press writer Stephen Braun contributed to this report.

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Follow Jack Gillum on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jackgillum

Report: NSA cracks most online encryption

U.S. and British intelligence agencies have reportedly figured out how to foil most privacy safeguards.
Revelations from Snowden docs

WASHINGTON (AP) — Persuading first-term Republicans in the House is President Barack Obama's toughest sell on military strikes against Syria.

Many of the three dozen freshmen come from solidly GOP districts where voters have a deep distrust of the president on health care and immigration. Members of the Washington establishment just a few months, the freshmen barely know Obama, as his invitations to exclusive White House dinners, part of the president's postelection charm offensive, have been to senators only.

For these first-termers, their only brush with the president came in March when Obama visited Capitol Hill to talk with all House Republicans. Today he's asking them to vote for war, and their reluctance highlights the president's daunting task in securing congressional approval.

"I haven't heard a word about how the targeted, limited strikes protect America's national security," Indiana Rep. Jackie Walorski said in an interview. "How does this fit into a long-term plan for the Middle East? What is the endgame? Giving (Syrian President Bashar) Assad two weeks to move all his weaponry around while we sit here and do whatever the president's doing? I've got a lot of questions; my district has got a lot of questions."

The congresswoman said the president needs to make the case to a wary American public and Congress. "That's not yet been done," said Walorski, a House Armed Services Committee member who described herself as undecided.

Among the Republican freshmen class of 37, including returning members such as Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Steve Stockman of Texas, at least six lawmakers have said they would vote against giving Obama the authority to use military force against Syria, two have announced their support and the rest remain undecided. The president faces growing congressional opposition from Republicans and Democrats even though a Senate committee delivered crucial support with a narrow vote Wednesday for force.

Three members of the Senate Armed Services announced their opposition on Thursday: Republicans David Vitter of Louisiana and Mike Lee of Utah, and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. An Associated Press survey found 36 senators in support, 29 against and 35 undecided ahead of votes next week.

The president has argued that a limited military response is warranted after chemical weapons attacks that the administration says killed more than 1,400 civilians, including at least 400 children. The Syrian government denies responsibility, contending that rebels fighting to topple the Assad government were to blame.

Rep. Trey Radel, R-Fla., a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and an announced 'no' vote, challenged Obama's argument that the credibility of the international community and Congress was on the line.

"Did we have credibility under Ronald Reagan?" Radel said in an interview. "Chemical weapons under Saddam Hussein were used in 1987 and we did nothing and I do not think that our credibility was compromised in any way, shape or form."

Radel is one House freshman who has had a personal connection with Obama, albeit brief.

"I got to shake his hand, meet him, actually shared a little moment," Radel said, recalling the GOP conference meeting in March. "I lived in Chicago a couple of years and I know for a fact that he used to frequent a blues club where I'd hang out."

Another Republican freshman, Oklahoma Rep. Markwayne Mullin, said in a statement that "it is not the responsibility of the United States to get involved in a country's civil war. Neither side in this civil war has the United States' best interest in mind."

Two GOP freshmen said they would support military action: Rep. Luke Messer of Indiana, president of the freshman class, and Rep. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran who is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor. Messer warned the administration that it must do more to rally support.

"America doesn't like to watch bullies stand by and do evil things to their people. But the American people inherently understand, intuitively understand, that there are high risks to action here too," Messer told Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs chairman, at a House hearing Wednesday.

"And if I were to make a suggestion, I think we've got a lot of work to do to help the American people understand why the risks of action are less than the risk of inaction," he said.

The top two Republicans in the House — Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia — support Obama on limited military action against Syria, but rank-and-file Republicans have repeatedly bucked the leadership this year, at least on domestic issues. A vote to authorize military force is a matter of conscience in which leadership is unlikely to pressure lawmakers.

Defense hawks such as Sen. John McCain, the GOP's 2008 presidential nominee and an aggressive proponent of military strikes, have little sway with House Republicans, especially the 100-plus who were elected in the past two elections. Many of the tea party-driven 2010 class and the 2012 lineup comprise the GOP's noninterventionist wing.

Potentially influential with freshmen is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. In a statement this week, the organization urged lawmakers to back military force, saying, "Barbarism on a mass scale must not be given a free pass."

A large delegation of AIPAC members plan to press lawmakers on Capitol Hill next week.

Walorski, the Indiana freshman, was part of a congressional group that traveled to Israel last month on a trip sponsored by the education foundation of AIPAC.

"We were standing on the Syrian border two weeks ago and the artillery fire — you could hear it, you could feel it in your feet, you could feel it in your chest, nonstop," Walorski said.

New York Rep. Chris Collins recalled staring across the Golan Heights into Syria.

"The Israeli position will carry some weight with me," Collins said in an interview. "They are the country that would bear the brunt of any kind of retaliation."

One group still not sold on Syria attack

House GOP freshmen all come from solidly Republican areas and have had very limited interactions with the president.
'My district has ... questions'