凍結 天然氣 火車

Air Force punished Delaware mortuary whistle-blowers

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Probe: Air Force punished Delaware mortuary whistle-blowers

by Robert Burns - Jan. 31, 2012 10:29 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Federal investigators have concluded that Air Force officials at the military mortuary in Dover, Del., illegally punished four civilian workers for blowing the whistle on the mishandling of body parts of dead troops.

The Office of Special Counsel said in a report released Tuesday that they have recommended to the Air Force that it discipline the three officials who allegedly retaliated against the whistle-blowers. The three were not identified by name. It said one is an active-duty military member and the other two are civilians.

Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said in a statement that he has appointed a two-star general to review the findings and take "appropriate action." Donley said reprisals against whistle-blowers are unacceptable.

Donley said he and the Air Force's top officer, Gen. Norton Schwartz, "believe strongly there is no place for reprisal in the Air Force. Reprisals against employees are unethical and illegal and counter to Air Force core values."

In an earlier investigation report released last November, the Office of Special Counsel said it had found "gross mismanagement" at the Dover facility, where small body parts of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan were lost on two occasions. The Air Force said at the time that it took disciplinary action -- but did not fire -- three senior supervisors there for their role in the mismanagement. The reprisal accusations were a separate matter and were investigated by the Special Counsel under the Whistleblower Protection Act.

The three disciplined in connection with the earlier Special Counsel included Air Force Col. Robert Edmondson, who commanded the Dover mortuary at the time of the incidents, and two civilian supervisors -- Trevor Dean and Quinton Keel.

Edmondson was given a letter of reprimand, denied a job commanding a unit at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., and barred from future command. Dean and Keel took a cut in pay and were moved to non-supervisory jobs at Dover. All three have declined comment.

Although the names of the three accused of retaliating against the whistle-blowers were not made public, two officials said they are Edmondson, Dean and Keel. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of privacy restrictions.

Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who wrote to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last September inquiring about alleged problems at Dover, before the loss of body parts was made public, said Tuesday that Donley should fire those who retaliated against the whistle-blowers.

Laser guided bullets

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'Self-guided' bullet can hit target a mile away

Feb. 1, 2012 12:02 PM

Associated Press

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Sandia National Laboratories engineers have invented a bullet that directs itself to a target like a tiny guided missile and can hit a target more than a mile away, the New Mexico-based lab announced Tuesday,

According to Sandia Labs engineers, the bullet twists and turns to guide itself toward a laser-directed point. It can make up to thirty corrections per second while in the air, officials said.

Sandia technical staff member Jim Jones said he thinks the .50-caliber bullets would work well with military machine guns, so soldiers could hit their mark faster and with precision.

"We've tested gunpowders to see if we can get muzzle velocity for military interest," Jones told KRQE-TV (http://bit.ly/zWnd2n). "We've tested various electronic components to see if they would survive the launch."

Testing has shown the bullet can reach speeds of 2,400 feet per second. Researchers said they were confident the bullet could reach standard military speeds using customized gunpowder.

Computer simulations showed an unguided bullet under real-world conditions could miss a target more than a half mile away. But according to the patent, a guided bullet would get within eight inches.

Sandia Labs is seeking a private company partner to complete testing of the prototype and bring a guided bullet to the marketplace. Research and development grants have taken the project this far.

Researchers have had initial success testing the design in computer simulations and in field tests of prototypes, built from commercially available parts, Jones said.

Sandia Labs said the design for the 4-inch-long bullet includes an optical sensor in the nose to detect a laser beam on a target. The sensor sends information to guidance and control electronics that use an algorithm in an eight-bit central processing unit to command electromagnetic actuators. These actuators steer tiny fins that guide the bullet to the target.

Sandia Labs said potential customers for the bullet could include the military, law enforcement and recreational shooters.

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Sandia Labs' bullet doesn't miss

Scientists patent self-guided bullet

Updated: Tuesday, 31 Jan 2012, 7:50 PM MST

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have invented a bullet that guides itself to the target.

Sandia has wide expertise at miniature technology, and the bullet works like a tiny guided missile.

The patented design doesn't shoot straight. Instead of a spiral rotation, the bullet twists and turns to guide itself towards a laser directed point. It can make up to thirty corrections per second while in the air.

Jim Jones, distinguished member of technical staff, and his team of engineers at Sandia Labs think the .50-caliber bullets would work well with military machine guns so soldiers could hit their mark faster and with precision.

"We've tested gunpowders to see if we can get muzzle velocity for military interest," Jones said. "We've tested various electronic components to see if they would survive the launch."

The team needs a sponsor to take the prototype and manufacture it on a commercial scale. Research and development grants have taken the project this far.

Jones says it's about halfway through being fully developed for commercial use.

The military pays very well.

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Some top military brass making more in pension than pay

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY

A change in federal law to keep experienced officers in uniform allows top generals and admirals to make more in retirement than they did on active duty, Pentagon and congressional records show.

The new pension rules were part of the 2007 Defense Authorization Act to address concerns that the military would lose too many experienced generals and admirals during wartime.

Previously, the maximum annual pension was based on an officer's pay at 26 years of service. Now, a four-star officer retiring in 2011 with 38 years' experience would get a yearly pension of about $219,600, a jump of $84,000, or 63% beyond what was once allowed. A three-star officer with 35 years' experience would get about $169,200 a year, up about $39,000, or 30%.

The highest pension, $272,892, is paid to a retired four-star officer with 43 years of service, according to the Pentagon. Before the law was changed, the typical pension for a retired four-star officer was $134,400. The top pay for an active-duty officer is capped at $179,900; housing and other allowances boost their compensation by another third.

"These changes cumulatively provide consistent recognition across an individual's entire career, not just the first 26 years of service," Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said. "This recognition also translates into increased readiness through the increased retention of our most experienced leaders."

The Project on Government Oversight, which looks at waste in government, said the pensions were too much.

"At a time when the Pentagon is struggling to pay for the men and women who actually fight wars, and is shrinking the size of its fighting force and civilian employees, it doesn't make sense to nearly double the size of a retired four-star's pension," said Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the group.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said that retirement benefits will have to be re-examined in light of lean budgets in coming years.

There are 146 three-star officers and 44 four-star officers receiving the higher pensions.

Increasing pension payments to the most-senior officers is unlikely to encourage them to stay in the military, said Beth Asch, an expert at the RAND Corp. But, she said, it may entice younger officers to remain in the military if the future payoff for doing so is substantial.

U.S. has expanded no-fly list

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U.S. has expanded no-fly list

by Eileen Sullivan - Feb. 2, 2012 11:58 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration has more than doubled, to about 21,000 names, its secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to or within the United States, including about 500 Americans, the Associated Press has learned.

The government lowered the bar for being added to the list, even as it says it's closer than ever to defeating al-Qaida.

The size of the government's secret no-fly list has jumped from about 10,000 in the past year, according to government figures provided to the AP.

The surge comes as the government says it's close to defeating al-Qaida, after killing many of its senior members. But senior officials said the threat does not stop there.

"As long as we sustain the pressure on it, we judge that core al-Qaida will be of largely symbolic importance to the global jihadist movement," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress on Thursday. "But regional affiliates and, to a lesser extent, small cells and individuals will drive the global jihad agenda."

Those are the people added to the no-fly list, current and former counterterrorism officials said. Most are from other countries; about 500 are Americans.

"Both U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement communities and foreign services continue to identify people who want to cause us harm, particularly in the U.S. and particularly as it relates to aviation," Transportation Security Administrator John Pistole said in an interview.

Affiliated terror groups in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Algeria and elsewhere, as well as individuals who ascribe to al-Qaida's beliefs -- "All are in the mix," said Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. "And no one is claiming that they are shrinking."

The flood of new names began after the failed Christmas 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner.

The government lowered the standard for putting people on the list and then scoured its filesfor anyone who qualified.

The government will not disclose who is on itslist or why someone might have been placed on it.

Among the most significant new standards is that now a person doesn't have to be considered only a threat to aviation to be placed on the no-fly list.

People who are considered a broader threat to domestic or international security or who attended a terror training camp also are included, said a U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.

The Christmas attack led to other changes in how the U.S. assembles its watch list.

Intelligence agencies across the government reviewed old files to find people who should have been on the government's terror watch list all along, plus those who should be added because of the new standards put in place to close security gaps.

After the Christmas attack, "We learned a lot about the watch-listing process and made strong improvements, which continue to this day," said Timothy Healy, director of the Terrorist Screening Center, which produces the no-fly list.

As agencies complete the reviews of their files, the pace of growth is expected to slow, the counterterrorism official said.

Terror-related developments

The remains of a top leader of the regional Jemaah Islamiyah terror network have not been found, the Philippine military said today, a day after announcing that he had been killed in a U.S.-backed airstrike. Troops on the ground were still searching the jungle camp that was hit Thursday for the body of Malaysian Zulkifli bin Hir, also known as Marwan. At least 15 people were killed in the dawn strike on a militant camp on Jolo Island, including two other high-level leaders.

The Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people during the Fort Hood shooting rampage will go on trial in June, a military judge ruled after agreeing to a three-month delay. Attorneys for Maj. Nidal Hasan argued during a hearing at the Army post in Texas that they still lacked key evidence needed to prepare for the March trial.

The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for signs of Iranian terrorists, according to interviews and a newly obtained secret police document. The document reveals that NYPD intelligence officers listed a dozen mosques from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs. None has been linked to terrorism.

-- Wire services

The administration’s muddled message on Afghanistan

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The administration’s muddled message on Afghanistan

By Editorial Board, Published: February 2

IT’S BECOMING increasingly difficult to reconcile the Obama administration’s military and diplomatic initiatives on Afghanistan. Last month, the State Department unveiled a “fight and talk” strategy that could involve the transfer of senior Taliban commanders from Guantanamo Bay to Qatar. The aim, officials said, was to induce Taliban leaders to accept what they have repeatedly rejected: talks with the Afghan government and a peace settlement based on the current Afghan constitution, including its protections for women.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta floated an entirely different plan: an end to most U.S. and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan by the second half of 2013, a year earlier than expected, and a substantial cut in the previously planned size of the Afghan armed forces. So much for “fight.” Though Mr. Panetta didn’t say so, this strategy implies another big U.S. troop reduction in 2013, beyond the pullout of about one-third of troops already planned for this year. U.S. commanders have lobbied to keep the troop strength steady from this coming autumn until the end of 2014 — the current endpoint for the NATO military commitment.

The new timetable may sound good to voters when Mr. Obama touts it on the presidential campaign trail. But how will the Taliban, and its backers in Pakistan, interpret it? Before negotiations even begin, the administration has unilaterally and radically reduced the opposing force the Taliban can expect to face 18 months from now. Will Taliban leader Mohammad Omar have reason to make significant concessions between now and then? More likely, the extremist Islamic movement and an increasingly hostile Pakistani military establishment will conclude that the United States is desperate to get its troops out of Afghanistan, as quickly as possible — whether or not the Afghan government and constitution survive.

Administration officials argue that the plan for NATO to remain in Afghanistan until the end of 2014 hasn’t changed — and that negotiations are underway with the Afghan government for a U.S. commitment of trainers and advisers well past that date. In theory, a robust U.S. stay-on force — say, of 20,000 troops, with air support — could ensure against a Taliban return to power in Kabul and force its leaders to make concessions.

But the total U.S. pullout from Iraq can’t have inspired much confidence in Kabul about U.S. steadfastness. And the trend of administration policy is toward a much smaller effort in Afghanistan. Since the death of Osama bin Laden in a Special Forces raid last May, administration strategy has veered sharply toward the concept that narrowly defined U.S. interests, such as keeping al-Qaeda in check, can be accomplished through the use of Special Forces and drones while ground troops are withdrawn.

In our view that theory is badly mistaken. A rapid U.S. drawdown in Afghanistan will most likely lead to a renewed civil war in which the Taliban could again gain the upper hand. That would endanger U.S. interests throughout the region — starting with a nuclear-armed Pakistan — and mean an unforgivable breach of faith with the Afghan women and men the United States promised to enfranchise and defend.

But if President Obama has decided to pursue that course, there’s an inevitable next question. If the goal of a stable and democratic Afghanistan is to be subordinated — if timetables are to be accelerated, regardless of conditions — why should U.S. ground troops fight and die this year?

Winding down the war in Afghanistan

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In winding down war, a fundamentally different challenge in Afghanistan than in Iraq

By Greg Jaffe and Kevin Sieff, Published: February 2

The narrative that the Obama administration has laid out for winding down the war in Afghanistan has a familiar feel: It is intended to evoke the gradual withdrawal from Iraq.

But the administration faces a fundamentally different challenge in Afghanistan and a host of problems that it did not have in the latter days of the Iraq war.

In Afghanistan, heavy fighting is likely to persist well into 2014, particularly in the provinces along Pakistan’s border, senior military officials said. In contrast with Iraq, the Afghan government and security forces will require billions of dollars annually in U.S. support for the foreseeable future. It seems unlikely that the insurgents’ haven in Pakistan will shrink.

“In Afghanistan, you will be fighting a much tougher war over the next few years compared with Iraq post-2008,” said retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, who previously served as the top U.S. commander in Kabul.

Obama administration officials made the comparison to Iraq on Thursday as they scrambled to clarify Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s remarks that the United States hoped to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of next year, more than a year earlier than scheduled, and shift to advising Afghan forces.

“Iraq is a helpful reference point in this,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney. Just as in Iraq, he said, American advisers would remain in the country and would “continue to participate in combat missions.”

But by mid-2010, when the Obama administration declared an end to the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, American forces had already pulled out of the country’s major cities, where the war’s fiercest and bloodiest battles took place. The 49,000 U.S. advisory troops that remained took casualties, but the vast majority of the fighting was carried out by Iraqi forces.

In Afghanistan, Taliban forces still control swaths of territory in the mountainous eastern regions along the border, where they continue to kill Afghan government forces and intimidate villagers.

“Are we ready to take over? In some places, we are,” said one Afghan commander, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But in others, we aren’t now, and we won’t be in a year.”

The Afghan commander’s concerns were echoed by senior U.S. military officials in Kabul who insisted that Panetta’s remarks did not signal a change in U.S. policy or even a planned diminution in combat operations for U.S. forces.

In many ways, the dust-up caused by Panetta’s remarks reflects a political divide within the Obama administration over how quickly the United States can and should turn over responsibility for security to an Afghan government that remains weak.

Senior military officials cautioned that the U.S. forces would still be in the lead in battles abutting havens in Pakistan, where commanders believe insurgents still receive assistance from that country’s intelligence service.

“We’re still going to be fighting,” said a senior military official in Kabul. “As time passes, we’ll become more distant to the [Afghan forces] as they become more self-sufficient and capable across 2014-2015.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to appear as though he was contradicting his civilian leadership.

In Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan officials have sought to build confidence among Afghan soldiers and civilians in the ability of the country’s institutions to maintain security. For the past six months, Afghan and U.S. officials have held formal ceremonies to celebrate the transition of cities, districts and provinces to Afghan control — early steps toward a post-NATO Afghanistan.

Billboards have been posted across the country with photos of U.S. soldiers handing their guns over to their Afghan counterparts. Afghan units have begun crafting their own missions and going on independent patrols.

Such measures, although sometimes dismissed as hollow symbols by officials in Kabul, have prompted Afghan officers to play a more active role in traditionally NATO-led military operations, Western military officials say.

Though more than a dozen formal transition ceremonies have been held since last summer, most have been in relatively peaceful provinces or in small patches of cities, sometimes only a few square miles.

Those handovers are a far stretch from the challenges to come. American officials planned to use early transition exercises as a litmus test for the broader shift to Afghan control.

Afghan commanders questioned whether the looming security handover is a testament to their own progress or a product of U.S. politics and war weariness. “For those who understand the reality, Panetta’s announcement sends a vague message. Many will argue, how can we trust the U.S. when they keep changing their words?” said Afghan Maj. Kosh Sadat.

Even among senior U.S. military commanders there has been a spirited debate over how quickly to press Afghan forces to take on more responsibility. This spring, American commanders will begin pairing up some of their small advisory teams with the more capable Afghan forces, U.S. officials said. The full complement of American advisory teams should be in place by early 2013.

Some U.S. military officials have pressed for giving Afghan units more responsibility sooner to test their ability to stand on their own as U.S. forces withdraw. “The time to figure out how good the Afghan forces are isn’t in 2014,” said Andrew Exum, a senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security. “It is now.”

In Kabul, military officials worry about losing ground gained from the insurgency during tough battles over the past two years.

“In 2013, we are moving to the decisive portion of the campaign where the Afghan forces will be in the lead but heavily advised, assisted and enabled” by NATO forces, one senior military official said.

The Karzai administration appeared unfazed by Panetta’s statement, with officials claiming that they are still confident the United States will remain a stabilizing force in Afghanistan.

“The international troops are focusing more on the strengthening, equipment and funding of Afghan forces, and this will make the Afghan forces self-sufficient and ready to take on this big responsibility,” said Hakim Asher, a government spokesman. He called the statement a “natural part of the process of transition.”

But to many in Washington, Panetta’s remarks were interpreted as the latest sign of the administration’s eagerness to bring the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan to an end.

“We have interests in Afghanistan, but they are limited, so people are groping around for a limited way of dealing with it,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “My worry is that we run the risk of backing into a situation where the investment we are making will not produce an adequate return.”

Sieff reported from Kabul.

Drone crashes in Somali capital

Surveillance drone crashes in Somali capital

Feb. 3, 2012 05:06 PM

Associated Press

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Witnesses say a surveillance drone has crashed into a refugee camp in the Somali capital.

Drones have been used by the U.S. to attack or observe al-Qaida-linked militants in the Horn of Africa nation.

Refugees and soldiers in Mogadishu’s Badbado camp say they watched the drone crash Friday into a hut made of sticks, corrugated cans and plastic bags.

Sacdiyo Sheikh Madar, a refugee at the camp, says African Union peacekeepers came to remove it.

Police officer Ali Hussein says the drone was shaped like a small plane. A similar drone crashed into a house in Mogadishu last year.

Politics may drive exit from Afghanistan

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Politics may drive exit from Afghanistan

by Deb Riechmann - Feb. 3, 2012 11:13 PM

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan - The Taliban are not beaten, the peace process is bogged down in internal squabbles and Afghan security forces aren't ready to take control of the nation. Yet the U.S. and its partners are talking about speeding up -- rather than slowing down -- their exit from the war.

It's becoming dramatically clear that politics is driving NATO's war exit strategy as much or more than conditions on the battlefield.

Political calendars in the West were never supposed to influence the decision about when Afghan forces take the lead and allow international troops to step back into support roles or leave altogether. The U.S., Afghan and other international leaders have said repeatedly that transition decisions would not be held hostage to international political agendas.

Then, after an Afghan soldier gunned down four French troops, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced last week that he was pulling French forces out of Afghanistan early. Sarkozy is facing an opponent in the coming presidential election who wants French forces withdrawn even faster.

Sarkozy boldly suggested that his NATO allies hand over security to the Afghan police and army in 2013 instead of by the close of 2014 -- an end date they had all agreed upon at a meeting in Lisbon more than a year ago.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta dropped another verbal bombshell this week at a NATO meeting in Brussels. He said the NATO allies had largely agreed to step back from the lead combat role in Afghanistan and let local forces take their place as early as 2013.

U.S. officials downplayed Panetta's statement, saying it was not a policy change but an optimistic look at the established 2014 end date.

Either way, it shows how badly the Obama administration wants out of the war.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said no final decision has been made but he noted the issue would be prominent in May, when President Barack Obama hosts the next NATO summit.

Announcing that the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan will wrap up earlier than expected would give Obama more good news to report about his foreign policy. Already, the U.S. military has officially declared the end of its mission in Iraq in December 2011.

Lisa Curtis, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, said U.S. commanders in Afghanistan realize that American public support for the war is evaporating but they don't want to squander military gains of the past 18 months.

"The fear is that President Obama, under pressure from other NATO members and wanting to strike a popular chord with the U.S. electorate in an election year, will announce a drastic reduction in U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2013 at the NATO summit in Chicago," Curtis said.

Taliban leader sent letter to Obama

Reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar wrote to President Barack Obama last year indicating an interest in talks key to ending the war in Afghanistan, current and former U.S. officials told the Associated Press.

The letter purportedly from Omar was unsigned. It was passed through a Taliban intermediary in July and intended for the White House. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the letter and its contents are part of sensitive diplomacy with a fighting force that still targets U.S. troops.

The previously undisclosed communication was considered authentic by people who saw it, but skeptical administration officials said they cannot determine it actually came from Omar. The Obama administration did not directly respond to the letter, two officials said, although it has broadened contacts with Omar's emissaries since then.

-- Associated Press

Who reviews the U.S. 'kill list'?

"There has been remarkably little public debate about the drone strikes, which have killed at least 1,300 people in Pakistan"

"Obama and his aides have refused to answer questions about drone strikes because they are part of a covert program, yet they have repeatedly taken credit for their victories in public"

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McManus: Who reviews the U.S. 'kill list'?

By Doyle McManus

February 5, 2012

When it comes to national security, Michael V. Haydenis no shrinking violet. As CIA director, he ran the Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretaps against suspected terrorists.

But the retired air force general admits to being a little squeamish about the Obama administration's expanding use of pilotless drones to kill suspected terrorists around the world — including, occasionally, U.S. citizens.

"Right now, there isn't a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel," Hayden told me recently.

As an example of the problem, he cites the example of Anwar Awlaki, the New Mexico-born member of Al Qaeda who was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen last September. "We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him," Hayden notes, "but we didn't need a court order to kill him. Isn't that something?"

Hayden isn't the only one who has qualms about the "targeted killing" program. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), has been pressing the administration to explain its rules for months.

In a written statement, Feinstein said she thinks Awlaki was "a lawful target" but added that she still thinks the administration should explain its reasoning more openly "to maintain public support of secret operations."

As Hayden puts it: "This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that's dangerous."

There has been remarkably little public debate about the drone strikes, which have killed at least 1,300 people in Pakistan alone since President Obama came to office. Little debate inside the United States, that is. But overseas, the operations have prompted increasing opposition and could turn into a foreign policy headache.

It's odd that the Obama administration, which came into office promising to be more open and more attentive to civil liberties than the previous one, has been so reluctant to explain its policies in this area. Obama and his aides have refused to answer questions about drone strikes because they are part of a covert program, yet they have repeatedly taken credit for their victories in public. After months of negotiations, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. won approval from the White House to spell out some of the administration's legal thinking in the Awlaki case. But his statement, originally promised for last month, has been delayed by continued internal wrangling.

When it is issued, officials said, the statement is likely to add a few details to the bare-bones rationale the administration has offered in a handful of public statements and court proceedings. The administration has said that strikes against suspected terrorists are justified for two reasons: First, that Al Qaeda is at war with the United States, which makes any participant in Al Qaeda operations an enemy combatant; and second, that anyone directly involved in terrorist plots against Americans poses an "imminent danger" to U.S. security.

Holder may also shed light on an issue that has been less clear: Should a terrorist suspect who is a U.S. citizen get special treatment? Some in the intelligence community argue that the answer is no — that a U.S.-born member of Al Qaeda is no different from an American who joined, say, the German army in World War II. But civil libertarians argue that in a murky war against terrorism, an American such as Awlaki deserves some kind of due process before his name goes on the CIA's "kill list."

In fact, officials say, Awlaki did get more due process than most Al Qaeda suspects on the list. They say the administration made a point of naming Awlaki publicly as an Al Qaeda leader — putting him on notice, in effect — before he was killed. And they say the Justice Department held that Awlaki could be killed only if it was not feasible to capture him. The administration has refused to release that legal opinion, in part because it's not sure it wants those standards to turn into a binding precedent for later cases.

But there are questions that go beyond the legal underpinning for targeted killing. Who puts names on the "kill list," and who reviews them? And is the process rigorous enough to withstand outside scrutiny?

In the case of a U.S. citizen such as Awlaki, Obama makes the final call. Or so said Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who offered a rare bit of on-the-record clarity in an interview withCBS' "60 Minutes" last week. "In the end, when it comes to going after someone like that, the president of the United States has to sign off," Panetta said.

There's also scrutiny from Congress. "There is no intelligence activity the [Senate] Intelligence Committee follows more closely, or conducts more oversight on, than CIA counter-terrorism operations along the Afghan-Pakistan border," Feinstein said, studiously avoiding the word "drone."

But congressional oversight comes after the fact, and it is divided between Congress' intelligence committees, which review CIA operations, and its armed forces committees, which review military operations.

That's one reason some former officials argue that the administration needs to set up a clearer, more rigorous system of internal review — for its own good. John B. Bellinger III, who served as the State Department's top lawyer during the Bush administration, believes a good solution would be to expand the jurisdiction of the judges who currently authorize wiretaps to cover targeted killing cases as well.

But most intelligence officials hate that idea. "Why on earth would you want to get a judge involved?" asked one. A better solution, he said, would be appointing a special review office made up of seasoned officials who can't be fired, to insulate them from bureaucratic pressure. But that would still invest life-or-death power in a secret corner of the intelligence community, without a clear constitutional foundation.

The biggest problem with this newly invented form of clandestine warfare is that its rules have been made on the fly. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, has made crucial decisions with little outside review and virtually no public scrutiny.

The administration says it has the authority to kill U.S. citizens who are active in Al Qaeda, but it's never explained how that squares with the Constitution's guarantee of due process. It's past time that it did so.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower

In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: February 5, 2012

WASHINGTON — On his second yearlong deployment to Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis traveled 9,000 miles, patrolled with American troops in eight provinces and returned in October of last year with a fervent conviction that the war was going disastrously and that senior military leaders had not leveled with the American public.

Since enlisting in the Army in 1985, he said, he had repeatedly seen top commanders falsely dress up a dismal situation. But this time, he would not let it rest. So he consulted with his pastor at McLean Bible Church in Virginia, where he sings in the choir. He watched his favorite movie, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” one more time, drawing inspiration from Jimmy Stewart’s role as the extraordinary ordinary man who takes on a corrupt establishment.

And then, late last month, Colonel Davis, 48, began an unusual one-man campaign of military truth-telling. He wrote two reports, one unclassified and the other classified, summarizing his observations on the candor gap with respect to Afghanistan. He briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members, spoke with a reporter for The New York Times, sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general — and only then informed his chain of command that he had done so.

“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?“ Colonel Davis asks in an article summarizing his views titled “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down.” It was published online Sunday in The Armed Forces Journal, the nation’s oldest independent periodical on military affairs. “ No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan,” he says in the article. “But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.”

Colonel Davis says his experience has caused him to doubt reports of progress in the war from numerous military leaders, including David H. Petraeus, who commanded the troops in Afghanistan before becoming the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in June.

Last March, for example, Mr. Petraeus, then an Army general, testified before the Senate that the Taliban’s momentum had been “arrested in much of the country” and that progress was “significant,” though fragile, and “on the right azimuth” to allow Afghan forces to take the lead in combat by the end of 2014.

Colonel Davis fiercely disputes such assertions and says few of the troops believe them. At the same time, he is acutely aware of the chasm in stature that separates him from those he is criticizing, and he has no illusions about the impact his public stance may have on his career.

“I’m going to get nuked,“ he said in an interview last month.

But his bosses’ initial response has been restrained. They told him that while they disagreed with him, he would not face “adverse action,” he said.

Col. James E. Hutton, chief of media relations for the Army, declined to comment specifically about Colonel Davis, but he rejected the idea that military leaders had been anything but truthful about Afghanistan.

“We are a values-based organization, and the integrity of what we publish and what we say is something we take very seriously,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Petraeus, Jennifer Youngblood of the C.I.A., said he “has demonstrated that he speaks truth to power in each of his leadership positions over the past several years. His record should stand on its own, as should LTC Davis’ analysis.”

If the official reaction to Colonel Davis’s campaign has been subdued, it may be partly because he has recruited a few supporters among the war skeptics on Capitol Hill.

“For Colonel Davis to go out on a limb and help us to understand what’s happening on the ground, I have the greatest admiration for him,“ said Representative Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina, who has met with Colonel Davis twice and read his reports.

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, one of four senators who met with Colonel Davis despite what he called “a lot of resistance from the Pentagon,” said the colonel was a valuable witness because his extensive travels and midlevel rank gave him access to a wide range of soldiers.

Moreover, Colonel Davis’s doubts about reports of progress in the war are widely shared, if not usually voiced in public by officers on duty. Just last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a hearing that she was “concerned by what appears to be a disparity” between public testimony about progress in Afghanistan and “the bleaker description” in a classified National Intelligence Estimate produced in December, which was described in news reports as “sobering” and “dire.”

Those words would also describe Colonel Davis’s account of what he saw in Afghanistan, the latest assignment in a military career that has included clashes with some commanders, but glowing evaluations from others. (“His maturity, tenacity and judgment can be counted on in even the hardest of situations, and his devotion to mission accomplishment is unmatched by his peers,” says an evaluation from May that concludes that he has “unlimited potential.”)

Colonel Davis, a son of a high school football coach in Dallas and who is known as Danny, served two years as an Army private before returning to Texas Tech and completing the Reserve Officer Training Corps program. He served in Germany and fought in the first Iraq war before joining the Reserve and working civilian jobs, including a year as a member of the Senate staff. Related

After the Sept. 11 attacks, he returned to active duty, serving a tour in Iraq as well as the two in Afghanistan and spending 15 months working on Future Combat Systems, an ambitious Army program to produce high-tech vehicles linked to drones and sensors. On that program, too, he said, commanders kept promising success despite ample evidence of trouble. The program was shut down in 2009 after an investment of billions of dollars.

In his recent tour in Afghanistan, Colonel Davis represented the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, created to bypass a cumbersome bureaucracy to make sure the troops quickly get the gear they need.

He spoke with about 250 soldiers, from 19-year-old privates to division commanders, as well as Afghan security officials and civilians, he said. From the Americans, he heard contempt for the cowardice and double-dealing of their Afghan counterparts. From Afghans, he learned of unofficial nonaggression pacts between Afghanistan’s security forces and Taliban fighters.

When he was in rugged Kunar Province, an Afghan police officer visiting his parents was kidnapped by the Taliban and killed. “That was in visual range of an American base,” he said. “Their influence didn’t even reach as far as they could see.”

Some of the soldiers he interviewed were later killed, a fact that shook him and that he mentions in videos he shot in Afghanistan and later posted on YouTube. At home, he pored over the statements of military leaders, including General Petraeus. He found them at odds with what he had seen, with classified intelligence reports and with casualty statistics.

“You can spin all kinds of stuff,” Colonel Davis said. “But you can’t spin the fact that more men are getting blown up every year.”

Colonel Davis can come across as strident, labeling as lies what others might call wishful thinking. Matthew M. Aid, a historian who examines Afghanistan in his new book “Intel Wars,” says that while there is a “yawning gap” between Pentagon statements and intelligence assessments, “it’s oversimplified to say the top brass are out-and-out lying. They are just too close to the subject.”

But Martin L. Cook, who teaches military ethics at the Naval War College, says Colonel Davis has identified a hazard that is intrinsic to military culture, in which a can-do optimism can be at odds with the strictest candor when a mission is failing.

“You’ve trained people to try to be successful even when half their buddies are dead and they’re almost out of ammo,” he said. “It’s very hard for them to say, ‘can’t do.’ ”

Mr. Cook said it was rare for an officer of Colonel Davis’s modest rank to “decide that he knows better” and to go to Congress and the news media.

“It may be an act of moral courage,” he said. “But he’s gone outside channels, and he’s taking his chances on what happens to him.”

Truth, lies and Afghanistan

Armed Forces Journal

Truth, lies and Afghanistan

How military leaders have let us down

By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.

I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.

From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.

From Bad to Abysmal

Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.

And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.

In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.

Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.

“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”

As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.

“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”

According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.

In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.

As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.

The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.

On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.

To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.

In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”

One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”

On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:

Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”

Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.

“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.

“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe.

“And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”

That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.

In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.

As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.

Credibility Gap

I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground.

A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”

The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.

“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”

How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.

I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 division-level “experiment” that turned out to be far more setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a “digital division” with fewer troops and more gear could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s “results,” Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in killing capability.

A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.

If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.

A nonclassified version is available at www.afghanreport.com. [Editor’s note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post this longer version.]

Tell The Truth

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start.

AFJ

Obama pretends Iraq war is over???

Source

Obama dinner to mark end of Iraq War

By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY

With U.S. forces still fighting in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has chosen to mark the end of the Iraq War with something more modest than a ticker-tape parade — a state-dinner-like event at the White House later this month feting a select group of combat veterans and their spouses or guests.

The core theme is the common fighting man or woman, said Douglas Wilson, Pentagon public affairs chief.

The intent is for those invited — with guests, numbering more than 200 — to represent the 1.5 million who fought in a nine-year-war that left nearly 4,500 dead and 32,000 wounded, he said.

"The dining room that night will look like the America that served in Iraq," Wilson said.

"State dinners honor heads of state and I think the feeling was that this type of dinner is an appropriate way to honor men and women who … merit the same degree of respect as a head of state," he said.

The black-tie White House event to be called "A Nation's Gratitude" may be unprecedented, Wilson said.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley agreed "it's an interesting White House first."

A formal White House announcement will come soon, Wilson said.

Factions led by the 200,000-member Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America are pushing for a ticker-tape parade in New York City, the USA's ritual celebration for heroes. "That (dinner) is a nice effort. The problem is what do you tell everybody outside that 200 who want to be a part of this," Executive Director Paul Reickhoff said.

Pentagon leaders are not opposed to a New York parade, Wilson said, but feel strongly it should wait until U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan end.

Senior enlisted leaders for each service branch are choosing those who will attend the White House dinner, and half or more will be enlisted, Wilson said.

The guest list is divided among Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marines and Navy in proportion to a service's role in Iraq, he said.

"They understand that every state and territory needs to be represented, every rank," Wilson said. "It needs to be diverse."

Sidewinder missiles cost $600,000 each???

I guess it ain't cheep killing woman and children in Iraq and Afghanistan with these high tech devices.

Source

Raytheon gets $39.6M to make newest Sidewinder

Arizona Daily Star | Posted: Monday, February 6, 2012

The U.S. Navy has awarded Tucson-based Raytheon Missile Systems a $39.6 million contract modification for fiscal year 2012 production and delivery of the AIM-9X Sidewinder Block II air-to-air missile.

The contract follows a $68.9 million contract announced in late December for low-rate initial production of 115 AIM-9X Block II missiles and related hardware for the Navy and the Air Force. [Wow a single missile only costs $599,130]

The AIM-9X Sidewinder is an infrared-guided, air-to-air missile that has demonstrated capability in the surface-to-air and air-to-surface missions, Raytheon said. The AIM-9X Block II adds a redesigned fuze and electronics, along with other enhancements to the AIM-9X Block I.

Raytheon says it has produced more than 4,500 AIM-9X Block I and II Sidewinders.

CIA digs in as Americans withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan

Source

CIA digs in as Americans withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan

By Greg Miller, Tuesday, February 7, 5:13 PM

The CIA is expected to maintain a large clandestine presence in Iraq and Afghanistan long after the departure of conventional U.S. troops as part of a plan by the Obama administration to rely on a combination of spies and Special Operations forces to protect U.S. interests in the two longtime war zones, U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials said that the CIA’s massive stations in Kabul and Baghdad will probably remain the agency’s largest overseas outposts for years, even if they shrink from record staffing levels set at the height of American efforts in those nations to fend off insurgencies and install capable governments.

The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in December has moved the CIA’s emphasis there toward more traditional espionage — monitoring developments in the increasingly antagonistic government, seeking to suppress al-Qaeda's affiliate in the country and countering the influence of Iran.

In Afghanistan, the CIA is expected to have a more aggressively operational role. U.S. officials said the agency’s paramilitary capabilities are seen as tools for keeping the Taliban off balance, protecting the government in Kabul and preserving access to Afghan airstrips that enable armed CIA drones to hunt al-Qaeda remnants in Pakistan.

As President Obama seeks to end a decade of large-scale conflict, the emerging assignments for the CIA suggest it will play a significant part in the administration’s search for ways to exert U.S. power in more streamlined and surgical ways.

As a result, the CIA station in Kabul — which at one point had responsibility for as many as 1,000 agency employees in Afghanistan— is expected to expand its collaboration with Special Operations forces when the drawdown of conventional troops begins.

U.S. Navy Adm. William McRaven, the Special Operations commander who directed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year, signaled the transition during remarks in Washington on Tuesday. “I have no doubt that Special Operations will be the last to leave Afghanistan,” McRaven said.

The CIA declined to comment. But current and former intelligence officials quibbled with the accuracy of McRaven’s assertion.

“I would say the agency will be the last to leave,” said a CIA veteran with extensive experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “We were the first to get there” after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the official said.

U.S. officials said the size of the agency’s presence in Afghanistan over the next several years has not been determined, and the CIA’s assignment is likely to be adjusted as the administration’s troop withdrawal plans evolve.

In some scenarios, teams of CIA and Special Operations troops could divide territory and lists of Taliban targets with Afghan forces, although officials said there will probably be extensive collaboration and overlap.

CIA paramilitary operatives were the first U.S. personnel to enter Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, linking up with Northern Alliance fighters weeks before U.S. military commandos arrived. More than a decade later, the CIA still has extensive paramilitary assets there.

“Like Special Forces, the intelligence community is used to doing a lot with a small footprint, using its agility to address a host of national security concerns,” said a U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The agency controls counterterrorism pursuit teams made up of dozens of Afghan fighters funded and trained by the CIA. The CIA has largely bankrolled and built the Afghan intelligence service. And the agency maintains a constellation of bases along the border with Pakistan.

Some of those sites are likely to be closed, current and former officials said. The 2010 death of seven CIA employees in a suicide bombing by a double-agent at a CIA base in Khost underscored the vulnerability of such remote outposts. As conventional forces depart, officials said, the agency will probably concentrate more of its remaining employees at compounds in Kabul and at the Bagram air base north of the capital.

As a result, more territory may be ceded to the Taliban. “We can lose the countryside, but I don’t think we’re going to lose Kabul and Bagram,” said the former senior CIA officer, who added that the agency could end up adding paramilitary personnel in Afghanistan as the size of the U.S. military deployment there shrinks.

The Obama administration has said it plans to pull about 22,000 troops out of Afghanistan by September, reducing the overall U.S. force to 68,000. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta fanned speculation that the drawdown could be accelerated by saying last week that the United States hoped to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by mid-2013.

If the agency is tapped to play an expanded role in Afghanistan and Iraq, the landscape will be familiar to many across the CIA’s senior ranks. Retired Army Gen. David H. Petraeus commanded U.S. forces in both countries before taking over as director of the CIA. A senior CIA operative who twice served as station chief in Kabul now heads the agency’s Special Activities Division, its paramilitary branch.

The pressure to maintain a sizable presence in Kabul and Baghdad comes as the CIA and other intelligence agencies face spending cuts for the first time since their budgets began expanding after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The CIA’s annual budget is believed to be about $5.5 billion. In congressional testimony last week, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said, “We’re not going to do more with less and all these other cliches. . . . We will just simply have less capability.”

At their peaks, the CIA’s stations in Kabul and Baghdad were the largest and second-largest in agency history, surpassing the size of the CIA’s station in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War. CIA veterans stressed that those totals included more security, support and analytic personnel than clandestine operatives.

At the high point of the U.S. military surge in Iraq, the CIA had as many as 700 employees in the country. Most worked in the Green Zone, but hundreds were also scattered across safe houses in population centers and regional U.S. military outposts.

The departure of U.S. forces in December has forced the agency to shutter many of those facilities, according to former CIA officials who said the agency’s presence has probably been reduced by half.

“We had bases all over the country, but that’s not the case anymore,” said a second former CIA officer who served in Iraq. The development is likely to hamper intelligence collection, the former officer said. “You can’t put hundreds of people in the embassy and expect that to be your platform in Iraq.”

Staff writer Julie Tate contributed to this report.

The U.S. must do more for Guatemala over STD study

Source

The U.S. must do more for Guatemala over STD study

By Editorial Board, Published: February 7

IN THE FALL of 2010, the Obama administration acknowledged a shocking truth: From 1946 through 1948, officials working in Guatemala for the U.S. Public Health Service conducted tests on some 5,100 unwitting individuals and deliberately infected at least 1,300 with sexually transmitted diseases. None of the victims — who included prisoners, soldiers, the mentally ill and commercial sex workers — consented to this barbaric treatment. At least 83 people died, and many suffered permanent damage.

President Obama expressed regrets to the Guatemalan president. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius called the experiments outrageous and, in a joint statement, apologized “to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.” The administration gave a presidential commission the task of compiling information about the origins, nature and scope of the experiments.

But there has been no effort to compensate individuals directly harmed by the atrocities.

A class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of eight individuals who claim to have been victims, spouses or descendants of victims, has been wending its way through the federal courts in the District. On Jan. 9, the Justice Department made a strong and potentially winning argument that the suit should be thrown out on technical grounds. A victory in the legal arena does not absolve the U.S. government from its moral responsibility. Moreover, it should not take a lawsuit to prompt the government to do the right thing.

The Obama administration has announced plans to spend $1 million to study new rules to protect volunteers in human-subject experiments and has allocated $775,000 to fight sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala. It has not ruled out compensating victims, but it notes the difficulty of identifying eligible individuals because of the passage of time and the facts that the experiments were conducted on foreign soil and that subjects were often not identified by their full names. True enough, but logistical hurdles should not thwart a good-faith attempt.

A lot of ground has already been covered by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethics Issues. But the commission noted in its September 2011 report that it did not have access to information in the Guatemalan government’s possession that was critical to identifying individual subjects. Guatemala has since identified several survivors.

The Obama administration should work with Congress to establish a panel to pull together all available information and to determine fair compensation for surviving victims or their families. The Guatemalan government should cooperate with the United States to ensure justice for its citizens.

American embassy in Iraq has 16,000 employees

Source

U.S. Planning to Slash Iraq Embassy Staff by Half

By TIM ARANGO

Published: February 7, 2012

BAGHDAD — Less than two months after American troops left, the State Department is preparing to slash by as much as half the enormous diplomatic presence it had planned for Iraq, a sharp sign of declining American influence in the country.

Officials in Baghdad and Washington said that Ambassador James F. Jeffrey and other senior State Department officials were reconsidering the size and scope of the embassy, where the staff has swelled to nearly 16,000 people, mostly contractors. [I believe that a large number of these 16,000 employees are mercenaries who are their to protect the US Embassy from the Iraqi people]

The expansive diplomatic operation and the $750 million embassy building, the largest of its kind in the world, were billed as necessary to nurture a postwar Iraq on its shaky path to democracy and establish normal relations between two countries linked by blood and mutual suspicion. But the Americans have been frustrated by what they see as Iraqi obstructionism and are now largely confined to the embassy because of security concerns, unable to interact enough with ordinary Iraqis to justify the $6 billion annual price tag. [Wow! $6 billion a year to run an embassy!]

The swift realization among some top officials that the diplomatic buildup may have been ill advised represents a remarkable pivot for the State Department, in that officials spent more than a year planning the expansion and that many of the thousands of additional personnel have only recently arrived.

Michael W. McClellan, the embassy spokesman, said in a statement, “Over the last year and continuing this year the Department of State and the Embassy in Baghdad have been considering ways to appropriately reduce the size of the U.S. mission in Iraq, primarily by decreasing the number of contractors needed to support the embassy’s operations.”

Mr. McClellan said the number of diplomats — currently about 2,000 — was also “subject to adjustment as appropriate.”

To make the cuts, he said the embassy was “hiring Iraqi staff and sourcing more goods and services to the local economy.”

After the American troops departed in December, life became more difficult for the thousands of diplomats and contractors left behind. Convoys of food that had been escorted by the United States military from Kuwait were delayed at border crossings as Iraqis demanded documentation that the Americans were unaccustomed to providing.

Within days, the salad bar at the embassy dining hall ran low. Sometimes there was no sugar or Splenda for coffee. On chicken-wing night, wings were rationed at six per person. Over the holidays, housing units were stocked with Meals Ready to Eat, the prepared food for soldiers in the field.

At every turn, the Americans say, the Iraqi government has interfered with the activities of the diplomatic mission, one they grant that the Iraqis never asked for or agreed upon. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s office — and sometimes even the prime minister himself — now must approve visas for all Americans, resulting in lengthy delays. American diplomats have had trouble setting up meetings with Iraqi officials.

For their part, the Iraqis say they are simply enforcing their laws and protecting their sovereignty in the absence of a working agreement with the Americans on the embassy.

“The main issue between Iraqis and the U.S. Embassy is that we have not seen, and do not know anything about, an agreement between the Iraqi government and the U.S.,” said Nahida al-Dayni, a lawmaker and member of Iraqiya, a largely Sunni bloc in Parliament.

Expressing a common sentiment among Iraqis, she added: “The U.S. had something on their mind when they made it so big. Perhaps they want to run the Middle East from Iraq, and their embassy will be a base for them here.”

Those suspicions have been reinforced by two murky episodes, one involving four armed Americans on the streets of Baghdad that Iraqi officials believe were Central Intelligence Agency operatives and another when an American helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing because of an unspecified mechanical failure on the outskirts of the capital on the banks of the Tigris River.

“The aircraft that broke down raised many questions about the role of Americans here,” said Ammar al-Hakim, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a leading Shiite political party and social organization. “So what is the relationship? We’re still waiting for more information.”

The current configuration of the embassy, a 104-acre campus with adobe-colored buildings, is actually smaller than the original plans that were drawn up at a time when officials believed that a residual American military presence would remain in Iraq beyond 2011. For instance, officials once planned for a 700-person consulate in the northern city of Mosul, but it was scrapped for budgetary reasons.

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari met with Mr. Jeffrey last week to discuss, among other things, the size of the American presence here. “The problem is with the contractors, with the security arrangements,” Mr. Zebari said. Mr. Jeffrey will leave the task of whittling down the embassy to his successor, as officials said he is expected to step down in the coming weeks.

“We always knew that what they were planning to do didn’t make sense,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “It’s increasingly becoming clear that they are horribly overstaffed given what they are able to accomplish.”

Mr. Pollack described as unrealistic the State Department’s belief that it could handle many of the tasks previously performed by the military, such as monitoring security in northern areas disputed by Arabs and Kurds, where checkpoints are jointly manned by Iraqi and Kurdish security forces, and visiting projects overseen by the United States Agency for International Development.

Americans are also still being shot at regularly in Iraq. At the Kirkuk airport, an Office of Security Cooperation, which handles weapons sales to the Iraqis and where a number of diplomats work, is frequently attacked by rockets fired by, officials believe, members of Men of the Army of Al Naqshbandi Order, a Sunni insurgent group.

American officials believed that Iraqi officials would be far more cooperative than they have been in smoothing the transition from a military operation to a diplomatic mission led by American civilians. The expansion has exacted a toll on Iraqi ministries, which are keen to exert their sovereignty after nearly nine years of war and occupation, and aggravated long-running tensions between the two countries.

The size of the embassy staff is even more remarkable when compared with those of other countries. Turkey, for instance, which is Iraq’s largest trading partner and wields more economic influence here than the United States, employs roughly 55 people at its embassy, and the number of actual diplomats is in the single digits.

“It’s really been an overload for us, for the Foreign Ministry,” Mr. Zebari said of the American mission.

The problems with the supply convoys, as well as a wide crackdown on security contractors that included detentions and the confiscation of documents, computers and weapons, prompted the embassy to post a notice on its Web site warning Americans working here that “the government of Iraq is strictly enforcing immigration and customs procedures, to include visas and stamps for entry and exit, vehicle registration, and authorizations for weapons, convoys, logistics and other matters.”

The considerations to reduce the number of embassy personnel, American officials here said, reflect a belief that a quieter and humbler diplomatic presence could actually result in greater leverage over Iraqi affairs, particularly in mediating a political crisis that flared just as the troops were leaving. Having fewer burly, bearded and tattooed security men — who are currently the face of America to many Iraqis and evoke memories of abuses like the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square in 2007 by private contractors — could help build trust with Iraqis, these officials believe.

“Iraqis, as individuals, have had bad experiences with these security firms,” said Latif Rashid, a senior adviser to President Jalal Talabani.

One State Department program that is likely to be scrutinized is an ambitious program to train the Iraqi police, which is costing about $500 million this year — far less than the nearly $1 billion that the embassy originally intended to spend. The program has generated considerable skepticism within the State Department — one of the officials interviewed predicted that the program could be scrapped later this year — because of the high cost of the support staff, the inability of police advisers to leave their bases because of the volatile security situation and a lack of support by the Iraqi government.

In an interview late last year with the American Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a senior official at the Interior Ministry said the United States should use the money it planned to spend on the police program “for something that can benefit the people of the United States.” The official, Adnan al-Asadi, predicted the Iraqis would receive “very little benefit” from the program.

Reducing the size of the embassy might have the added benefit of quieting the anti-Americanism of those who violently opposed the military occupation.

Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has steadfastly railed against American influence here and whose militia fought the American military, has recently told his followers that the United States has failed to “disarm.”

Mr. Sadr recently posted a statement on his Web site that read, “I ask the competent authorities in Iraq to open an embassy in Washington, equivalent to the size of the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, in order to maintain the prestige of Iraq.”

Feds sued to release bin Laden photos

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Bin Laden Death Photos FOIA Case Focuses on His Burial at Sea

The Atlantic Wire

By John Hudson

The high-profile legal battle over the disclosure of Osama bin Laden's death photos is beginning to focus on images of the terrorist leader's burial in the North Arabian Sea. On Wednesday night, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed court papers in its suit against the Defense Department and the CIA for the release of "all photographs and/or video recordings" taken on the night bin Laden was killed. The 19-page brief challenges the government's rationale for withholding images but gives explicit focus to the images taken on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson prior to his burial.

"Release of images of bin Laden’s body – particularly those images showing the body cleaned and prepared for burial and being buried at sea – would not reveal any previously unknown covert intelligence missions," reads the filing. In its brief filed last month, the Justice Department argued that all 52 photographs or videos taken of bin Laden "could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security." The DOJ didn't differentiate between the gory photos taken immediately after he was shot and the less graphic photos of the burial. It gave a blanket argument that all materials must be withheld because they contain images of U.S. Navy SEAL members, advanced military equipment, secret intelligence methods and could incite violence in the Muslim world.

Last night, Judicial Watch took issue with those arguments as applied to the burial photos:

Conspicuously absent from Defendants’ argument is any proof of how, for example, images of bin Laden’s body as it was being prepared for burial at sea or images of the actual burial at sea itself would reveal information about the identities of the members of the U.S. Navy SEAL team that carried out the raid or the tools and equipment used by the SEAL team during the raid. Similarly, Defendants make no effort to describe how images of bin Laden’s body taken as it was being transported to the location of its burial at sea would reveal site exploitation tactics, techniques, or procedures employed at bin Laden’s compound in Abottabad, Pakistan. Obviously, images taken on board the USS Carl Vinson of the burial at sea are not going to reveal site exploitation tactics, techniques, or procedures used in the Abottabad compound or even facial recognition techniques or capabilities. Defendants have completely failed to correlate particular records to specific legal theories and therefore have failed to satisfy their burden as a matter of law.

Another point Judicial Watch raised is why the top-secret aspects of the images couldn't be blurred out or digitally-scrambled. As for the DOJ's claim that any images could be used to "generate fodder for extremist commentary that could ... trigger violence, attacks, or acts of revenge," the watchdog group cites precedent, noting "No court appears to have ever held that ... a government agency [can] withhold requested records simply because their release might be used for propaganda purposes or 'inflame tensions' overseas."

Though he is not mentioned in the filing, Judicial Watch is actually making the same case Republican Senator James Inhofe made last year after seeing the bin Laden photos at CIA headquarters. "It's much more reasonable to show the public" the burial photos, he told The Atlantic Wire. As to where the case moves next, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton says they have asked for a hearing and it will be up to the court, led by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, to decide on the timing. We've asked a pair of Freedom of Information Act experts to weigh in on the latest filing and will publish their views when available.

bin Laden thinks Jenna Jameson is hot???

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Porn Industry and Conservative Activists Unite Over Bin Laden Photos

The conservative watchdog group suing President Obama for the release of Osama bin Laden's death materials just gained an unlikely ally: the porn industry press. Last week, the mainstream media had a field day with the news that the Al Qaeda leader had a "stash of pornography" in his Pakistani compound. While that ephemeral news nugget has vanished from the headlines today, XBIZ, the adult entertainment industry's "leading source" for "up-to-the-minute" news, hasn't forgotten about it.

"Will we ever find out the studios, video titles, directors or genres of the films Bid Laden's alleged to have possessed?" pondered XBIZ's Rhett Pardon. "The answer is maybe."

Pardon then excitedly details the lawsuit filed by the conservative group Judicial Watch for "all photographs and/or video" taken from the bin Laden raid. "If the FOIA lawsuit is granted, nearly all information relative to Bid Laden's porn stash, as well as all other details of his compound and belongings, could be released," he writes. Hallelujah! No doubt a strange bedfellow for a conservative group that's made the Obama administrative its prime target since his election in '08. But hey, sometimes transparency really brings the country together.

Update: It looks like XBIZ's prurient interests won't be sated. At least not by Judicial Watch. The group's president Tom Fitton tells the Atlantic Wire "our lawsuit does not cover anything other than photos and video of bin Laden." Fitton adds that Judicial Watch's skepticism of President Obama precedes his election when, in 2006, it awarded Obama "honorable mention" on its list of corrupt politicians. It looks like some other news agency or group will have to file an expanded FOIA request to obtain bin Laden's porn collection.

War is good for the economy?

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Ariz. defense sector braces for cutback

U.S. budget plan could impact major contractors statewide

by Erin Kelly - Feb. 10, 2012 03:25 PM

Republic Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Leaders of Arizona's $5 billion defense industry are anxiously awaiting details of proposed budget cuts by the Obama administration and Congress as contractors position themselves to compete in a postwar economy.

On Monday, President Barack Obama will unveil a fiscal 2013 budget that will provide details of his plan to scale back the size of the Army and Marine Corps, reduce forces in Europe and cut the nation's nuclear arsenal while investing more heavily in special forces, unmanned aircraft and cybersecurity. The president has proposed cuts of $487 billion over 10 years.

At stake for Arizona is the future of a defense industry that directly employs nearly 40,000 people, contributes nearly $5 billion to the gross state product and pays more than $4 billion in wages, according to a September 2010 report by the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. The industry represents about 2 percent of Arizona's total gross domestic product and about 2 percent of its total employment, according to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Arizona was the ninth-largest recipient of federal defense contracts in 2010, the Arizona Aerospace and Defense Commission said.

"These are big dollars that the state can't afford to lose," said Dennis Hoffman, an economics professor and director of the L. William Seidman Research Institute at ASU's W.P. Carey School of Business. "It's not that the sky is falling, but it has the potential to fall if we are not mindful of how important the defense sector is to Arizona."

The Arizona Commerce Authority, an economic-development organization overseen by Gov. Jan Brewer, monitors the state's defense and aerospace industry and sees continued opportunities for Arizona in areas such as border security and unmanned aircraft, which the Pentagon has identified as priorities even amid the budget cutting.

Still, Arizona is likely to be touched in some way by the proposed defense cuts, Hoffman said. The administration already has announced that it will slow the purchase of F-35 joint strike fighters, which could affect Luke Air Force Base. The base has been identified by the Air Force as a preferred training site for the jets so any slowdown or reductions in the purchase of the F-35s could impact the training mission.

The defense cuts, prompted by the federal budget crisis, the end of the U.S. war in Iraq and the winding down of the war in Afghanistan, come as Congress is faced with the prospect of having to slash an additional $500 billion from the Pentagon budget.

Congress must make those cuts unless lawmakers can agree by the end of this year on an alternative way to shrink the nation's whopping deficit. Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl are fierce opponents of defense cuts and have proposed an alternative plan to reduce the deficit by imposing a pay freeze on federal workers and members of Congress.

In addition to its direct impact, the defense industry creates a ripple effect on Arizona's economy -- mainly through consumer spending by its well-paid workforce. Indirectly, the industry has helped create about 54,000 more jobs and nearly $4 billion more in gross state product, the ASU report says.

Arizona's top defense contractors, including Raytheon Missile Systems of Tucson, General Dynamics C4 Systems of Scottsdale, and Boeing Co. of Mesa, say they are concerned about the federal budget cuts but don't know exactly what the impact will be until they see details.

The companies have been positioning themselves to meet the Defense Department's future needs by investing in cybersecurity, unmanned aircraft, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. Some are pursuing international customers more aggressively.

Boeing, which makes Apache helicopters in Mesa, is selling as many as 70 of the helicopters to the Saudis. Their newest assembly line in Mesa is producing the unmanned A160T Hummingbird, a rotorcraft with an operating range of 2,590 miles, more than twice that of other unmanned rotorcraft.

"We've been anticipating at least the flattening of the defense budget for several years, although it will be worse than that if Congress has to make deep cuts," Boeing spokesman Dan Beck said. "By taking the steps we've taken over the last five or six years, we're in a good position to get through this and continue to be a strong and viable defense contractor."

At the same time, Beck said, "I don't want to make light of the fact that we are faced with a defense-budget environment that we have great concerns about."

Raytheon CEO William H. Swanson, in a recent question-and-answer session with investors, said his company also has positioned itself well for the changing priorities and trimmed-down budget at the Defense Department.

"In this environment, we're focused on the right areas and have a strong portfolio in electronic warfare, ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems), cybersecurity and missile-defense systems, which are priority areas for our international and domestic customers," Swanson said. Missile-defense systems are produced at Raytheon's Tucson division. Just last month, the U.S. Navy awarded the Tucson division a nearly $40 million contract for production and delivery of the AIM-9X Bock II infrared-guided air-to-air missile.

In Scottsdale, General Dynamics produces cybersecurity systems that can be used by both military and law-enforcement customers and is building an information and communications system that is known as the Army's "tactical Internet," said spokeswoman Fran Jacques.

"We're very happy with the portfolio we have," she said. "A lot of these technologies and processes transcend the military to the homeland so first responders are using devices adapted for their mission."

Even if spending is cut significantly, big defense companies such as those in Arizona still have their existing contracts to keep them going for quite a while, said Brad Curran, a defense-industry analyst in the San Antonio office of Frost & Sullivan research firm.

"There is a lot of equipment that's broken and needs to be fixed, everything from soldiers' radios to weapons to ships and airplanes that are worn out after 10 years of war," Curran said.

Economic impact

Direct impacts from the operations of defense and aerospace companies:

$4.8 billion in gross state product.

$4.3 billion in wages.

About 40,000 jobs.

Direct impacts from purchases made from Arizona suppliers:

$1.4 billion in gross state product.

$1 billion in wages.

About 17,000 jobs.

Indirect impacts from consumer spending by defense-industry employees and supplier employees:

$2 billion in gross state product.

$1.2 billion in wages.

About 30,000 jobs.

Indirect impacts from spending of new state and local government tax revenue:

$401 million in gross state product.

$326 million in wages.

About 7,400 jobs.

Total economic impact of Arizona's defense and aerospace industry:

$8.8 billion in gross state product.

$6.8 billion in wages.

Nearly 94,000 jobs.

Source: 2010 report by the L. William Seidman Research Institute, W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University

Defense employers

and installations

Arizona's largest defense employers:

Raytheon Missile Systems: about 11,500 employees.

Honeywell: about 9,500 employees.

General Dynamics: about 4,500 employees.

Boeing Co.: about 4,400 employees.

Sources: Raytheon, Boeing, staff reports

Employment* at Arizona's major defense installations:

Davis?Monthan Air Force Base, Tucson: about 7,800.

Fort Huachuca, Sierra Vista: about 7,700.

Luke Air Force Base, Maricopa County: about 6,000.

Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma: about 4,200.

* Military and civilian.

Sources: 2011 report by the Council for Community and Economic Research, Arizona Commerce Authority.

A shell game to keep the public from knowing the full costs of the wars???

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Risks of Afghan War Shift From Soldiers to Contractors

By ROD NORDLAND

Published: February 11, 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan — Even dying is being outsourced here.

This is a war where traditional military jobs, from mess hall cooks to base guards and convoy drivers, have increasingly been shifted to the private sector. Many American generals and diplomats have private contractors for their personal bodyguards. And along with the risks have come the consequences: More civilian contractors working for American companies than American soldiers died in Afghanistan last year for the first time during the war.

American employers here are under no obligation to publicly report the deaths of their employees and frequently do not. While the military announces the names of all its war dead, private companies routinely notify only family members. Most of the contractors die unheralded and uncounted — and in some cases, leave their survivors uncompensated.

“By continuing to outsource high-risk jobs that were previously performed by soldiers, the military, in effect, is privatizing the ultimate sacrifice,” said Steven L. Schooner, a law professor at George Washington University who has studied the civilian casualties issue.

Last year, at least 430 employees of American contractors were reported killed in Afghanistan: 386 working for the Defense Department, 43 for the United States Agency for International Development and one for the State Department, according to data provided by the American Embassy in Kabul and publicly available in part from the United States Department of Labor.

By comparison, 418 American soldiers died in Afghanistan last year, according to Defense Department statistics compiled by icasualties.org, an independent organization that monitors war deaths.

That trend has been growing for the past several years in Afghanistan, and it parallels a similar trend in Iraq, where contractor deaths exceeded military deaths as long ago as 2009. In Iraq, however, that took place as the number of American troops was being drastically reduced until their complete withdrawal at the end of last year. And last year, more soldiers than private contractors died in Iraq (54 compared with 41, according to Labor Department figures).

Experts who have studied the phenomenon say that because many contractors do not comply with even the current, scanty reporting requirements, the true number of private contractor deaths may be far higher. “No one believes we’re underreporting military deaths,” Mr. Schooner said. “Everyone believes we’re underreporting contractor deaths.”

Qais Mansoori, 20, may have been among the uncounted. An Afghan interpreter employed by Mission Essential Personnel, a leading provider of interpreters in Afghanistan, Mr. Mansoori was killed along with five other interpreters when Taliban insurgents overran the military base where the interpreters were staying in the Mirwais district of Kandahar Province in July 2010.

That attack, typically, was scantily reported, since no soldiers died — although the death toll was 17, including an unidentified American civilian, according to Afghan officials and Mr. Mansoori’s friends and family.

Under the federal Defense Base Act, American defense contractors are obliged to report the war zone deaths and injuries of their employees — including subcontractors and foreign workers — to the Department of Labor, and to carry insurance that will provide the employees with medical care and compensation. In the case of foreign employees, which many of the dead were, survivors generally receive a death benefit equal to half of the employee’s salary for life; American employees get even more.

Mr. Mansoori’s brother, Mohammad, 35, an employee of a mine-removal charity in Afghanistan, said his brother’s employer, Mission Essential Personnel, promptly contacted the family and made a lump sum payment of $10,004, never mentioning the lifetime annuity to which they were entitled — which given Mr. Mansoori’s salary of $800 a month would have been closer to $150,000 over his survivors’ lifetimes. “I wish he was still here to look after my father and mother,” Mohammad Mansoori said. Their father is blind, and Qais Mansoori was his parents’ sole support, he said.

A spokesman for Mission Essential Personnel, Sean Rushton, disputed that, saying that his company has been making biweekly payments of $190 to Mr. Mansoori’s family and will continue doing so for 29 years. The $10,004 lump sum payment was a voluntary death gratuity paid by the company, Mr. Rushton said.

There were 113,491 employees of defense contractors in Afghanistan as of January 2012, compared with about 90,000 American soldiers, according to Defense Department statistics. Of those, 25,287, or about 22 percent of the employees, were American citizens, with 47 percent Afghans and 31 percent from other countries.

The bulk of the known contractor deaths are concentrated among a handful of major companies, particularly those providing interpreters, drivers, security guards and other support personnel who are particularly vulnerable to attacks.

The biggest contractor in terms of war zone deaths is apparently the defense giant L-3 Communications. If L-3 were a country, it would have the third highest loss of life in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq; only the United States and Britain would exceed it in fatalities.

Over the past 10 years, L-3 and its subsidiaries, including Titan Corporation and MPRI Inc., had at least 370 workers killed and 1,789 seriously wounded or injured through the end of 2011 in Iraq and Afghanistan, records show. In a statement, a spokeswoman for L-3, Jennifer Barton, said: “L-3 is proud to have the opportunity to support the U.S. and coalition efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We mourn the loss of life of these dedicated men and women.”

Other American companies with a high number of fatalities are Supreme Group, a catering company, with 241 dead through the end of 2011; Service Employees International, another catering company, with 125 dead; and security companies like DynCorps (101 dead), Aegis (86 dead) and Hart Group (63 dead). In all, according to Labor Department data, 64 American companies have lost more than seven employees each in the past 10 years.

The American dead have included people like James McLaughlin, 55, who trained pilots on a contract for MPRI and was killed by a rogue Afghan pilot who also killed eight American soldiers last April; and Todd Walker, Michael Clawson and James Scott Ozier, employees of AAR Airlift, who were killed in a helicopter crash in Helmand Province last month for which Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility.

For every contractor who is killed, many more are seriously wounded. According to the Labor Department’s statistics, 1,777 American contractors in Afghanistan were injured or wounded seriously enough to miss more than four days of work last year.

Marcie Hascall Clark began the Defense Base Act Compensation Blog after her husband, Merlin, a former Navy explosives ordnance disposal expert, was injured in 2003 while working for an American contractor. She and her husband have spent the past seven years fighting for hundreds of thousands of dollars in disability payments and medical compensation. “It was quite a shock to learn how little my husband’s body, mind and future were worth,” she said.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Pretending the American Empire won the war in Afghanistan

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US gambles on special forces in Afghanistan strategy

AFP

By Dan De Luce

As it draws down troops in Afghanistan, the United States plans to rely heavily on its special forces, gambling the elite troops can serve as a firewall to prevent the Taliban seizing back power, experts and officials say.

Having backed a major troop buildup when he entered office, President Barack Obama is shifting course, opting for a scaled back military presence built around 9,000 special operations forces focused on training Afghan troops and striking insurgent leaders, officials said.

"It's a natural progression," said one defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"As the mission becomes more focused on training, it makes sense that special forces take on more importance. Training is one of their primary missions. That's what they do."

The approach reflects lowered expectations about what can be accomplished after ten years of war and carries an array of risks, analysts and former officials said.

"It's a policy calculation that these (conventional) troops won't be needed. I would bet there would be some challenges," said Jeffrey Dressler, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

Obama's initial strategy was to knock back the insurgency in strategic areas in the south and east, gaining the upper hand on the battlefield to pave the way for handing over security to the Afghans and possible peace talks.

But while the Taliban lost ground in the south, NATO-led forces have yet to roll back the insurgents in the east and the war is still widely seen as a stalemate.

"The military mission is not complete," said Seth Jones of the RAND Corporation, a former adviser to special forces commanders.

A smaller NATO military footprint could allow the Taliban to gain back lost ground on the battlefield, especially in the southern Helmand province, possibly undermining Kabul's bargaining power in any peace talks with the insurgency, he said.

Obama's wager, however, has a chance of succeeding if the military aim is much narrower -- to avert disaster instead of fighting the Taliban in every corner of the country, Jones said.

"The only way this is likely to work is if the objectives begin to change," Jones said.

"If the US objectives are to prevent the Taliban from overthrowing the Kabul government, that may be something that is achievable."

Already, the United States no longer expects the central government in Kabul to provide security in every area. Instead, the US military has built up local police forces, leaving it to towns and villages to fend off the insurgents, he said.

It remains unclear how the drawdown of most coalition troops by the end of 2014 will affect the morale of Afghan forces as well as the West's uneasy relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Deploying and supplying special forces will require continued cooperation from the Afghan government, which harbors deep distrust of the special forces due to aggressive night raids and assaults that have claimed civilian lives.

If US economic aid and financial support for Afghan forces declines dramatically, Karzai and other leaders may choose to provide less than full cooperation to the Americans, said Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"The special forces' presence in particular has been quite controversial for Afghans," Biddle said.

"We sort of assume that we can withdraw all sorts of other things that the Afghans want, and they'll still give us what we want," he said. "One needs to think carefully about the sustainability of that."

By relying on a limited troop presence and special forces, the US approach has come full circle, resembling the model employed at the outset of the war by former president George W. Bush and his controversial defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Unlike the Rumsfeld era, fiscal pressures are partly driving the latest emphasis on a light footprint.

Circumstances in Afghanistan also are markedly different from 2001-2002, when the Taliban were in disarray, before the Islamist militants rebounded as a formidable insurgency.

"The problem now is without a sizable counter-insurgency effort, can the (Kabul) government persist in the face of a large, capable insurgency that did not exist in 2002?" Biddle said.

Obama lets his Generals & Admirals declare war???

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Admiral Seeks Freer Hand in Deployment of Elite Forces

By ERIC SCHMITT, MARK MAZZETTI and THOM SHANKER

Published: February 12, 2012

WASHINGTON — As the United States turns increasingly to Special Operations forces to confront developing threats scattered around the world, the nation’s top Special Operations officer, a member of the Navy Seals who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, is seeking new authority to move his forces faster and outside of normal Pentagon deployment channels.

The officer, Adm. William H. McRaven, who leads the Special Operations Command, is pushing for a larger role for his elite units who have traditionally operated in the dark corners of American foreign policy. The plan would give him more autonomy to position his forces and their war-fighting equipment where intelligence and global events indicate they are most needed.

It would also allow the Special Operations forces to expand their presence in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

While President Obama and his Pentagon’s leadership have increasingly made Special Operations forces their military tool of choice, similar plans in the past have foundered because of opposition from regional commanders and the State Department. The military’s regional combatant commanders have feared a decrease of their authority, and some ambassadors in crisis zones have voiced concerns that commandos may carry out missions that are perceived to tread on a host country’s sovereignty, like the rift in ties with Pakistan after the Bin Laden raid.

Administration, military and Congressional officials say that the Special Operations Command has embarked on a quiet lobbying campaign to push through the initiative. Pentagon and administration officials note that while the Special Operations Command is certain to see a growth in its budget and personnel when the new Defense Department spending plan is released Monday — in contrast to many other parts of the military that are being cut — no decisions have been made on whether to expand Admiral McRaven’s authorities.

The White House and State Department declined to comment on the proposal on Sunday.

The proposals are put forward as a new model for warfare in an age of diminishing Pentagon budgets, shrinking numbers of troops and declining public appetite for large wars of occupation, according to Pentagon officials, military officers and civilian contractors briefed on the plan. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made.

Under the new concepts, a significant number of Special Operations forces — projected at 12,000 — would remain deployed around the world. While commando teams would be on call for striking terrorist targets and rescuing hostages, just as significant would be the increased number of these personnel deployed on training and liaison assignments and to gather information to help the command better predict approaching national security risks.

Officials stressed that in almost all cases, Special Operations forces would still only be ordered on specific missions by the regional four-star commander.

“It’s not really about Socom running the global war on terrorism,” Admiral McRaven said in a brief interview last week, referring to the Special Operations Command. “I don’t think we’re ready to do that. What it’s about is how do I better support” the regional combatant commanders.

For the past decade, more than 80 percent of the United States’ Special Operations forces have been deployed to the Middle East. With the military’s conventional forces coming home after the full withdrawal from Iraq, Admiral McRaven wants the authority to spread his commando teams into regions where they had been thinned out to provide forces for wars after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Even more, Admiral McRaven wants the authority to quickly move his units to potential hot spots without going through the standard Pentagon process governing overseas deployments. Historically, the deployment of American forces overseas began with a request from a global combatant commander that was processed through the military’s Joint Staff and placed before the defense secretary for approval, in a cautious and deliberate process.

Shifting national security threats may argue for Admiral McRaven’s plans. With Special Operations forces concentrated in the Middle East and Southwest Asia over the last decade, commanders in other regions are seeking more of these units in their areas.

State Department officials say they have not yet been briefed on the proposals. In the past, some ambassadors in crisis zones have opposed increased deployments of Special Operations teams, and they have demanded assurances that diplomatic chiefs of missions will be fully involved in their plans and missions.

Senior Special Operations commanders pledged that their efforts would be coordinated with the senior diplomatic representative in each country. These officers also describe how the new authorities would stress working with local security forces whenever possible. The exception would be when a local government was unable or unwilling to cooperate with an authorized American mission, or if there was no responsible government in power with whom to work.

Admiral McRaven’s plans have raised concerns even within the Special Operations community. Two Pentagon consultants said they have spoken with senior Special Operations officers who worry about their troops being stretched too thin. They are also concerned that Special Operations forces — still less than 2 percent of the entire military — will become so much the “go to” force of choice that they are asked to carry out missions beyond their capacity.

“Sure, we’re worried about that,” said one senior Special Operations officer with several command tours overseas. “But we also think we can manage that.”

The Special Operations Command now numbers just under 66,000 people — including both military personnel and Defense Department civilians — a doubling since 2001. Its budget has reached $10.5 billion, up from $4.2 billion in 2001 (after adjusting for inflation).

Over the past decade, Special Operations Command personnel have been deployed for combat operations, exercises, training and other liaison missions in more than 70 countries. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Special Operations Command sustained overseas deployments of more than 12,000 troops a day, with four-fifths committed to the broader Middle East.

Even as the Pentagon trims its conventional force, with a refocus on the Asia-Pacific region and reductions in Europe, the Special Operations Command says it needs to permanently sustain that overseas force of 12,000 deployed around the world — with troops that came out of Iraq being distributed across regions that had not had many over the past decade.

Under Admiral McRaven’s evolving plans — what he calls the Global SOF Alliance — Special Operations forces would be moved around the globe at his direction, to bolster the forces available to the top Special Operations officer assigned to each theater of operation. Thickening the Special Operations deployments in these other regions would allow the United States to be ready to respond more rapidly to a broader range of threats.

Current guidelines allow the Special Operations Command to carry out missions on its own for very specific types of operations, although that has rarely been done and officials involved in the current debate say that would remain a rare event.

“He’s trying to provide global agility,” said one former military official who has been briefed on the planning. “If your network is not elastic, it’s not as agile as the enemy.”

Iran pays back Israel for murder of nuke scientist?

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Israel blames Iran for attacks on diplomats in India, Georgia

by Ravi Nessman - Feb. 13, 2012 10:00 PM

Associated Press

NEW DELHI - Israel blamed Iran on Monday for bomb attacks on its diplomats' cars in India and Georgia, heightening concerns that the Jewish state was moving closer to striking its archenemy.

Iran denied responsibility for the attacks, which appeared to mirror the recent killings of Iranian nuclear scientists, which Iran blamed on Israel.

The blast in New Delhi set a car ablaze and injured four people, including an Israeli Embassy driver and a diplomat's wife. The device in Georgia was discovered and safely defused.

"Iran is behind these attacks, and it is the largest terror exporter in the world," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers from his Likud Party.

The violence added further tension to one of the globe's most contentious standoffs. Iran has been accused of developing a nuclear-weapons program that Israel says threatens the existence of the Jewish state. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.

Comments by Israeli officials in recent weeks have raised fears that Israel might be preparing to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. While Israel says it hopes that international sanctions can curb Iran's nuclear program, leaders pointedly note that "all options are on the table" and have warned that as Iran moves closer to weapons capability, time is running out for action. Fearing that an Israeli attack could set off a conflict across the region and send oil prices skyrocketing, U.S. and other Western countries have been pressing Israel to give sanctions more time.

Israeli military analyst Reuven Pedatzur said Monday's action was unlikely to have any bearing on whether Israel attacks Iran, calling it an "isolated incident" with rather low impact.

The attackers in India and Georgia appeared to have used "sticky bombs" attached to cars by magnets, similar to weapons used against Iran's nuclear officials. Netanyahu said Israel had thwarted attacks in recent months in Azerbaijan and Thailand and unspecified other countries.

"In all those cases, the elements behind these attacks were Iran and its protege, Hezbollah," Netanyahu said, referring to Iran's Lebanese proxy. He vowed to "act with a strong hand against international terror."

Israeli media reported that the government blamed Iran based on prior intelligence and that security officials feared this could be the start of a wave of attacks against Israeli targets overseas.

Iranian officials rejected Netanyahu's accusation.

"This accusation is within the Zionist regime's psychological war against Iran," the official IRNA news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast as saying.

"The Zionist regime, due to repeated crimes against humanity, is the main party accused of terrorist activities," he said, according to IRNA.

The New Delhi attack took place just after 3 p.m. a few hundred yards from the prime minister's residence as the diplomat's wife headed to the American Embassy School to pick up her children, said Delhi Police Commissioner B.K. Gupta.

When the minivan approached a crossing, she noticed a motorcyclist ride up and stick something on it that appeared to be a magnetic device, he said. The minivan traveled a short distance, there was a loud sound and then an explosion, and the minivan caught fire, he said. The blast left the vehicle charred and appeared to blow out its rear door.

Drone strikes in the USA????

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Pentagon working with FAA to open U.S. airspace to combat drones

By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times

February 13, 2012, 9:57 p.m.

With a growing fleet of combat drones in its arsenal, the Pentagon is working with the Federal Aviation Administration to open U.S. airspace to its robotic aircraft.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, the military says the drones that it has spent the last decade accruing need to return to the United States. When the nation first went to war after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the military had around 50 drones. Now it owns nearly 7,500.

These flying robots need to be shipped home at some point, and the military then hopes to station them at various military bases and use them for many purposes. But the FAA doesn't allow drones in national airspace without a special certificate.

These aircraft would be used to help train and retrain the pilots who fly the drones remotely, but they also are likely to find new roles at home in emergencies, helping firefighters see hot spots during wildfires or possibly even dropping water to combat the blaze.

At a recent conference about robotic technology in Washington, D.C., a number of military members spoke about the importance of integrating drones along with manned aircraft.

"The stuff from Afghanistan is going to come back," Steve Pennington, the Air Force's director of ranges, bases and airspace, said at the conference. The Department of Defense "doesn't want a segregated environment. We want a fully integrated environment."

That means the Pentagon wants the same rules for drones as any other military aircraft in the U.S. today.

Robotic technology was the focus of the Assn. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's annual program review conference in Washington last week. For three days, a crowd made up of more than 500 military contractors, military personnel and industry insiders packed the Omni Shoreham Hotel to listen to the foremost experts on robots in the air, on the ground and in the sea.

Once the stuff of science-fiction novels, robotic technology now plays a major role day-to-day life. Automated machines help farmers gather crops. Robotic submarines scour the ocean floor for signs of oil beds. Flying drones have become crucial in hunting suspected terrorists in the Middle East.

Drones such as the jet-powered, high-flying RQ-4 Global Hawk made by Northrop Grumman Corp. have also been successful in providing aerial coverage of recent catastrophic events like the tsunami in Japan and earthquake in Haiti.

The FAA has said that remotely piloted aircraft aren't allowed in national airspace on a wide scale because they don't have an adequate "detect, sense and avoid" technology to prevent midair collisions.

The FAA does allow exceptions. Unarmed Predator drones are used to patrol the nation's borders through special certifications. The FAA said it issued 313 such certificates last year.

The vast majority of the military's drones are small — similar to hobby aircraft. The FAA is working on proposed rules for integrating these drones, which are being eyed by law enforcement and private business to provide aerial surveillance. The FAA expects to release the proposal on small drones this spring.

But the Pentagon is concerned about flying hundreds of larger drones, including Global Hawks as well as MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers, both made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. in Poway.

And last week Congress approved legislation that requires the FAA to have a plan to integrate drones of all kinds into national airspace on a wide scale by 2015.

The Army will conduct a demonstration this summer at its Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, testing ground-based radars and other sense-and-avoid technology, Mary Ottman, deputy product director with the Army, said at the conference.

These first steps are crucial, said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who co-chairs a bipartisan drone caucus with Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-Santa Clarita). Officially known as the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, the panel was formed in 2009 to inform members of Congress on the far-reaching applications of drone technology.

McKeon also said he was in favor of moving along the process of integrating drones into civil airspace. This came before he was abruptly interrupted by an anti-drone female protester during a speech.

"These drones are playing God," she said, carrying a banner that read "Stop Killer Drones." She was part of a group that wants the end of drone strikes.

Within seconds, hotel security personnel surrounded the woman. She was carried out chanting, "Stop killer drones."

McKeon, who stood silent throughout the brief protest, went on with his speech.

william.hennigan@latimes.com

National Guard colonel pleads guilty to fraud

Retired National Guard colonel pleads guilty to fraud

Feb. 15, 2012 09:55 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

A retired National Guard colonel who embezzled more than $2 million from charitable funds pleaded guilty in Maricopa County Superior Court Wednesday to fraud and theft charges.

James Eugene Burnes, 66, was resource manager for the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs. Between 2007 and 2011, when he was found out, he diverted money from funds that were intended to provide emergency assistance to Arizona National Guard members and their families.

Prosecutors said Burnes took the money to support a gambling habit.

Burnes will be sentenced March 28 before Judge Susan Brnovich.

We won the war! Time to release the POWs in Guantanamo

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This War Is Not Over Yet

By MARY L. DUDZIAK

Published: February 15, 2012

THE defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, recently announced that America hoped to end its combat mission in Afghanistan in 2013 as it did in Iraq last year. Yet at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, the United States continues to hold enemy detainees “for the duration of hostilities.”

Indeed, the “ending” of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq appears to have no consequences for the ending of detention. Because the end of a war is traditionally thought to be the moment when a president’s war powers begin to ebb, bringing combat to a close in Afghanistan and Iraq should lead to a reduction in executive power — including the legitimate basis for detaining the enemy.

But there is a disconnect today between the wars that are ending and the “war” that is used to justify ongoing detention of prisoners. Originally, the war in Afghanistan was part of the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” This framing had rhetorical power, but it quickly drew criticism because a war on terror has no boundaries in space or time, and no prospect of ever ending.

When he took office, President Obama abandoned the “war on terror” rhetoric, focusing instead on Iraq and Afghanistan. American war now seemed more manageable and traditional. A confined war in a specific war zone was a war that presumably could end once the enemy was defeated within that territory. But it was not so simple: Qaeda fighters slipped over the Afghan border to Pakistan, extending the zone of conflict.

Ending wars has never been easy, of course. On the Korean Peninsula, fighting came to a halt with an armistice agreement in 1953, but a peace treaty has never been signed, so there has been no formal end to that war. Faced with continuing threats from North Korea, American troops continue to maintain a presence in South Korea. Had today’s logic been applied there, Korean prisoners of war might still be serving the rest of their years in detention.

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese soldiers also crossed a border, into Cambodia. But once that war came to an end, the basis for ongoing detention of North Vietnamese enemy soldiers ended, even if a cold war against communism continued.

America’s recent wars have been hard to end, but our presidents have done their best to argue that our goals have been accomplished. President George W. Bush did this memorably when he declared victory in Iraq in May 2003 on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln under the banner “Mission Accomplished” — and yet that conflict was far from over.

President Obama had his own “Mission Accomplished” moment, when he declared the “end of combat in Iraq” in August 2010. Like Mr. Bush’s episode, Mr. Obama’s was principally a media event, as reporters spoke with excitement about the historic moment, as American combat troops crossed the border into Kuwait. Yet at the time, 50,000 United States troops remained in Iraq, and the Army quickly reassured them that, even though “conflict” had ended, “conflict conditions” persisted, and hence soldiers would still receive additional pay for serving in a hostile zone. That first “ending” of the Iraq war has now been largely forgotten, eclipsed by the December 2011 withdrawal — a much more extensive drawdown than initially planned.

The “end of combat” in Afghanistan, slated for 2013, could become yet another made-for-media event. But at the very least it should force Americans to confront the contradiction of ending two wars while invoking a nebulous and never-ending third one to justify the continued detention of prisoners.

Administration lawyers have an answer for this: the original post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force gave the president authority to act against Al Qaeda and its supporters.

Mr. Obama brought his definition of war into line with this more expansive view in January 2010 by declaring that the United States is “at war against Al Qaeda.” This broadened the scope of Mr. Obama’s rhetoric on war by divorcing it from geography. And it provided a way of bringing into the ambit of American war terrorists outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric tied to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was killed by an American drone strike in Yemen last September.

Like the Bush administration’s version of the war on terror, this war with Al Qaeda allows us to follow our enemies wherever they may go. It also enables us to continue framing terrorists as warriors, subject to detention without charges as long as threats related to Al Qaeda exist.

Mr. Obama is trying to have it both ways. Ending major conflicts in two countries helps him deliver on campaign promises. But his expansive definition of war leaves in place the executive power to detain without charges, and to exercise war powers in any region where Al Qaeda has a presence.

By asserting, for political purposes, that the nation’s two wars are ending while planning behind the scenes for a longer-term war against Al Qaeda terrorists, the man who pledged to bring America’s wars to an end has instead laid the basis for an endless battle.

Mary L. Dudziak, a professor of law, history and political science at the University of Southern California, is the author of “War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences.”

FBI creates terrorism plot, then stops it!!!!

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Federal agents arrest Amine El Khalifi; he allegedly planned to bomb Capitol

By Sari Horwitz, William Wan and Del Quentin Wilber

Published: February 17

Federal authorities on Friday arrested a 29-year-old Moroccan man in an alleged plot to carry out a suicide bombing at the U.S. Capitol, the latest in a series of terrorism-related arrests resulting from undercover sting operations.

For more than a year, Amine El Khalifi, of Alexandria, considered attacking targets including a synagogue, an Alexandria building with military offices and a Washington restaurant frequented by military officials, authorities said. When arrested a few blocks from the Capitol around lunchtime on Friday, he was carrying what he believed to be a loaded automatic weapon and a suicide vest ready for detonation.

How a plot was hatched — and thwarted

The gun and vest were provided not by al-Qaeda, as Khalifi had been told, but by undercover FBI agents who rendered them inoperable, authorities said.

They said Khalifi had been the subject of a lengthy investigation and never posed a threat to the public. On Friday afternoon, he made an initial court appearance in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, where he was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against federal property. He faces life in prison if convicted.

Khalifi “allegedly believed he was working with al-Qaeda,” said Neil H. MacBride, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Khalifi “devised the plot, the targets and the methods on his own.”

In several recent terrorism sting operations, critics have accused federal investigators of provoking suspects and, in some cases, suggesting possible targets or tactics. Legal experts say the FBI sometimes walks a fine line in such cases.

“You want to be very sure that the narrative is not substantially provided by the government,” said Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, who studies terrorism sting operations. “There’s a lot of gray area in these cases.”

But officials said Friday that Khalifi, who allegedly conducted surveillance on the Capitol and engaged in methodical planning, was no unwitting victim.

Khalifi arrived in the United States when he was 16 and was living as an illegal immigrant in Northern Virginia, having overstayed his visitor’s visa for years, officials said. In 2010, he was evicted from an Arlington apartment after having failed to pay rent.

The landlord of that apartment, Frank Dynda, a retired patent lawyer, said, “He was getting mysterious packages labeled ‘books,’ but I didn’t think there were books in them.”

Dynda said he thought Khalifi was “suspicious and hostile,” and Dynda reported Khalifi to Arlington police. Two officers visited Dynda’s apartment building soon after the report but told him there was no reason to pursue the matter, he said.

It was unclear how Khalifi came to the attention of federal authorities. According to the criminal complaint filed in court Friday, a confidential source reported to the FBI in January 2011 that Khalifi had met at a residence in Arlington with individuals, one of whom produced what appeared to be an AK-47 assault rifle, two revolvers and ammunition.

When one of the other individuals expressed the sentiment that “the ‘war on terrorism’ was a ‘war on Muslims’ and said that the group needed to be ready for war,” Khalifi reportedly agreed, according to the complaint.

Khalifi “sought to be associated with an armed extremist group” and was introduced on Dec. 1, 2011, to a man called Yusuf, who was an undercover law enforcement officer.

How a plot was hatched — and thwarted

According to the criminal complaint, during meetings with the undercover officer, Khalifi indicated his desire to conduct an operation in which he could carry out a shooting rampage in a restaurant. That restaurant — like the synagogue — was not identified in court documents.

On Jan. 15, Khalifi told undercover agents that he had modified his plans for the attack and wanted to conduct a suicide bombing at the Capitol, according to the complaint. It said that on that same day, at a quarry in West Virginia, Khalifi carried out a test bombing using a cellphone as a detonation device; the test bomb exploded, and Khalifi expressed a desire for a larger explosion in his attack.

On Friday, before preparing for what he allegedly considered a “martyrdom” mission, Khalifi prayed at Dar Al-Hijrah, a Northern Virginia mosque, according to its imam, Johari Abdul-Malik, who said he learned of Khalifi’s presence in an afternoon phone call from the FBI. “They said that the guy prayed at the mosque this morning,” Abdul-Malik said. “They said they’ve been following him for a long time now, and he’s not a regular attender at our mosque nor any other mosque.”

Khalifi was driven into downtown Washington by Yusuf and another man who was working undercover with the FBI. Afterward, Khalifi began walking alone toward the Capitol but quickly was arrested, authorities said.

“There is no doubt that this guy was committed,” said a law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation.

Following the arrest, FBI agents and Arlington police raided a red-brick rambler on Randolph Street in the Douglas Park neighborhood, near a wooded area with trails and a creek. Agents were seen going in and out of the house and searching the back yard. Arlington police said they were assisting with a search warrant.

As news of the arrest spread, several members of the mosque Khalifi visited expressed concern that they could be thrust into the spotlight once again, even though Khalifi was not thought to have been a regular worshiper at the mosque.

Dar Al-Hijrah has weathered repeated criticism for ties to worshipers who were found to have been terrorism suspects. The mosque’s leaders have noted that, as one of the largest mosques in the Mid-Atlantic, it attracts worshipers from all over, including many who attend infrequently.

In the past year, federal agents have arrested at least 20 people in the United States on terrorism-related charges, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Washington has been the alleged target in at least two terrorism cases. In one, a Massachusetts man of Bangladeshi descent was arrested for allegedly plotting to fly explosives-packed model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol. In the other, Farooque Ahmed, a Pakistani American from Ashburn, attempted to bomb Washington area Metro stations. In both of those cases, the FBI relied on undercover agents.

Ashraf Nubani, a Muslim lawyer in Washington who has defended terrorism suspects in similar cases in the past, said he has has watched with alarm the increase of such FBI stings.

“It’s controlled from beginning to end by FBI. But you can’t create a terrorism case and then say you stopped it,” Nubani said. “Had the FBI not been involved, through their manipulation or informants, would the same thing have happened? Would there be attempted violence? They have their sights on certain people, the ones who talk big talk.”

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the affidavit in the Khalifi case makes clear that “at each step, it was the defendant who proposed the alleged plot and sought help in obtaining the weapons to carry it out.”

“Whenever we conduct an undercover operation of this sort, we fully anticipate that allegations of entrapment will be raised as a defense, and we conduct the investigation accordingly to assure that entrapment does not occur,” he said.

Khalifi is due in court Wednesday afternoon for a preliminary hearing.

Staff writers William Branigin, Jason Ukman, Jeremy Borden, Katherine Driessen, Allison Klein, Erica W. Morrison, Dan Morse and Clarence Williams and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Will John McCain get his wish to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran???

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Iran Raid Seen as a Huge Task for Israeli Jets

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: February 19, 2012

WASHINGTON — Should Israel decide to launch a strike on Iran, its pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran’s air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously — and use at least 100 planes.

That is the assessment of American defense officials and military analysts close to the Pentagon, who say that an Israeli attack meant to set back Iran’s nuclear program would be a huge and highly complex operation. They describe it as far different from Israel’s “surgical” strikes on a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007 and Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.

“All the pundits who talk about ‘Oh, yeah, bomb Iran,’ it ain’t going to be that easy,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who retired last year as the Air Force’s top intelligence official and who planned the American air campaigns in 2001 in Afghanistan and in the 1991 Gulf War.

Speculation that Israel might attack Iran has intensified in recent months as tensions between the countries have escalated. In a sign of rising American concern, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Sunday, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, warned on CNN that an Israeli strike on Iran right now would be “destabilizing.” Similarly, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that attacking Iran would not be “the wise thing” for Israel to do “at this moment.”

But while an Israeli spokesman in Washington, Lior Weintraub, said the country continued to push for tougher sanctions on Iran, he reiterated that Israel, like the United States, “is keeping all options on the table.”

The possible outlines of an Israeli attack have become a source of debate in Washington, where some analysts question whether Israel even has the military capacity to carry it off. One fear is that the United States would be sucked into finishing the job — a task that even with America’s far larger arsenal of aircraft and munitions could still take many weeks, defense analysts said. Another fear is of Iranian retaliation.

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll say, ‘Here’s how it’s going to be done — handful of planes, over an evening, in and out,’ ” said Andrew R. Hoehn, a former Pentagon official who is now director of the Rand Corporation’s Project Air Force, which does extensive research for the United States Air Force.

Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009, said flatly last month that airstrikes capable of seriously setting back Iran’s nuclear program were “beyond the capacity” of Israel, in part because of the distance that attack aircraft would have to travel and the scale of the task.

Still, a top defense official cautioned in an interview last week that “we don’t have perfect visibility” into Israel’s arsenal, let alone its military calculations. His views were echoed by Anthony H. Cordesman, an influential military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There are a lot of unknowns, there are a lot of potential risks, but Israel may know that those risks aren’t that serious,” he said.

Given that Israel would want to strike Iran’s four major nuclear sites — the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, the heavy-water reactor at Arak and the yellowcake-conversion plant at Isfahan — military analysts say the first problem is how to get there. There are three potential routes: to the north over Turkey, to the south over Saudi Arabia or taking a central route across Jordan and Iraq.

The route over Iraq would be the most direct and likely, defense analysts say, because Iraq effectively has no air defenses and the United States, after its December withdrawal, no longer has the obligation to defend Iraqi skies. “That was a concern of the Israelis a year ago, that we would come up and intercept their aircraft if the Israelis chose to take a path across Iraq,” said a former defense official who asked for anonymity to discuss secret intelligence.

Assuming that Jordan tolerates the Israeli overflight, the next problem is distance. Israel has American-built F-15I and F-16I fighter jets that can carry bombs to the targets, but their range — depending on altitude, speed and payload — falls far short of the minimum 2,000-mile round trip. That does not include an aircraft’s “loiter time” over a target plus the potential of having to fight off attacks from Iranian missiles and planes.

In any possibility, Israel would have to use airborne refueling planes, called tankers, but Israel is not thought to have enough. Scott Johnson, an analyst at the defense consulting firm IHS Jane’s and the leader of a team preparing an online seminar on Israeli strike possibilities on Iran, said that Israel had eight KC-707 American-made tankers, although it is not clear they are all in operation. It is possible, he said, that Israel has reconfigured existing planes into tankers to use in a strike.

Even so, any number of tankers would need to be protected by ever more fighter planes. “So the numbers you need just skyrocket,” Mr. Johnson said. Israel has about 125 F-15Is and F-16Is. One possibility, Mr. Johnson said, would be to fly the tankers as high as 50,000 feet, making them hard for air defenses to hit, and then have them drop down to a lower altitude to meet up with the fighter jets to refuel.

Israel would still need to use its electronic warfare planes to penetrate Iran’s air defenses and jam its radar systems to create a corridor for an attack. Iran’s antiaircraft defenses may be a generation old — in 2010, Russia refused to sell Iran its more advanced S-300 missile system — but they are hardly negligible, military analysts say.

Iranian missiles could force Israeli warplanes to maneuver and dump their munitions before they even reached their targets. Iran could also strike back with missiles that could hit Israel, opening a new war in the Middle East, though some Israeli officials have argued that the consequences would be worse if Iran were to gain a nuclear weapon.

Another major hurdle is Israel’s inventory of bombs capable of penetrating the Natanz facility, believed to be buried under 30 feet of reinforced concrete, and the Fordo site, which is built into a mountain.

Assuming it does not use a nuclear device, Israel has American-made GBU-28 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs that could damage such hardened targets, although it is unclear how far down they can go.

Earlier this month, a Bipartisan Policy Center report by Charles S. Robb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, and Charles F. Wald, a retired Air Force general, recommended that the Obama administration sell Israel 200 enhanced GBU-31 “bunker busters” as well as three advanced refueling planes.

The two said that they were not advocating an Israeli attack, but that the munitions and aircraft were needed to improve Israel’s credibility as it threatens a strike.

Should the United States get involved — or decide to strike on its own — military analysts said that the Pentagon had the ability to launch big strikes with bombers, stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, followed up by drones that could carry out damage assessments to help direct further strikes. Unlike Israel, the United States has plenty of refueling capability. Bombers could fly from Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or bases in Britain and the United States.

Nonetheless, defense officials say it would still be tough to penetrate Iran’s deepest facilities with existing American bombs and so are enhancing an existing 30,000-pound “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” that was specifically designed for Iran and North Korea.

“There’s only one superpower in the world that can carry this off,” General Deptula said. “Israel’s great on a selective strike here and there.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg loves the police state

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NYC mayor, Yale leader spar over Muslim spying

by David B. Caruso - Feb. 21, 2012 11:11 PM

Associated Press

NEW YORK - New York City's mayor faced off with the president of Yale University on Monday over efforts by the city's Police Department to monitor Muslim student groups.

The Associated Press revealed over the weekend that in recent years, the NYPD has kept close watch on Muslim student associations across the Northeast. The effort included daily tracking of student websites and blogs, monitoring who was speaking to the groups and, in one case, sending an undercover officer on a whitewater-rafting trip with students from the City College of New York.

Yale President Richard Levin was among a number of academics who condemned the effort Monday, while Rutgers University and leaders of Muslim student groups elsewhere called for investigations into the monitoring.

"I am writing to state, in the strongest possible terms, that police surveillance based on religion, nationality, or peacefully expressed political opinions is antithetical to the values of Yale, the academic community, and the United States," Levin wrote in a statement.

Speaking to reporters later Monday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg dismissed those criticisms as baseless.

"I don't know why keeping the country safe is antithetical to the values of Yale," he said.

He said it was "ridiculous" to argue that there was anything wrong with officers keeping an eye on websites that are available to the general public.

"Of course we're going to look at anything that's publicly available in the public domain. We have an obligation to do so, and it is to protect the very things that let Yale survive," Bloomberg said.

Asked by a reporter if he thought it was a "step too far" to send undercover investigators to accompany students on rafting vacations, Bloomberg said, "No. We have to keep this country safe."

"It's very cute to go and blame everybody and say we should stay away from anything that smacks of intelligence gathering. The job of our law enforcement is to make sure that they prevent things. And you only do that by being proactive."

Bloomberg added that he believed that police officers had obeyed the law.

The NYPD monitoring effort included schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

The undercover agent who attended the City College rafting trip recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed. Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

States use "war on terror" to raise revenue???

Loot confiscated by TSA turns into revenue for states

By Bart Jansen, USA TODAY

From samurai swords to hatchets to snow globes, the Transportation Security Administration collects tons of unusual objects each year that passengers try to carry onto planes.

The objects are what the TSA deems weapons or other threats to flight security. They're surrendered at checkpoints by forgetful or harried passengers who would rather give them up than miss a flight or return to the check-in counter and pay extra to put them in a checked bag.

Among the most common: Swiss Army knives or similarly sharp multiuse pocket tools, though the gamut runs to swords or even fuzzy handcuffs that are more for bedroom use than law enforcement.

And despite cynical suggestions from angry travelers that security officers keep the items for themselves, the TSA turns over the property to state agencies and commercial vendors, which cart it away to sell. Although public auctions yield a fraction of retail prices, dozens of states have found some revenue in the contraband.

"It's kind of amazing what people will try to take on board," says Troy Thompson, spokesman for Pennsylvania's Department of General Services, which takes some of the contraband. "To them (passengers), it's an item that's not threatening, but in these days and times it is threatening."

Pennsylvania collects truckloads of items from airports, including New York City's John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty. The state has raised $700,000 from selling them since 2004, Thompson says.

The most sought-after items by buyers are among the most often left behind: pocket knives, scissors and corkscrews, which are typically sold in boxes of 100. Occasionally, machetes, samurai swords and even an African spear are trucked to the state warehouse in Harrisburg, he says.

The passenger shakedown

About 30 states have collected TSA-relinquished property since the agency was created to provide stricter baggage screening after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to Scott Pepperman, executive director of the National Association of State Agencies for Surplus Property.

Because the TSA had trouble coping with the accumulation, with 10 tons of contraband piling up at Los Angeles International Airport alone, Pepperman helped negotiate an agreement a decade ago with the federal government for states to take possession of the surrendered items.

"It was of no use to TSA. It's of no value to them. The cost and care of storage and handling was exceeding the commercial value of it to them," Pepperman says. "Some (states) put them up on eBay. Some have their own websites. Others have auctions."

Some states, he says, donate useful items to schools, fire departments and charities.

Some items have questionable resale value. Items that crossed Pepperman's path while he worked in the Pennsylvania surplus agency until two years ago included machetes, meat slicers and a box of rocks.

"We collected more fuzzy handcuffs than you would ever see in your life — boxes and boxes of fuzzy handcuffs," he says.

Despite a policy of not carrying sharp objects onto planes that dates to just after 9/11 and one that limits liquids and gels that dates to 2006, the TSA continues to collect objects that clearly have malevolent possibilities.

This month, a spear gun showed up at Newark, joining assorted hatchets, chains, inert grenades, metal throwing stars and bullet-holding bandoliers.

Al Della Fave, spokesman for the Port Authority Police Department for New York and New Jersey, admired a recent find of decorative daggers from the Middle East in an ornate wooden box that a traveler carried under his arm.

"People think they're good to go — and they're not," Della Fava says.

More innocent-looking items also are relinquished. Hundreds of snow globes from Disneyland are in the mountain of TSA contraband piled up in Sacramento, says Michael Liang, spokesman for California's Department of General Services.

The liquid in the snow globes makes the souvenirs a forbidden item in carry-on bags on the possibility it could be explosive.

'Not a big moneymaker'

Nobody keeps track of how many tons of relinquished property is handed over or how much states receive in sales annually. Collecting, sorting and selling the odd objects is a chore, and the amount some states make may seem paltry.

This month, California had one of its quarterly auctions and got $9,800 for TSA-confiscated items, Liang says.

"It's not a lot of money, but every bit helps," he says.

In Alabama, the surplus property division at the state Department of Economic and Community Affairs got about 3 tons last year from airports in Alabama and Florida. Sales totaled about $15,000 for the year, says Larry Childers, an agency spokesman.

"It's a net plus for us, but not a big moneymaker," Childers says.

Georgia opted out of collecting the objects in 2008 because it was too much trouble, says Steve Ekin, the surplus program manager for the Department of Administrative Services.

"It was a lot of work for very little return," Ekin says.

The "War on Terror" is just a renamed "War on Drugs"?

While we are told the "Patriot Act" is for a "war on terrorism" in reality less then one percent of the people arrested for "Patriot Act" are arrested for "terrorism crimes". Most of the arrests are for "drug war" crimes.

Source

More Homeland Security presence in Four Corners

Feb. 22, 2012 09:16 AM

Associated Press

FARMINGTON, N.M. -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations in New Mexico said it plans to increase its presence in New Mexico's Four Corners region to counter to growing influences of Mexican drug cartels in the area.

The Farmington Daily Times reports (http://bit.ly/wxZvqT ) the federal agency proposes that two agents move to San Juan County full-time and that more agents be dispatched occasionally to the area to assist with serious criminal investigations.

The move comes after New Mexico law enforcement agencies around the state have asked federal officials to assist cash-strapped departments in battling gangs, drug trafficking and weapons violations. But as federal authorities have moved into places like Roswell and Las Cruces, violent Mexican drug cartels have increased their presence in the remote area of northwest New Mexico that border three other western states.

Federal authorities said that by getting involved and charging criminals in federal court, it can increase the amount of prison time. "New Mexico is very difficult with their laws. It's hard to get some quality time" in prison, said Kevin Abar, the assistant special agent in charge for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations in New Mexico. "This is where the federal government can step in, in the issue."

In recent months, Homeland Security Agents assisted local law enforcement agencies in more than 20 criminal investigations that will be prosecuted by U.S. attorneys, said Dennis Ulrich, a deputy special agent in charge of the agency's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"Some of the worst of the worst (criminals), they've plucked them out of here for narcotics, guns and gang membership," said Neil Haws, the director of Region II Narcotics Task Force. "It's very significant."

Homeland Security investigations will focus on arresting criminals for bulk-cash smuggling, weapons, child exploitation, narcotics, identity theft, cultural property smuggling, counterfeit drugs and merchandise and identity theft, Abar said.

Federal charges for those types of crimes have harsher punishments than state chargers. And the crimes are commonly used to fund terrorism and drug cartels, he said.

Abar also said the agency will arrest high-ranking members of the criminal networks.

"We want to target people who are trusted," he said.

The federal government can also seize criminals' money and possessions when they are convicted.

Since 2009, Homeland Security has added around 60 new agents to New Mexico and helped formed a number of joint task forces and multiagency groups aimed at tackling rural gangs, political corruption, drug and gun trafficking, child pornography, and human smuggling.

The beefed-up presence has resulted in a string of recent high-profile arrests, federal officials said. In March, for example, the mayor of the border town of Columbus and its police chief were among those arrested in a drug and weapons raid following a federal investigation into firearms smuggling from the U.S to Mexico. The mayor and police chief later pleaded guilty to federal charges.

U.S. Attorney Kenneth J. Gonzales said that for years New Mexico was often overlooked as federal officials spent energies on other hotspots around the country. But in recent years, federal officials began to realize that the state's 180-mile border with Mexico and its many wide-open American Indian reservations left it vulnerable to growing gun, drug and human trafficking among other crimes, he said.

In addition to seeking agents to work in San Juan County, local law enforcement and government officials are lobbying for a federal magistrate judge to work in San Juan County, so criminals could be tried for federal crimes locally, said Farmington Police Chief Kyle Westall.

"We believe we have the cases here for their work load, so we're optimistic," he said.

By having permanent Homeland Security agents in San Juan County, it may be more feasible to locate a federal judge here, Farmington Mayor Tommy Roberts said.

Information from: The Daily Times, www.daily-times.com

Yes, the police do read your private emails!!!!

A police thug from the Homeland Security, the Arizona DPS, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and the Phoenix Police will probably read this email before you do.

Adeela Khan forwarded an email message announcing an upcoming Islamic conference in Toronto to her Muslim friends at the University at Buffalo.

That email caused an analyst at the New York Police Department to her name in an official report, which was marked "SECRET" and went to Commissioner Raymond Kelly's office.

NYPD monitored Muslim students all over Northeast

By CHRIS HAWLEY | Associated Press

Mon, Feb 20, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) — One autumn morning in Buffalo, N.Y., a college student named Adeela Khan logged into her email and found a message announcing an upcoming Islamic conference in Toronto.

Khan clicked "forward," sent it to a group of fellow Muslims at the University at Buffalo, and promptly forgot about it.

But that simple act on Nov. 9, 2006, was enough to arouse the suspicion of an intelligence analyst at the New York Police Department, 300 miles away, who combed through her post and put her name in an official report. Marked "SECRET" in large red letters, the document went all the way to Commissioner Raymond Kelly's office.

The report, along with other documents obtained by The Associated Press, reveals how the NYPD's intelligence division focused far beyond New York City as part of a surveillance program targeting Muslims.

Police trawled daily through student websites run by Muslim student groups at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers and 13 other colleges in the Northeast. They talked with local authorities about professors in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.

Asked about the monitoring, police spokesman Paul Browne provided a list of 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations, which the NYPD referred to as MSAs. They included Jesse Morton, who this month pleaded guilty to posting online threats against the creators of the animated TV show "South Park." He had once tried to recruit followers at Stony Brook University on Long Island, Browne said.

"As a result, the NYPD deemed it prudent to get a better handle on what was occurring at MSAs," Browne said in an email. He said police monitored student websites and collected publicly available information in 2006 and 2007.But documents show other surveillance efforts continued for years afterward.

"I see a violation of civil rights here," said Tanweer Haq, chaplain of the Muslim Student Association at Syracuse University. "Nobody wants to be on the list of the FBI or the NYPD or whatever. Muslim students want to have their own lives, their own privacy and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody else has."

In recent months, the AP has revealed secret programs the NYPD built with help from the CIA to monitor Muslims at the places where they eat, shop and worship. The AP also published details about how police placed undercover officers at Muslim student associations in colleges within the city limits; this revelation has outraged faculty and student groups.

Though the NYPD says it follows the same rules as the FBI, some of the NYPD's activities go beyond what the FBI is allowed to do.

Kelly and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg repeatedly have said that the police only follow legitimate leads about suspected criminal activity.

But the latest documents mention no wrongdoing by any students.

In one report, an undercover officer describes accompanying 18 Muslim students from the City College of New York on a whitewater rafting trip in upstate New York on April 21, 2008. The officer noted the names of attendees who were officers of the Muslim Student Association.

"In addition to the regularly scheduled events (Rafting), the group prayed at least four times a day, and much of the conversation was spent discussing Islam and was religious in nature," the report says.

Praying five times a day is one of the core traditions of Islam.

Jawad Rasul, one of the students on the trip, said he was stunned that his name was included in the police report.

"It forces me to look around wherever I am now," Rasul said.

But another student, Ali Ahmed, whom the NYPD said appeared to be in charge of the trip, said he understood the police department's concern.

"I can't blame them for doing their job," Ahmed said. "There's lots of Muslims doing some bad things and it gives a bad name to all of us, so they have to take their due diligence."

City College criticized the surveillance and said it was unaware the NYPD was watching students.

"The City College of New York does not accept or condone any investigation of any student organization based on the political or religious content of its ideas," the college said in a written statement. "Absent specific evidence linking a member of the City College community to criminal activity, we do not condone this kind of investigation."

Browne said undercover officers go wherever people they're investigating go. There is no indication that, in the nearly four years since the report, the NYPD brought charges connecting City College students to terrorism.

Student groups were of particular interest to the NYPD because they attract young Muslim men, a demographic that terrorist groups frequently draw from. Police worried about which Muslim scholars were influencing these students and feared that extracurricular activities such as paintball outings could be used as terrorist training.

The AP first reported in October that the NYPD had placed informants or undercover officers in the Muslim Student Associations at City College, Brooklyn College, Baruch College, Hunter College, City College of New York, Queens College, La Guardia Community College and St. John's University. All of those colleges are within the New York City limits.

A person familiar with the program, who like others insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it, said the NYPD also had a student informant at Syracuse.

Police also were interested in the Muslim student group at Rutgers, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 2009, undercover NYPD officers had a safe house in an apartment not far from campus. The operation was blown when the building superintendent stumbled upon the safe house and, thinking it was some sort of a terrorist cell, called the police emerency dispatcher.

The FBI responded and determined that monitoring Rutgers students was one of the operation's objectives, current and former federal officials said.

The Rutgers police chief at the time, Rhonda Harris, would not discuss the fallout. In a written statement, university spokesman E.J. Miranda said: "The university was not aware of this at the time and we have nothing to add on this matter."

Another NYPD intelligence report from Jan. 2, 2009, described a trip by three NYPD officers to Buffalo, where they met with a high-ranking member of the Erie County Sheriff's Department and agreed "to develop assets jointly in the Buffalo area, to act as listening posts within the ethnic Somalian community."

The sheriff's department official noted "that there are some Somali Professors and students at SUNY-Buffalo and it would be worthwhile to further analyze that population," the report says.

Browne said the NYPD did not follow that recommendation. A spokesman for the university, John DellaContrada, said the NYPD never contacted the administration. Sheriff's Departments spokeswoman Mary Murray could not immediately confirm the meeting or say whether the proposal went any further.

The document that mentions Khan, the University at Buffalo student, is entitled "Weekly MSA Report" and dated Nov. 22, 2006. It explains that officers from the NYPD's Cyber Intelligence unit visited the websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations as a "daily routine."

The universities included Yale; Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; Syracuse; New York University; Clarkson University; the Newark and New Brunswick campuses of Rutgers; and the State University of New York campuses in Buffalo, Albany, Stony Brook and Potsdam; Queens College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College and La Guardia Community College.

Khan was a board member of the Muslim Student Association at the University at Buffalo at the time she received the conference announcement, which went out to a mailing list of Muslim organizations.

The email said "highly respected scholars" would be attending the Toronto conference, but did not say who or give any details of the program. Khan says she never went to the conference, was not affiliated with it and had no idea who was speaking at it.

Khan says she clicked "forward" and sent it to a Yahoo chat group of fellow students.

"A couple people had gone the year prior and they said they had a really nice time, so I was just passing the information on forward. That's really all it was," said Khan, who has since graduated.

But officer Mahmood Ahmad of the NYPD's Cyber Intelligence Unit took notice and listed Khan in his weekly report for Kelly. The officer began researching the Toronto conference and found that one of the speakers, Tariq Ramadan, had his U.S. visa revoked in 2004. The U.S. government said it was because Ramadan had given money to a Palestinian group. It reinstated his visa in 2010.

The officer's report notes three other speakers. One, Siraj Wahaj, is a prominent but controversial New York imam who has attracted the attention of authorities for years. Prosecutors included his name on a 3 ½-page list of people they said "may be alleged as co-conspirators" in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, though he was never charged.

The other two are Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir, two of the nation's most prominent Muslim scholars. Both have lectured at top universities in the U.S.. Yusuf met with President George W. Bush at the White House following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

There is no indication that the investigation went any further, or that Khan was ever implicated in anything. Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said students like her have nothing to fear from the police.

"Students who advertised events or sent emails about regular events should not be worried about a 'terrorism file' being kept on them. NYPD only investigated persons who we had reasonable suspicion to believe might be involved in unlawful activities," Browne said.

But Khan still worries about being associated with the police report.

"It's just a waste of resources, if you ask me," she said. "I understand why they're doing it, but it's just kind of like a Catch-22. I'm not the one doing anything wrong."

The university said it was unaware its students were being monitored.

"UB does not conduct this kind of surveillance and if asked, UB would not voluntarily cooperate with such a request," the university said in a written statement. "As a public university, UB strongly supports the values of freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of religion, and a reasonable expectation of privacy."

The same Nov. 22, 2006, report also noted seminars announced on the websites of the Muslim student associations at New York University and Rutgers University's campus in Newark, New Jersey.

Browne said intelligence analysts were interested in recruiting by the Islamic Thinkers Society, a New York-based group that wants to see the United States governed under Islamic law. Morton was a leader of the group and went to Stony Brook University's MSA to recruit students that same month.

"One thing that our open source searches were interested in determining at the time was, where (does the) Islamic Thinkers Society go — in terms of MSAs for recruiting," Browne said.

Yale declined comment. The University of Pennsylvania did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Other colleges on the list said they worried the monitoring infringed on students' freedom of speech.

"Like New York City itself, American universities are admired across the globe as places that welcome a diversity of people and viewpoints. So we would obviously be concerned about anything that could chill our essential values of academic freedom or intrude on student privacy," Columbia University spokesman Robert Hornsby said in a written statement.

Danish Munir, an alumnus adviser for the University of Pennsylvania's Muslim Student Association, said he believes police are wasting their time by watching college students.

"What do they expect to find here?" Munir said. "These are all kids coming from rich families or good families, and they're just trying to make a living, have a good career, have a good college experience. It's a futile allocation of resources."

___

Online:

View the report at: http://apne.ws/zLpfdM

___

Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman and Eileen Sullivan contributed to this report.

___

Contact the Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations (at) ap.org

Emperor Obama lied to us about winning the Iraq war???

Source

Widespread gunfire, bombs kill 55, hurt 225 across Iraq

by Lara Jakes - Feb. 24, 2012 12:19 AM

Associated Press

BAGHDAD - Bombs and deadly shootings relentlessly pounded Iraqis on Thursday, killing at least 55 people and wounding more than 225 in a widespread wave of violence the government called a "frantic attempt" by insurgents to prove the country will never be stable.

Cars burned, school desks were bloodied, bandaged victims lay in hospitals and pools of blood were left with the wounded on floors of bombed businesses after the daylong series of attacks in 12 cities across Iraq.

The assault demonstrated how vulnerable the country remains two months after the American military left and put the onus for protecting the public solely in the hands of Iraqi forces.

"There was no reason for this bomb. A primary school is here, students came to study and people came to work," Karim Abbas woefully said in the town of Musayyib, where he saw a car bomb parked near an elementary school kill three people and wound 73. Most of the injured in the town, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, were schoolchildren.

Other Iraqis, fed up with the continued violence, furiously blamed security forces for letting it happen.

"We want to know: What were the thousands of policemen and soldiers in Baghdad doing today while the terrorists were roaming the city and spreading violence?" said Ahmed al-Tamimi, who was working at an Education Ministry office a block away from a restaurant bombed in the Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah in northern Baghdad.

He described a hellish scene of human flesh and pools of blood at the restaurant, where another car bomb killed nine people and wounded 19.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the latest attacks, but car bombs are a hallmark of al-Qaida. The Iraqi Interior Ministry blamed al-Qaida insurgents for the violence.

"These attacks are part of frantic attempts by the terrorist groups to show that the security situation in Iraq will not ever be stable," the ministry said in a statement. "These attacks are part of al-Qaida efforts to deliver a message to its supporters that al-Qaida is still operating inside Iraq, and it has the ability to launch strikes inside the capital or other cities and towns."

Fifteen of the day's 26 attacks targeted security forces on patrols, at checkpoints and around government and political offices. Six policemen were killed at their checkpoint in northern Baghdad in a pre-dawn drive-by shooting. A suicide bomber blew up his car in front of a police station in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing two and wounding eight.

Records detail mosque spying; NYPD defends tactics

Records detail mosque spying; NYPD defends tactics

By ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO

Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Police Department targeted Muslim mosques with tactics normally reserved for criminal organizations, according to newly obtained police documents that showed police collecting the license plates of worshippers, monitoring them on surveillance cameras and cataloging sermons through a network of informants.

The documents, obtained by The Associated Press, have come to light as the NYPD fends off criticism of its monitoring of Muslim student groups and its cataloging of mosques and Muslim businesses in nearby Newark, N.J.

The NYPD's spokesman, Paul Browne, forcefully defended the legality of those efforts Thursday, telling reporters that its officers may go wherever the public goes and collect intelligence, even outside city limits.

The new documents, prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, show how the NYPD's roster of paid informants monitored conversations and sermons inside mosques. The records offer the first glimpse of what those informants, known informally as "mosque crawlers," gleaned from inside the houses of worship.

For instance, when a Danish newspaper published inflammatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in September 2005, Muslim communities around the world erupted in outrage. Violent mobs took to the streets in the Middle East. A Somali man even broke into the cartoonist's house in Denmark with an ax.

In New York, thousands of miles away, it was a different story. Muslim leaders preached peace and urged people to protest lawfully. Write letters to politicians, they said. Some advocated boycotting Danish products, burning flags and holding rallies.

All of that was permissible under law and protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. All was reported to the NYPD by its mosque crawlers and made its way into police files for Kelly.

"Imam Shamsi Ali brought up the topic of the cartoon, condemning them. He announced a rally that was to take place on Sunday (02/05/06) near the United Nations. He asked that everyone to attend if possible and reminded everyone to keep their poise if they can make it," one report read.

At the Muslim Center of New York in Queens, the report said, "Mohammad Tariq Sherwani led the prayer service and urged those in attendance to participate in a demonstration at the United Nations on Sunday."

When one Muslim leader suggested planning a demonstration, one of the people involved in the discussion about how to get a permit was, in fact, working for the NYPD.

"It seems horrible to me that the NYPD is treating an entire religious community as potential terrorists," said civil rights lawyer Jethro Eisenstein, who reviewed some of the documents and is involved in a decades-old class-action lawsuit against the police department for spying on protesters and political dissidents.

The lawsuit is known as the Handschu case, and a court order in that case governs how the NYPD may collect intelligence.

Eisenstein said the documents prove the NYPD has violated those rules.

"This is a flat-out violation," Eisenstein said. "This is a smoking gun."

Browne, the NYPD spokesman, did not discuss specific investigations Thursday but told reporters that, because of the Handschu case, the NYPD operates under stricter rules than any other department in the country. He said police do not violate those rules.

His statements were intended to calm a controversy over a 2007 operation in which the NYPD mapped and photographed all of Newark's mosques and eavesdropped on Muslim businesses. Newark Mayor Cory Booker said he was never told about the surveillance, which he said offended him.

Booker and his police director accused the NYPD of misleading them by not revealing exactly what they were doing. Had they known, they said it never would have been permitted. But Browne said Newark police were told before and after the operation and knew exactly what it entailed.

Kelly, the police commissioner, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have been emphatic that police only follow legitimate leads of criminal activity and do not conduct preventive surveillance in ethnic communities.

Former and current law enforcement officials either involved in or with direct knowledge of these programs say they did not follow leads. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the secret programs. But the documents support their claims.

The effort highlights one of the most difficult aspects of policing in the age of terrorism. Solving crimes isn't enough; police are expected to identify would-be terrorists and move in before they can attack.

There are no universally agreed upon warning signs for terrorism. Terrorists have used Internet cafes, stayed in hostels, worked out at gyms, visited travel agencies, attended student groups and prayed at mosques. So the NYPD monitored those areas. In doing so, they monitored many innocent people as they went about their daily lives.

Using plainclothes officers from the squad known as the Demographics Unit, police swept Muslim neighborhoods and catalogued the location of mosques. The ethnic makeup of each congregation was logged as police fanned out across the city and outside their jurisdiction, into suburban Long Island and areas of New Jersey.

"African American, Arab, Pakistani," police wrote beneath the photo of one mosque in Newark.

Investigators looked at mosques as the center of Muslim life. All their connections had to be known.

David Cohen, the NYPD's top intelligence officer, wanted a source inside every mosque within a 250-mile radius of New York, current and former officials said. Though the officials said they never managed to reach that goal, documents show the NYPD successfully placed informants or undercovers — sometimes both — into mosques from Westchester County, N.Y., to New Jersey.

The NYPD used these sources to get a sense of the sentiment of worshippers whenever an event generated headlines. The goal, former officials said, was to alert police to potential problems before they bubbled up.

Even when it was clear there were no links to terrorism, the mosque informants gave the NYPD the ability to "take the pulse" of the community, as Cohen and other managers put it.

When New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor were killed on Oct. 11, 2006, when their small plane crashed into a Manhattan high-rise apartment, fighter planes were scrambled. Within hours the FBI and Homeland Security Department said it was an accident. Terrorism was ruled out.

Yet for days after the event, the NYPD's mosque crawlers reported to police about what they heard at sermons and among worshippers.

At the Brooklyn Islamic Center, a confidential informant "noted chatter among the regulars expressing relief and thanks to God that the crash was only an accident and not an act of terrorism," one report reads.

"The worshippers made remarks to the effect that 'it better be an accident; we don't need any more heat,'" an undercover officer reported from the Al-Tawheed Islamic Center in Jersey City, N.J.

In some instances, the NYPD put cameras on light poles and trained them on mosques, documents show. Because the cameras were in public space, police didn't need a warrant to conduct the surveillance.

Police also wrote down the license plates of cars in mosque parking lots, documents show. In some instances, police in unmarked cars outfitted with electronic license plate readers would drive down the street and record the plates of everyone parked near the mosque, former officials recalled.

"They're viewing Muslims like they're crazy. They're terrorists. They all must be fanatics," said Abdul Akbar Mohammed, the imam for the past eight years at the Masjid Imam Ali K. Muslim in Newark. "That's not right."

___

Associated Press writers Chris Hawley and Eileen Sullivan contributed to this report.

___

Online:

View the NYPD documents: www.ap.org/nypd

NYPD Informant summaries of Danish cartoons: http://apne.ws/zVwtCt

NYPD New Jersey mosque targeting: http://apne.ws/wsrSvN

NYPD Informant summaries of plane crash: http://apne.ws/xB9kVM

___

Contact the Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations (at) ap.org

30 percent of drone attack victims are civilians

Source

Study: Militants, not civilians, are primary victims of drone strikes

by Sebastian Abbot - Feb. 26, 2012 01:01 AM

Associated Press

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - American drone strikes inside Pakistan are killing far fewer civilians than many in the country are led to believe, according to a rare on-the-ground investigation by the Associated Press of 10 of the deadliest attacks in the past 18 months.

The widespread perception in Pakistan that civilians, not militants, are the principal victims -- a view that is fostered by leading right-wing politicians, clerics and the fighters themselves -- fuels pervasive anti-American sentiment and, some argue, has swelled the ranks of al-Qaida and the Taliban.

But an AP reporter who spoke to about 80 villagers at the sites of the 10 attacks in North Waziristan, the main sanctuary for militants in Pakistan's northwest tribal region along the Afghan border, was told that a significant majority of the dead were combatants.

The AP was told by the villagers that of at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent -- at least 138 -- were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17.

Excluding that strike, which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants, villagers said.

But the civilian deaths in the covert CIA-run program raise legal and ethical concerns, especially given Washington's reluctance to speak openly about the strikes or compensate the families of innocent victims.

U.S. officials who were shown the AP's findings rejected the accounts of any civilian casualties but declined to be quoted by name or make their own information public.

The U.S. has carried out at least 280 attacks since 2004 in Pakistan's tribal region. The area is dangerous and off-limits to most reporters, and death tolls from the strikes usually rely on reports from Pakistani intelligence agents speaking on condition of anonymity.

The numbers gathered by the AP turned out to be very close to those given by Pakistani intelligence on the day of each strike, the main difference being that the officials often did not distinguish between militants and civilians.

Drone attacks began during the Bush administration. President Barack Obama has ramped them up significantly since he took office but slowed them down in recent months because of increased tension between the U.S. and Pakistan caused by American airstrikes that accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November.

Pakistan responded by kicking the U.S. out of a base used to service American drones, but the move is not expected to affect the program significantly.

The AP study paints a much different picture from that advanced by important Pakistani opinion shapers.

Syed Munawar Hasan, head of the country's most powerful Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, recently claimed on TV that the strikes "are killing nearly 100 percent innocent people."

Imran Khan, a popular opposition politician close to some right-wing Islamic groups, addressed a cheering crowd last April, saying, "Those who lie to the nation after every drone attack and say terrorists were killed should be ashamed."

He called for journalists and activists to go to the tribal region to see that the strikes were killing civilians, not militants.

Some analysts have been skeptical about carrying out on-the-ground investigations, assuming villagers would follow the militants' narrative of high civilian death tolls to avoid reprisals. But the AP study showed otherwise.

Many knew the dead civilians personally. They also said one way to distinguish civilians from militants was by counting funerals, because the bodies of dead militants would usually be whisked away for burial elsewhere.

U.S. counterterrorism officials disputed the death tolls and other details of some of the strikes, including the exact locations.

The "war on terror" is just an extension of the "war on drugs"

White House helps pay for NYPD Muslim surveillance

And of course Obama promise to make the government open and accountable for it's actions is 100 percent BS - "John Brennan, Obama's top counterterrorism adviser ... would not elaborate. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ... refused in recent months to discuss the police tactics. Tom Perez, the Justice Department's top civil rights lawyer, has repeatedly refused to answer questions about the NYPD"

Source

White House helps pay for NYPD Muslim surveillance

WASHINGTON (AP) – Millions of dollars in White House money has helped pay for New York Police Department programs that put entire American Muslim neighborhoods under surveillance.

Attorney Nadia Kahf, left, stands with Mohamed Elfilali of the Islamic Center of Passaic County during a news conference in Newark to address NYPD spying.

The money is part of a little-known grant intended to help law enforcement fight drug crimes. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135 million to the New York and New Jersey region through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, known as HIDTA.

Some of that money — it's unclear exactly how much because the program has little oversight — has paid for the cars that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods. It also paid for computers that store even innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events.

When NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly was filled in on these efforts, his briefings were prepared on HIDTA computers.

The AP confirmed the use of White House money through secret police documents and interviews with current and former city and federal officials. The AP also obtained electronic documents with digital signatures indicating they were created and saved on HIDTA computers. The HIDTA grant program is overseen by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The disclosure that the White House is at least partially paying for the NYPD's wholesale surveillance of places where Muslims eat, shop, work and pray complicates efforts by the Obama administration to stay out of the fray over New York's controversial counterterrorism programs. The administration has championed outreach to American Muslims and has said law enforcement should not put entire communities under suspicion.

The Obama administration, however, has pointedly refused to endorse or repudiate the NYPD programs it helps pay for. The White House last week declined to comment on its grant payments.

John Brennan, Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, last year called the NYPD's efforts "heroic" but would not elaborate. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, whose department also gives grant money to the NYPD and is one of the lead federal agencies helping police build relationships with Muslims, has refused in recent months to discuss the police tactics. Tom Perez, the Justice Department's top civil rights lawyer, has repeatedly refused to answer questions about the NYPD.

Outside Washington, the NYPD's efforts drew increased criticism last week. College administrators at Yale, Columbia and elsewhere issued harsh rebukes for NYPD's infiltration of Muslim student groups and its monitoring of school websites. New Jersey's governor and the mayor of its largest city have complained about the NYPD's widespread surveillance there, outside New York's police jurisdiction.

The White House HIDTA grant program was established at the height of the drug war to help police fight drug gangs and unravel supply routes. It has provided about $2.3 billion to local authorities in the past decade.

After the terror attacks, law enforcement was allowed to use some of that money to fight terrorism. It's unclear how much HIDTA money has been used to pay for the intelligence division, in part because NYPD intelligence operations receive scant oversight in New York.

Congress, which approves the money for the program, is not provided with a detailed breakdown of activities. None of the NYPD's clandestine programs is cited in the New York-New Jersey region's annual reports to Congress between 2006 and 2010.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not respond to questions the AP sent to him in two emails about the White House money and the department's intelligence division.

Most of the money from the White House grants in New York and New Jersey has been spent fighting drugs, said Chauncey Parker, director of the program there. He said less than $1.3 million was spent on vehicles used by the NYPD intelligence unit.

"Those cars are used to collect and analyze counterterrorism information with the goal of preventing a terrorist attack in New York City or anywhere else," Parker said. "If it's been used for specific counterterrorism effort, then it's been used to pay for those cars."

Former police officials told the AP those vehicles have been used to photograph mosques and record the license plates of worshippers.

In addition to paying for the cars, the White House money pays for part of the office space the intelligence division shares with other agencies in Manhattan.

When police compiled lists of Muslims who took new, Americanized names, they kept those records on HIDTA computer servers. That was ongoing as recently as October, city officials said.

Many NYPD intelligence officers, including those that conducted surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods, had HIDTA email addresses. Briefing documents for Kelly, the police commissioner, were compiled on HIDTA computers. Those documents described what police informants were hearing inside mosques and which academic conferences Muslim scholars attended.

When police wanted to pay a confidential informant, they were told to sign onto the HIDTA website to file the paperwork, according to a 2007 internal document obtained by the AP.

Parker said the White House grant money was never used to pay any of the NYPD intelligence division's confidential informants. The HIDTA computer systems, he said, are platforms that allow different law enforcement agencies to share information and work.

"I am shocked to hear that federal dollars may have helped finance the NYPD's misguided efforts to spy on Muslims in America," said Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., one of 34 members of Congress who have asked the Justice Department and House Judiciary Committee to investigate the NYPD.

The connection between NYPD and the White House anti-drug grant program surfaced years ago, during a long-running civil rights lawsuit against police. Civil rights attorneys asked in court about a "demonstration debriefing form" that police used whenever they arrested people for civil disobedience. The form carried the seal of both the NYPD Intelligence Division and HIDTA.

A city lawyer downplayed any connection. She said the NYPD and HIDTA not only shared office space, they also shared office supplies like paper. The NYPD form with the seal of a White House anti-drug program was "a recycled piece of paper that got picked up and modified," attorney Gail Donoghue told a federal judge in 2003.

The issue died in court and was never pursued further.

Last week, the controversy over NYPD's programs drew one former Obama administration official into the discussion.

After the AP revealed an extensive program to monitor Muslims in Newark, N.J., police there denied knowing anything about it. The Newark police director at the time, Garry McCarthy, has since moved on to lead Chicago's police department where President Barack Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is now the mayor.

"We don't do that in Chicago and we're not going to do that," Emanuel said last week.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the NYPD surveillance in his state was "disturbing" and has asked the attorney general to investigate. Christie was New Jersey's top federal prosecutor and sat on the HIDTA executive board during 2006 and 2007 when the NYPD was conducting surveillance in New Jersey cities. Christie said he didn't know that, in 2007, the NYPD catalogued every mosque and Muslim business in Newark, the state's largest city.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Source

Burned in Afghanistan

Is there any point in staying?

Steve Chapman

March 1, 2012

Afghans are rioting, American soldiers are regularly murdered by their allies, the Taliban are hanging in, and civilian casualties in Afghanistan set a record last year. But a Pentagon spokesman assures us that "the fundamentals of our strategy remain sound."

He had to tell us because we wouldn't know it otherwise. In almost every respect, our venture in Afghanistan looks like a dismal, irredeemable failure. Year after year, we've been told that things are getting better. But lately, it's hard to take that claim seriously.

When Afghans erupted in rage over the careless burning of Qurans at Bagram Airbase, the upheaval was not just about Muslim holy books. It was also about the grossly dysfunctional relationship between us and them — a product of the huge cultural gulf, our outsized ambitions and the irritant of our presence.

Afghanistan is a medieval country that we can barely begin to understand. Yet we presume that with all our money, technology, weaponry and wisdom, we can mold it like soft clay.

Things don't work so well in practice. Only one out of every 10 Afghans who sign up to join the army or national police can read and write. The military's desertion rate, an American general acknowledged last year, approaches a staggering 30 percent.

Many if not most Afghans have never heard of the 9/11 attacks. Even the deputy chairman of the government's High Peace Council told The Wall Street Journal he doesn't believe al-Qaida destroyed the World Trade Center.

So what can we expect ordinary people to think when they see the country overrun with armed foreigners who sometimes kill and injure innocent civilians? Or when they hear that those infidels are burning Qurans?

The war in Afghanistan is now the longest in American history, and if hawks have their way, we'll be there for years to come. Alas, we have demonstrated the force of two things we already knew: Some mistakes can't be undone no matter how you try, and every guest eventually wears out his welcome.

In Afghanistan, we originally failed to make the needed commitment to destroy the enemy, because President George W. Bush was distracted by his eagerness to invade Iraq. As a result, the Taliban survived and eventually mounted a major comeback. Barack Obama decided to pour in troops and funds, but by that time, Afghan patience was nearing exhaustion.

So results keep falling miserably short of what's needed to produce lasting success. Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, who spent last year in a combat deployment touring Afghanistan, writes in the February issue of the Armed Forces Journal, "What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground."

Instead, he was told that the Taliban "controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot" of coalition military bases. "I observed Afghan security forces collude with the insurgency." He found American officers "who had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area."

The mutual ill will has become deadly. Two American officers were shot to death last week at the Afghan Interior Ministry, which is supposed to be one of the safest places in Kabul. But for U.S. military personnel, there are no longer any safe places.

Even official assessments of the war are discouraging. In a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, director of national intelligence James Clapper predicted the Afghan government will make "incremental, fragile progress" this year, while noting the persistence of "corruption as well as poor leadership and management" in the police and army.

Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess Jr., director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the committee that "the Afghan government will continue to struggle to fill the vacuum" left by coalition troops. The Afghan defense minister predicts "catastrophe" if the U.S. proceeds with plans to reduce the size of the Afghan force after 2014.

That leaves us in a catch-22: We can't bring peace and good governance to Afghanistan unless we stay a lot longer, but the longer we stay the more resentment and resistance we provoke. At this point, a U.S. officer who works on Afghanistan told McClatchy Newspapers, "Afghans hate us, and we don't trust them."

Americans who lived through Vietnam recall the image of helicopters evacuating our embassy personnel from Saigon as the enemy closed in. We may get to do the same thing in Kabul — but this time under fire from our friends.

Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman

schapman@tribune.com

Twitter @SteveChapman13

[Let's face it. The American Empire lost our silly war in Afghanistan, just like the Soviets lots their silly war in Afghanistan. Sadly the American Empire didn't learn jack sh*t from our stupid mistake in Vietnam!]

"it costs $850,000 to maintain a single soldier for a year in Afghanistan"

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Defense budget hearings: Lots to learn for those who pay attention

By Walter Pincus, Published: February 29

Congressional hearings on the defense budget can be a bore, and there are so many of them — 11 so far this week.

But seeing them or reading transcripts provides both information and a feel for how the destinies of senior civilian officials and top-ranking Defense Department officials are controlled by legislators, be they knowledgeable or not.

Did you know, for example, that it costs $850,000 to maintain a single soldier for a year in Afghanistan?

Defense Department Comptroller Robert Hale offered that figure Monday at a Senate Budget Committee hearing where Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was the main witness. Hale explained that the number included special allowances for being there, the money spent for supporting other coalition forces and even a share for costs of the organization that produces protective devices used to discover improvised explosive devices.

At that same hearing, you would have learned of an ongoing investigation into actions at the Madigan Army Medical Center outside Tacoma, Wash. Soldiers originally found to have PTSD were stripped of that diagnosis by Madigan screeners and instead were found to have “other behavioral health disorders that didn’t come with the same level of benefits,” according to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Murray said that after an independent review of some soldiers at Walter Reed, some diagnoses were changed back to PTSD. More soldiers are awaiting review.

Murray questioned Panetta about an allegation that the Madigan decision to change PTSD diagnosis “seems” to have been related to the higher benefits that would go with having PTSD.

Panetta responded that he became concerned when he read a report on the Madigan Center and that it was under investigation. He said he had “just met with a couple last night. And they had to go through hell in order to be able to get the diagnosis that was required here. And that should not happen.” He added, “I’ve directed our personnel undersecretary to look at this issue and to correct it. . . . It’s unacceptable now to have the process we have in place.”

At previous hearings, Panetta had put off answering how he would meet sequestration, the 2011 Budget Control Act requirement to cut an additional $500 billion in national security spending over the next 10 years, starting in January 2013. On Monday, he said he was waiting for guidance from the White House through the Office of Management and Budget and he assumed serious planning would have to begin “sometime in the summer.”

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said that meant that Congress would have to act prior to the summer if it was to head off sequester, which Panetta has said would be disastrous to the new national security strategy.

Hale added that Pentagon and OMB lawyers were studying how the across-the-board sequester cuts would be applied, if it came to that. In a letter to Congress in November, Panetta had indicated a common percentage cut would be applied to every single Defense Department program. But Hale said the percentage reductions would probably apply to accounts — such as Navy shipbuilding or Army operations and maintenance — and there would be flexibility on how they were made to individual programs.

As it had in earlier fiscal 2013 budget hearings, the Obama administration’s plan to reduce some costs for defense health care by raising retired military personnel contributions for their Tricare coverage drew opposition from most senators on the panel.

Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) talked about a letter from a serviceman about to retire who heard about the Tricare increase. He wrote the senator that “he has a sister that’s on welfare, and his sister pays nowhere near the costs that he does, and so he’s not sure that the military is such a good deal compared to welfare.” Enzi added, “That seems to me to be a terrible comparison.”

Panetta responded that the recommendations for Tricare increases would be based on a retiree’s income level. And as he had done in earlier hearings, Panetta said Tricare is “much less in cost than the private sector in terms of those same health-care benefits. So it’s still a pretty good deal that we provide for retirees even though we are asking for these additional fees.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) asked why the military is being told they have to increase their Tricare payments while “we’re not asking any other government employee to do that?” He added, “Why ask the military and not . . . maybe unionized members of the federal workforce?”

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) added: “I just worry about your ability to go to our military and to ask them to do this, to make the sacrifice, when civilian employees of the federal workforce, including members of Congress, because we get the same health plan, aren’t making a similar sacrifice. . . . I just worry about what message we’re sending to our military with that.”

Panetta found a bit of support for his health-care effort. Portman, a former OMB director under President George W. Bush, noted that in 2000, defense health-care costs were $17.4 billion. Twelve years later, they were $50 billion. He asked Panetta, “Do you think you’re doing enough on health care in this first stage, and what more can be done?”

Panetta, who has been generally criticized for any increase, called it a first step.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) jumped in with his support. He had heard Panetta take his lumps at a Feb. 14 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. This time, Graham, an Air Force reserve officer, pointed out that “we haven’t had a premium adjustment since 1995.”

With a series of rapid-fire questions that often is his style, Graham, an attorney, summed up the Defense Department’s Tricare case: “Secretary Panetta, the entitlement part of the DOD budget, health-care costs, is competing with guns and weapons systems. Is that correct?” Panetta replied, “Correct.”

“And you cannot sustain this. This is what you’re telling the Congress?” Again Panetta replied, “That’s correct.”

“It is absolutely essential you get control over your health-care costs. Is that correct, Secretary Panetta?”

“That’s correct,” was the reply.

“If you got a better way of adjusting premiums, let me know, but it has to change,” Graham said.

Panetta replied that he was open to change. With that, Graham rested his support for the payment increase.

You learn something worth knowing at every hearing.

To read Walter Pincus’s previous columns, go to national-security.

Will Emperor Obama and the American Empire invade Iran????

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Obama says he's not bluffing on Iran

Mar. 2, 2012 07:44 AM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says he means it when he insists it's unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon. "I don't bluff," Obama said in an interview published Friday.

In his most expansive remarks on the issue, Obama told The Atlantic magazine that Iran and Israel both understand that "a military component" is one of a mix of options for dealing with Iran, along with sanctions and diplomacy.

Obama plans to meet Monday at the White House with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and will try to convince him to postpone any plans his government may have to attack Iran's nuclear facilities in coming months.

The president said he won't advertise any U.S. plans for Iran. At the same time, Obama has consistently refused to renounce a military option.

"I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff," he said in the interview. "I also don't, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But (both) governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say."

Obama warned that a premature strike might inadvertently help Iran: "At a time when there is not a lot of sympathy for Iran and its only real ally (Syria) is on the ropes, do we want a distraction in which suddenly Iran can portray itself as a victim?"

Obama also rejected as unreasonable a more limited policy of containment in confronting Iran's nuclear efforts.

"You're talking about the most volatile region in the world," he said. "It will not be tolerable to a number of states in that region for Iran to have a nuclear weapon and them not to have a nuclear weapon. Iran is known to sponsor terrorist organizations, so the threat of proliferation becomes that much more severe. "

He also pointed to economic turmoil in Iran and reiterated that sanctions against the Iranian regime are starting to bite.

In a series of recent meetings with Israeli leaders, administration officials are believed to have sought to persuade the Jewish state to give sanctions more time to work and to hold off on any military strike. Speaking Thursday to reporters, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama believes there is still "time and space" for those measures to persuade the Iranian regime to take a different course.

Israeli officials acknowledge the pain in Iran but have publicly expressed doubt those measures will ever cause Iran's clerical leaders to change course.

Obama wasn't so sure. "They're sensitive to the opinions of the people and they are troubled by the isolation that they're experiencing," he told the Atlantic. "They know, for example, that when these kinds of sanctions are applied, it puts a world of hurt on them."

Before his meeting with Netanyahu. Obama plans to speak Sunday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group that Netanyahu will also address.

Though Obama emphatically portrays himself as one of Israel's best friends, touting military and other ties, his relationship with Netanyahu has at times been frosty. The two have sparred publicly over Jewish settlements on the West Bank, with Netanyahu pushing back on Washington's efforts to move forward on peace talks with the Palestinians.

The Iran issue has risen to the forefront of Obama's foreign policy. At a fundraiser in New York on Thursday night, an audience member shouted out, urging the president to avoid a war with Iran.

"Nobody has announced a war," Obama cautioned. "You're jumping the gun a little bit."

Air Force to mutilate live pigs to give medics training

Air Force base rescue squadron to train using live pigs

Mar. 2, 2012 06:50 AM

Associated Press

TUCSON -- A Davis-Monthan Air Force Base medic unit plans to use live pigs for training in treating combat trauma. The Arizona Daily Star reports at least 10 members of the 306 Rescue Squadron at the Tucson base will practice their skills this weekend on pigs that will be knocked out and subjected to wounds that simulate those that ground troops may receive on the battlefield.

The Department of Defense says the training is allowed, however, the Pentagon recommends using alternative training methods whenever possible, provided they "produce scientifically or educationally valid or equivalent results."

A protest letter was sent this week by a group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. They say there are alternatives to using live animals including training simulators that are more realistic to battlefield conditions.

Emperor Obama to invade Iran????

Source

Obama: Attacking Iran over nuclear dispute still option

by Ben Feller - Mar. 4, 2012 11:34 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama said Sunday he would not hesitate to attack Iran to keep it from getting a nuclear bomb, hoping a forceful assurance will discourage Israel from launching a unilateral strike that could ignite the Middle East and drag the U.S. into war.

Pleading for time for diplomacy to work, Obama warned that "loose talk of war" was only undermining world security.

Addressing a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, Obama delivered messages to multiple audiences: Israel, Iran, Jewish voters, a restless Congress, a wary international community and three Republican presidential contenders who will speak to the same group Tuesday.

At the core was his bullish assertion that the United States will never settle for containing a nuclear-armed Iran or fail to defend Israel.

"I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests," Obama said. [American isn't defending it's self. It's an unprovoked attack on another country]

But he framed military force as a last resort, not the next option at a time when sanctions are squeezing Iran. The president seemed intent on quieting a drumbeat for war, saying even the talk of it has driven up the price of oil to the benefit of Iran.

"Now is not the time for bluster," Obama said. "Now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in."

Obama's speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee set a tone for a vital meeting today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose embattled Mideast nation fears it will soon lose a window to strike Iran before it becomes a target of nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu, standing his ground against what his country perceives as a threat to its existence, said he perhaps most appreciated hearing Obama say, "Israel must be able to defend itself, by itself, against any threat." Speaking to reporters in Canada ahead of his arrival in the U.S., Netanyahu made no reference to the sanctions and diplomacy Obama emphasized.

The U.S. fears an Israeli strike on Iran would do little to derail Tehran's long-term nuclear weapons pursuit, and, in the near term, would turn Iran into a victim. Many analysts believe an Israeli attack would result in a region-wide conflict, including Iranian attacks on American troops in the Persian Gulf.

The influence of the lobbying group, known as AIPAC, has turned its annual conference into a must-attend event for politicians. Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum will all address the group Tuesday via satellite.

Why it's OK for Obama to murder Americans abroad!!!!

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Holder expected to explain rationale for targeting U.S. citizens abroad

By Sari Horwitz and Peter Finn, Published: March 4

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday plans to provide the most detailed account to date of the Obama administration’s legal rationale for killing U.S. citizens abroad, as it did in last year’s airstrike against an alleged al-Qaeda operative in Yemen, officials said.

The rationale Holder plans to offer resembles, in its broad strokes, those previously offered by lower-ranking officials. But his speech Monday will mark a new and higher-profile phase of the administration’s campaign to justify lethal action in those rare instances in which U.S. citizens, such as New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki, join terrorist causes devoted to harming their homeland.

Civil libertarians and other critics have been demanding a more thorough and public accounting of the administration’s logic since the killing of Awlaki in September. Administration officials have relied on a classified opinion, written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, that provides a legal framework for the unusual action, but they have refused repeated requests to release it despite intense internal debate on the subject.

Holder plans to argue that the killing of an American terrorist abroad is legal under the 2001 congressional authorization of the use of military force, according to an official briefed on the speech, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its details ahead of its formal release. This official also said Holder plans to say that the U.S. right to self-defense is not limited to traditional battlefields as the government pursues terrorists who present an imminent threat.

Awlaki, 40, was a skilled propagandist and the chief of external operations for al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, which has attempted a number of terrorist attacks on the United States, according to administration officials. He had been placed on “kill lists” compiled by the CIA and and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command. Awlaki died when a joint CIA-JSOC drone operation fired missiles at him.

He was the first U.S. citizen deliberately targeted by the U.S. government.

Major address on security

The Awlaki operation was carried out after the administration requested and received the Justice Department opinion saying that targeting and killing U.S. citizens overseas was legal under domestic and international law, according to administration officials. The classified memo also included intelligence material about his operational role within al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.

Senior Obama administration officials, including John O. Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism adviser, and Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, have given speeches that offered a broad rationale for U.S. drone attacks on individuals in al-Qaeda and associated forces.

On Feb. 22, in a speech at Yale Law School, Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson said the targeted killing of those suspected of engaging in terrorist activities against the United States, including U.S. citizens, is justified and legal. He did not mention Awlaki by name or the secret CIA drone program.

Holder’s remarks will be included in what administration officials are calling a major national security speech at Northwestern University’s law school in Chicago. The speech may not mention Awlaki by name, but his case has been central to the legal thinking on the issue and in the preparation of the text of Monday’s speech, officials said.

In the administration, there was some reluctance on the part of the intelligence community to discuss the subject publicly. But others argued that the killing of an American citizen by the U.S. government was such an extraordinary event that it required some public accounting.

The American Civil Liberties Union has asked a federal court to force the Obama administration to release legal and intelligence records related to the killing of Awlaki and two other U.S. citizens in drone attacks in Yemen last year. Samir Khan, also a U.S. citizen, was reported to have been killed in the Awlaki attack. And Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was reportedly killed in a JSOC drone strike two weeks later.

After the killing of Awlaki, several senators called on the Obama administration to release the classified legal memo.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that “for both transparency and to maintain public support of secret operations, it is important to explain the general framework for counterterrorism actions.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also urged administration officials to release the memo.

Civilian vs. military custody

Holder’s speech will also outline the Obama administration’s approach to counterterrorism and the rule of law, according to an official familiar with the address. Holder will discuss the broad new waivers that President Obama issued last week that allow U.S. law enforcement agencies to retain custody of al-Qaeda terrorism suspects rather than turn them over to the military.

Holder also plans to highlight the success of the civilian court system in the prosecutions and convictions of terrorism suspects. One case he will cite as an example is that of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to bring down a U.S. commercial flight on Christmas Day 2009 by attempting to detonate a bomb hidden in his underwear. He was sentenced last month to life in prison.

Abdulmutallab was arrested by federal law enforcement agents, given his Miranda rights within an hour and processed through the civilian criminal justice system. Some Republican critics argued that Abdulmu­tallab should never have been advised of his rights to counsel and that the administration should have considered turning him over to the military to continue his interrogation.

But administration officials said that they got the intelligence they needed from him immediately and that later he provided further details on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Some of that information, including on Awlaki’s alleged operational role, was revealed at Abdulmutallab’s sentencing.

Prosecutors said Abdulmu­tallab was acting on the orders of Awlaki, which may have been a critical factor in the legal reasoning in the classified Justice memo justifying his killing.

Holder will also discuss the debate over whether terrorism suspects should be tried in federal criminal courts or by military commissions. The administration argues that military commissions are appropriate for a small and select group of cases but that it should have the ability to transfer some suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States for trial. Congress, however, has blocked such prosecutions.

A preemptive strike against Iran violates the U.S. and international law

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The legal case against attacking Iran

A preemptive strike against Iran would violate both U.S. and international law.

By Bruce Ackerman

March 5, 2012

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington has provoked a broad debate over the military and political wisdom of an attack on Iran. But so far, there has been little attention to the legal issues involved, which are crucial. American support for a preemptive strike would be a violation of both international law and the U.S. Constitution.

Article II of the Constitution requires the president to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," and Article VI says that treaties are part of the "supreme law of the land." [Which means treaties override over normal laws passed by Congress] Since the Senate overwhelmingly ratified the United Nations Charter as a treaty in 1945, the president is constitutionally required to abide by Article 51 of the charter. This provision allows states to use military force in self-defense only when responding to an "armed attack." Preemptive attacks are another matter. [And of course both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan are violations of Article 51, along with the war in Vietnam]

In 1981, the United States joined in the U.N. Security Council's unanimous condemnation of Israel's preemptive assault on an Iraqi nuclear reactor. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it bluntly: "Armed attack in such circumstances cannot be justified. It represents a grave breach of international law."

In standing with the Security Council to condemn the Israeli raid, the Reagan administration was embracing a tradition of U.S. statesmanship that began with Secretary of State Daniel Webster. In 1837, the British were trying to suppress a revolt in eastern Canada. Because U.S. militias were assisting the uprising, the British launched a night raid into New York state, burning a U.S. ship, the SS Caroline, and sending it over Niagara Falls.

After lengthy negotiations, Webster gained British consent to a treaty that prohibited such preemptive strikes. The two sides agreed in 1842 that a cross-border strike was legitimate only if there was a "necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation." This Anglo-American formula remains a part of international law today.

The United States was also the central player at the decisive moment for self-defense in the 20th century: the judgment at Nuremberg. We remember these trials for their condemnation of genocide. But this was not their central focus. The main charge was that the Nazis had waged aggressive war — and this required the Allies to endorse the limited doctrine of self-defense enshrined in traditional law.

Even when the United States felt itself to be directly threatened during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy did not invoke the right of preemptive self-defense. Although the risk of mass destruction was high, the president's legal arguments were carefully constrained: When intercepting Soviet missiles on the high seas, Kennedy relied on the regional peacekeeping provisions of the U.N. Charter.

A departure from this restrictive approach came only recently, during the run-up to the war in Iraq, when the George W. Bush administration pointed to Saddam Hussein's purported looming nuclear threat to American cities as justification for the U.S.-led invasion. The tragic outcome of this adventure only emphasizes the wisdom of Webster's insistence that the "necessity of self-defense" be "instant" and "overwhelming."

Today, we are at a crucial legal turning point. If President Obama supports Netanyahu's preemptive strike, he will transform Bush's Iraq aberration into the founding precedent of a new era of international law. He should instead reaffirm Reagan's position in 1981 and return the presidency to its traditional commitments to international law abroad and constitutional fidelity at home.

The wrong choice would have profound consequences. We are moving into a multipolar world, where the United States and its allies will have diminished power to secure the peace. This is not the time to unleash an open-ended doctrine of preemptive self-defense that will permit other nations to avoid Security Council approval for the aggressive use of military force.

This moment of decision comes at an awkward time, given election-year politics. But it is the president's job to govern according to law while pursuing the long-run interests of the United States.

Bruce Ackerman is a professor of law and political science at Yale and the author, most recently, of "The Decline and Fall of the American Republic."

Eric Holder: U.S. can murder American citizens in terror fight

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Eric Holder: U.S. can target citizens overseas in terror fight

By Richard A. Serrano and Andrew R. Grimm

March 5, 2012, 1:44 p.m.

Reporting from Chicago— Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. defended the U.S. right to target and kill American citizens overseas in the war on terror, telling an audience at the Northwestern University law school that when those individuals pose a real threat to this country and cannot be captured unharmed, "we must take steps to stop them."

But according to the text of his remarks released by the Justice Department, he stressed that it can only be done "in full accordance with the Constitution," [I bet he had his fingers crossed!] and asserted that a targeted slaying, like that of American-born Anwar Awlaki in a U.S. drone attack in Yemen last year, can be ordered only after an "imminent threat" was posed to this country and their capture was "not feasible."

"In this hour of danger, we simply cannot afford to wait until deadly plans are carried out," Holder said. "And we will not."

He said the legal right to kill U.S. citizens overseas without benefit of a trial was based in Congress’ authorization to use all necessary and appropriate force against the perpetrators of 9/11 or those who helped them and the president’s power "to protect the nation from any imminent threat of violent attack." [Hmmm so Congress can vote to suspend the Constitution and let the President murder anybody he feels like????]

That authority is "not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan," Holder said, adding that, "We are at war with a stateless enemy, prone to shifting operations from country to country."

His speech, in a carefully orchestrated address Monday at the law school’s Chicago campus, came after sharp questions over the Obama administration’s slaying of Awlaki, born in New Mexico, and how his killing comports with the oft-repeated stance from Holder and the White House that terrorists should be brought to justice in U.S. federal courts in this country.

The attorney general has been at the center of the controversy over trying to defend the administration’s policy toward handling terrorists.

Obama in the 2008 campaign pledged to close the military prison for terrorists at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he and Holder have repeatedly insisted that terrorists should be tried in federal civilian courts rather than military tribunals. But after intense pressure from Republicans and some Democrats, they have had to back off on shutting Guantanamo Bay, as well as their plan to try five top Sept. 11 plotters in federal court in New York.

Since the drone attack last fall that killed Awlaki and a second American citizen, Samir Khan, conservatives began casting the administration as two-faced in its policy for terrorists, and liberals questioned how Obama and Holder could justify killing Americans.

Holder did not mention the September slayings of Awlaki or Khan, or the reported slaying of Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, in a drone attack two weeks later. Nor did he discuss the Department of Justice Office of Legal Policy document giving the administration legal justification for the use of force. Indeed, he did not even acknowledge that such a document exists, although several organizations have filed suit to make it public.

Holder did not take questions from reporters after his remarks, and while he originally was going to answer questions from the law school audience, on Monday morning he abruptly canceled that plan.

Evidence has shown the 40-year-old Awlaki, a radical cleric, was a major propagandist for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He also was linked to Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who is being court-martialed for the 2009 rampage that killed 13 at Ft. Hood, Texas, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian sentenced in federal court in Detroit last month to life in prison with no parole for trying to ignite a bomb on a jetliner on Christmas Day 2009.

The government has alleged Awlaki encouraged Hasan and Abdulmutallab in their plots to kill Americans, with Holder on Monday strongly suggesting that someone like him meets three criteria for an attack with lethal force – he poses an imminent threat against the U.S, his capture is not feasible, and his slaying "would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles."

Holder argued that the Supreme Court has applied a "balancing approach" to the 5th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which guarantees a citizen his right to due process of law that also "takes into account the realities of combat."

"Here," he said, "the interests of both sides of the scale are extraordinarily weighty."

But, the attorney general added, "it is imperative for the government to counter threats posed by senior operational leaders of al Qaeda, and to protect the innocent people whose lives could be lost in their attacks."

Serrano reported from Washington.

Richard.serrano@latimes.com dgrimm@tribune.com

John McCain - Bomb Syria

McCain seeks airstrikes on Syria; U.S. presses Putin

Mar. 5, 2012 03:30 PM

Assocaited Press

WASHINGTON -- Frustrated by a diplomatic logjam and a bloody Syrian offensive, Republican Sen. John McCain on Monday urged the United States to launch airstrikes against President Bashar Assad's regime to force him out of power -- a call for dramatic military intervention that wasn't supported by the Obama administration or its European or Arab partners.

McCain's statement on the Senate floor came as the U.S. and European governments pleaded for Russia's Vladimir Putin to rethink his anti-interventionist stance on Syria, in what appeared to be an increasingly desperate effort for consensus among world powers to stop a crackdown that has killed more than 7,500 people. Hundreds fled to neighboring Lebanon on Monday fearing they'd be massacred in their homes.

But the trans-Atlantic calls for Russia to abandon its opposition to strong U.N. action were delivered at a curious time: a day after Putin showed his strength by resoundingly winning re-election as president, a position he held from 2000 to 2008. Even the modest aim of gaining Russian support for a humanitarian strategy in Syria faced renewed resistance Monday -- showing just how limited the diplomatic options were despite the ongoing violence.

McCain's strategy would be far more direct, though it's unclear how popular it would be. His statement was as much a critique of President Barack Obama as a rallying call for an international military campaign, accusing the president of being too soft on Assad.

McCain, the GOP's presidential nominee in 2008 and his party's senior member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the U.S. should change policy by arming Syria's rebels and spearheading a military effort to support them.

"The only realistic way to do so is with foreign airpower," McCain concluded. "The United States should lead an international effort to protect key population centers in Syria, especially in the north, through airstrikes on Assad's forces."

McCain's proposal will likely divide American lawmakers, many of whom opposed a similar operation in Libya last year. Even if it were championed by the Obama administration and its NATO allies, the plan would divide other countries hostile to the Assad regime but unwilling to support another Western military intervention in the Muslim world. And it would be anathema to Russia, which sees Syria as its primary ally in the Middle East.

Unlike the international Libya campaign that ousted Moammar Gadhafi in Libya last year, military action against Syria would not have the backing of the U.N. Security Council and would be difficult to justify under international law. In many ways, it would also be a rejection of Obama's doctrine stressing international collaboration on applying military force.

Obama's strategy has been to use sanctions and international diplomatic isolation to pressure Assad into handing over power as part of a political transition. At the minimum, Western countries want aid guaranteed for civilians caught between Assad's forces and the increasingly militarized opposition, but are struggling even to convince Damascus and its Russian and Iranian backers of that.

Russia, alongside fellow veto-wielding Security Council member China, has stood by Assad even while his forces have killed thousands over the past year, rejecting two U.N. resolutions critical of the Syrian government. Negotiations on a narrower, third resolution are ongoing in New York, and the Kremlin again seems to be standing in the way.

"I hope that Russia now, after the elections and with a clear view, will see that it stands on the wrong side of history," said German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. "The people in Syria who are standing up for democracy and their freedom need solidarity from the international community."

Speaking in Prague, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said an Arab League meeting this weekend would offer Putin a chance to work with the rest of the world on getting humanitarian assistance into besieged cities such as Homs, and recognizing "that there needs to be a new leadership in Syria."

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Washington planned to immediately take up the Syrian issue with Moscow. She said the U.S. is open to compromise on U.N. action as long as Russia stopped trying to equate the Assad regime's violent repression of protesters with rebels trying only to defend their communities.

"We hope that their sense of humanity and compassion will encourage them to join us in pressing the Assad regime to silence its guns," she said.

The entreaties failed to make an immediate impression on Moscow. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov instead drew attention to a months-old Russian resolution demanding that Syria's government and the opposition hold talks on reforms. The Russian approach would keep the levers of power in Assad's hands, while requiring his opponents to end their rebellion.

"I don't think there is a need for any new initiatives," Lavrov said Monday. He said other countries "shouldn't expect one another to take any action, but sit down together and decide what steps need to be taken so that the Syrians stop shooting at each other."

Syria is Russia's primary ally in the Middle East, having maintained close ties with Damascus since the Cold War, when the Arab country was led by the current leader's father, Hafez Assad. Putin, Russia's prime minister for the past four years, called last week for government and opposition forces to pull out of besieged cities, accusing the West of encouraging the rebels to fight by refusing to make that demand.

Western countries, meanwhile, added to the pressure and isolation against Assad on Monday.

The Obama administration added Syria's state television and radio to a U.S. sanctions list for its role in supporting the crackdown, while Canada joined the list of governments that have closed their embassies in Damascus to protest the violence.

McCain's call for airstrikes was a marked change from his remarks last month, when he said the U.S. should find ways to help the Syrian people without putting American "boots on the ground." Then, he said the options included providing medical care and technical assistance to safe havens for refugees of the violence.

He had since called for arming Syria's rebels, another step the Obama administration is hesitant to take. It fears a further militarization of Syria, and says the government's superior firepower in the form of tanks and artillery means funneling weapons to Assad's opponents may neither save lives nor accelerate the end of the regime.

"American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History"

"American Sniper" is about one man's evolution from restless civilian to dedicated killer.

"On the front of my arm, I had a crusader cross inked in, I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I hated the damned savages I'd been fighting. I always will"

The author seems to be clueless on why he is murdering all these people other then the government told him to do it.

Source

"American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History"

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times

March 5, 2012

This is the season of celebrity for the Navy SEALs.

The takedown of Osama bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan thrust the institutionally secretive SEALs into the modern-media spotlight. Soon the SEALs seemed to become America's favorite warriors: silent, deadly, mysterious.

There have been innumerable news stories about SEAL Team Six, which killed Bin Laden. Also, a Newsweek cover story ("Navy SEALs: Obama's Secret Army") and a new movie,"Act of Valor,"featuring real SEALs.

Add to this mix "American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History" by former SEAL Chris Kyle, with help from San Diego lawyer Scott McEwen and writer Jim DeFelice, whose credits include a biography of Gen. Omar Bradley and a series of military thrillers.

Kyle is a Texas country boy who found a home in the SEALs and developed a talent, and a liking, for the dangers of warfare and finding the right spot from which to kill an enemy with a single shot. Sniping is a skill that requires patience, nerve and a certain cold-bloodedness, all of which Kyle displayed relentlessly in the major battles of Iraq.

"After the first kill," Kyle writes, "the others come easy. I don't have to psych myself up, or do something special mentally — I look through the scope, get my target in the cross hairs, and kill my enemy, before he kills one of my people."

"American Sniper" is about one man's evolution from restless civilian to dedicated killer. For those who like their American military personnel to be diffident and dutifully respectful of their enemies, this book is not for them.

Kyle is unpossessed by political correctness. He has a seething contempt for the enemy, disdain for Iraqi security forces who are supposed to be U.S. allies, and hardly any feeling at all for Iraqi civilians. Between deployments, he got a tattoo to express his anger. "On the front of my arm, I had a crusader cross inked in," he writes. "I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for blood. I hated the damned savages I'd been fighting. I always will. They've taken so much from me."

By his own admission, he has no interest in either the geopolitics or the high-level strategizing of the Iraq war. While other military personnel, and several journalists, have praised the Sunni sheiks for coming to the side of the U.S. in Ramadi, Kyle has a different view about what turned the tide: "Force moved that battle. We killed the bad guys and brought the leaders to the peace table. That is how the world works."

Kyle's view is blunt and simplistic. While its accuracy may be debated, his view represented the position of the ground soldiers who did the fighting — Army, Marine and SEAL. Kyle's voice deserves attention not as a historic analysis but as the sound of anger from the battlefield and the difficulty of resuming anything that passes for a normal life.

The voice of Kyle's wife, Tara, also deserves attention. Several passages of her comments are interspersed with her husband's story of war and killing. The passages are spare but revealing. In one of these, she finds the idea that her husband is restrained by official rules-of-engagement against an enemy who isn't to be "more than ridiculous, it's despicable." Later, estrangement sets in: "Little by little, I realized I wasn't the most important thing in his life. The words were there, but he didn't mean it."

And still later, she confides: "When our marriage reached a crisis, I said I wouldn't love him the same if he reenlisted again…In the beginning, I believed he loved me more than anything. Slowly the SEAL Teams started to become his first love."

It may not be what Kyle and his co-authors intended, but the story of strife between husband and wife is what gives "American Sniper" much of its wallop: the truism that even when the shooting stops, the impact of the war on those who fought it, and those who love them, has only begun.

tony.perry@latimes.com

Obama is a war monger just like the Republicans

Source

Candidates Hammer Obama Over Iran, but Approaches Differ Little

By HELENE COOPER

Published: March 5, 2012

WASHINGTON — To rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, Mitt Romney says he would conduct naval exercises in the Persian Gulf to remind Iran of American military might. He would try to ratchet up Security Council sanctions on Iran, targeting its Revolutionary Guards, and the country’s central bank and other financial institutions. And if Russia and China do not go along, he says, the United States should team up with other willing governments to put such punitive measures in place.

As it turns out, that amounts to what President Obama is doing.

As their tone on Iran escalates in advance of appearances via satellite Tuesday morning before the country’s most influential pro-Israel lobbying group, the Republican candidates for president have tried to draw stark contrasts between themselves and Mr. Obama when it comes to stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Mr. Obama’s Iran strategy, Rick Santorum said recently on “Meet the Press” on NBC, risked turning the United States into a “paper tiger.” Newt Gingrich said that on Iran, “we’re being played for fools.”

On Sunday, Mr. Romney, appearing in Atlanta, offered this: “If Barack Obama gets re-elected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.” And on Monday, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post comparing Mr. Obama to President Jimmy Carter, who he said “fretted in the White House” as Iran held American hostages for 444 days.

Mr. Obama and his backers have cried foul, saying the Republican candidates, in the quest to appear tough, are playing a dangerous game that could end up driving Iran closer to a nuclear weapon, as Mr. Obama implied in his own address Sunday to a pro-Israel group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, echoed that in an interview on Monday.

“To be making a blanket statement that if he’s president they’ll have one, and if Romney’s president they won’t have one, is the most craven political thing to say,” he said. “To make up differences is to play in Iranian hands.” Mr. Kerry said it could further drive up the price of oil, which helps Iran, as traders on world markets build in expectations of a military strike.

Though advisers to Mr. Romney say they see significant differences between his Iran policy and Mr. Obama’s, other Iran experts and former officials in Republican and Democratic administrations say they do not see how the Iran policies being espoused on the Republican presidential campaign trail would do much more to stop Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon. In the case of Mr. Romney, they said, his Iran policy is essentially Mr. Obama’s Iran policy.

“They seem to talk more in the realm of their imagination, and what they think will pass as good policy in an election campaign, as opposed to taking into account the realities on the ground,” said Abbas Milani, an Iran expert at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who has advised the administrations of both Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush on Iran.

R. Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s top Iran negotiator under President Bush, said: “The attacks on Obama basically say, ‘He’s weak and we’re strong.’ But when you look at the specifics, you don’t see any difference.”

For instance, Mr. Romney’s Iran issues statement, available on his Web site, argues that to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, he would “repair relations with Israel, increase military coordination and assistance, and enhance intelligence sharing to ensure that our allied capabilities are robust and ready to deal with Iran.” In addition, Mr. Romney calls for restoring the “regular presence of aircraft carrier task forces in both the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf region simultaneously.”

But in recent years, the United States has always had one or two aircraft carrier strike groups deployed in the Persian Gulf region at a time, although there has generally not been one in the Mediterranean since 2003. However, American carriers do routinely transit the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal on passages to and from the United States and the Persian Gulf. There are also a number of American destroyers and cruisers regularly deployed to the Mediterranean.

As for assistance to Israel, while Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel have had a rocky personal relationship, the United States remains Israel’s most dependable ally. Last year, Mr. Obama drew global criticism when he opposed a Palestinian bid for statehood through the Security Council, and his administration boycotted a racism conference in Durban in 2009 on the grounds that it allowed anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denial views. Mr. Obama has also increased military aid to Israel and promoted sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, with Europe agreeing to impose an oil embargo on Iran, a step unthinkable four years ago.

Mr. Romney’s backers insisted Monday that the two men were far apart on Iran.

“President Obama for three years refused to build on previous administrations’ work to penalize Iran for its enrichment programs with the hopes that the regime would come around to his reset policies and softer world view,” said Richard Grenell, who was the spokesman for the American mission to the United Nations under Mr. Bush. Mr. Obama, he said, “is now scrambling to talk tough just in time for the U.S. elections.”

Eric S. Edelman, a Pentagon under secretary in the Bush administration and a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, said a key difference between the president and Mr. Romney was that Mr. Obama had spent too much time minimizing the military option.

Although Mr. Obama has repeatedly said that using military force remains on the table, “he didn’t say, ‘I’m ready to use force to stop Iran from getting a bomb,’ ” Mr. Edelman said. “He has made the credibility of the U.S. military option very low. If you talk to the Saudis and the Emiratis, they don’t think the president is really ready to pull the trigger.”

Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting.

8 women allege rape, harassment in military suit

8 women allege rape, harassment in military suit

Mar. 6, 2012 06:17 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Eight current and former members of the U.S. military allege in a new federal lawsuit that they were raped, assaulted or harassed during their service and suffered retaliation when they reported it to their superiors.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, accuses the military of having a "high tolerance for sexual predators in their ranks" and fostering a hostile environment that discourages victims of sexual assault from coming forward and punishes them when they do. The suit claims the Defense Department has failed to take aggressive steps to confront the problem despite public statements suggesting otherwise.

The eight women include an active-duty enlisted Marine and seven others who served in the Navy and Marine Corps. Seven women allege that a comrade raped or tried to sexually assault them, including in a commanding officer's office after a pub crawl in Washington and inside a Naval Air Station barracks room in Florida. The eighth says she was harassed and threatened while deployed to Iraq, only to be told by a superior that "this happens all the time."

"There (are) no circumstances under which women who are brave enough and patriotic enough to stand up and defend this nation should have to be subjected to being called 'slut, whore, walking mattress,'" said Susan Burke, a lawyer representing the women. "This is the year 2012. This kind of conduct is not acceptable."

The women say they've suffered depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder because of the assaults. One woman says she tried to commit suicide after being raped inside her home by a senior officer and his civilian friend.

The lawsuit names as defendants past and present military leaders, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and his predecessors.

Defense Department spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said she could not discuss pending litigation, but said the military has no tolerance for sexual assault. Under a policy announced in December, service members who report a sexual assault have the option of quickly transferring to another unit or installation.

She said the department has also increased funding for investigators and judge advocates to receive specialized training in sexual assault cases and has appointed a two-star officer to direct a sexual assault response and prevention office. The Pentagon is assembling a data system to track reports of sexual assault and is reviewing how commanding officers are trained in preventing and responding to rape cases.

"It is important that everyone in uniform be alert to the problem and have the leadership training to help prevent these crimes," Smith said in a written statement.

The Marine Corps issued a statement Tuesday evening saying it takes sexual assault allegations seriously and continues to improve in responding to and preventing rapes within the ranks. The statement challenged the allegations of two former Marines -- Ariana Klay and Elle Helmer -- who are part of the lawsuit, saying their claims had been investigated and properly handled. Although The Associated Press normally does not identify victims of sexual assault, Klay and Helmer agreed to publicly discuss their case.

"Commanders are expected to foster a climate where Marines will trust their command to listen respectfully, respond confidentially, investigate immediately, and take appropriate action," the statement said.

A similar lawsuit was filed last year in federal court in Virginia. But the case was dismissed after the government argued in part that the judiciary had to defer to military decisions on command and discipline. That decision is being appealed.

Klay, a former Marine Corps officer and plaintiff who says she was raped in August 2010, said the military avoids scrutiny for its handling of these accusations by projecting a warrior culture immune to questioning and because the public doesn't want to believe these crimes and cover-ups are occurring among service members.

"A noble cause is a great vehicle for corruption because nobody wants to look and nobody is going to look," Klay told the AP.

After serving in Iraq, Klay was recruited to Military Barracks Washington in the nation's capital, where she says she was falsely accused of adultery, taunted as a "slut" and "whore" and told to "deal with it" by a superior. She said the situation became so uncomfortable that she requested a deployment to Afghanistan, but that request was denied because she was told she was too critical to the command.

Klay alleges she was raped inside her row house near the barracks on the morning of Aug. 28, 2010, by an officer who said he planned to humiliate her and by his civilian friend. She said she reported the rape and left the barracks, but endured retaliation and became so despondent that she attempted suicide.

Haytham Faraj, a lawyer for the officer, denied that any rape occurred and said that his client and Klay were instead involved in a consensual sexual relationship. His client was found not guilty of the sexual assault allegations after a court-martial and was convicted instead of the lesser offenses of adultery and indecent language.

Another plaintiff, Elle Helmer, who says she was told she obtained a public affairs position at the Marine Barracks because she was considered the "prettiest," reported being sexually assaulted by a commanding officer following a St. Patrick's Day pub crawl in Washington's Capitol Hill in 2006. She says she was discouraged from submitting to a rape kit and medical examination and was told she needed to toughen up. The lawsuit says the military initially refused to investigate, and Helmer says she found herself investigated for public intoxication and conduct unbecoming. She says left the military soon after.

"It took approximately 72 hours for the victim to become the accused in this example, and that was really the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition," Helmer said.

"Are they saying we're all lying? Are they saying it doesn't happen? Hiding behind their rhetoric of zero tolerance is entirely cowardly and misleading and they know it," Helmer said.

TSA gives some travelers special treatment

Source

Sky Harbor adds 'trusted traveler' program

Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport has joined 23 other airports nationwide in offering the “trusted traveler” program that allows frequent international passengers who've cleared a federal background check to hustle through security checkpoints.

Sky Harbor is one of four airports to start offering the Global Entry program for trusted travelers in recent weeks.

A new federal regulation expanding the program formally went into effect on Tuesday. The program’s expansion was announced last month by U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

A pilot of Global Entry was launched in 2008 and was, until the new rule was written, available at 20 airports.

In addition to Sky Harbor, three other international airports recently began offering expedited security checks, including Minneapolis-St. Paul, Charlotte, and Denver.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol oversees the program for DHS, and estimates that travelers cleared for participating Global Entry get through the Transportation Security Administration’s checkpoints 20 minutes faster than the average traveler.

To apply for the trusted-traveler clearance, a passenger must be at least 14 years old and pass a security-threat assessment. Passengers 14 to 18 years old must have obtained signed consent of a parent or guardian. The government charges a $100 processing fee for every applicant.

Once a traveler has clearance, he or she can check in at special Global Entry kiosks, which look like small ATMs in the terminals of the airports participating in the program to enter the expedited lines at security checkpoints.

As of June 6, 2011, 75 percent (148,000 travelers) out of 198,000 applicants had been approved for the trusted-traveler program, federal documents show.

- Emily Gersema, emily.gersema@arizonarepublic.com

Good guys 6 - Bad guys 0

Source

6 British troops presumed dead in massive Afghan blast

March 7, 2012 | 3:06 am

REPORTING FROM KABUL, Afghanistan -- Six British troops were missing and presumed dead after a massive blast destroyed their tank-like armored vehicle in Helmand province, British and coalition military officials said Wednesday. It would be the largest loss of British military lives in a single incident in Afghanistan in nearly three years.

Some 24 hours after the explosion, which took place Tuesday, the 25-ton Warrior vehicle, which has tracks like a tank, still had not been recovered, British officials said. For that reason, the fatalities were not yet listed as confirmed, but military officials said the soldiers’ families had been notified of the presumed deaths.

A Helmand provincial spokesman, Daud Ahmadi, said the explosion, believed due to a roadside bomb, had taken place in Helmand’s Gereshk district, not far from the country’s main ring-road highway. The NATO force also said the blast was from an improvised explosive device, or IED, and confirmed the presumed deaths of six service members without specifying their nationality.

Destroying or disabling such a heavy vehicle and killing all those inside would require an extremely powerful bomb, and the incident pointed to a continuing Taliban presence in Helmand province despite military gains touted by NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF. Helmand, together with neighboring Kandahar province, is considered the Taliban movement’s home ground, but the insurgents were driven over the past two years from many longtime strongholds.

The deaths came one day after a trip to Helmand by the American commander of the NATO force, Gen. John Allen. During his visit, he told U.S. Marines in Marjah, the scene of a major offensive in February 2010, that their efforts were “helping to make the area a safer place for Afghans to live and work,” according to a military press release.

Several parts of Helmand, including its capital, Lashkar Gah, are now under the security control of the Afghan police and army -- part of a nationwide push for Afghan forces to take over most combat duties by the end of next year. That coincides with a drawdown of U.S. troops that began in the latter part of last year and is to accelerate this year.

By the end of 2012, the U.S. contingent is to be reduced to about 68,000 troops, down from a high of more than 100,000. Americans make up the bulk of the NATO force.

Border Patrol testing surveillance blimp

Border Patrol testing surveillance blimp

Mar. 7, 2012 07:01 AM

Associated Press

NOGALES -- That big white thing flying over Nogales this week is a tethered-camera-equipped blimp the Border Patrol is testing out.

The Nogales International reports the aerostat is equipped with surveillance equipment and is on a test flight for the next week or so.

Border Patrol spokesman Lloyd Easterling says it was first deployed Monday at an altitude of between 1,500 and 2,000 feet.

Easterling says when and if the blimp returns to the Nogales border area will depend on whether the agency is satisfied with the system's performance.

According to the blimp maker's website, the aerostat is capable of scanning a city-sized area at once, making it virtually impossible to sneak up to, or through a protected area.

Marine's Facebook page tests military rules

Marine's Facebook page tests military rules

By JULIE WATSON | Associated Press

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Marine Sgt. Gary Stein first started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots to encourage service members to exercise their free speech rights. Then he declared that he wouldn't follow orders from the commander in chief, President Barack Obama.

While Stein softened his statement to say he wouldn't follow "unlawful orders," military observers say he may have gone too far. [Sorry to tell you this, but the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were unconstitutional and illegal orders according to many legal scholars!]

The Marine Corps is now looking into whether he violated the military's rules prohibiting political statements by those in uniform and broke its guidelines on what troops can and cannot say on social media. Stein said his views are constitutionally protected.

While troops have always expressed their views in private, Stein's case highlights the potential for their opinions to go global as tech-savvy service members post personal details, videos and pictures that can hurt the military's image at home and abroad.

"I think that it's been pretty well established for a long time that freedom of speech is one area in which people do surrender some of their basic rights in entering the armed forces," said former Navy officer David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

"Good order and discipline require the military maintain respect for the chain of command," Glazier said. "That includes prohibiting speech critical of the senior officers in that chain of command — up to and including the commander in chief." [Yea, dictators, tyrants and king also love to prohibit free speech for the same reason.]

According to Pentagon directives, military personnel in uniform can't sponsor a political club; participate in any TV or radio program or group discussion that advocates for or against a political party, candidate or cause; or speak at any event promoting a political movement.

Commissioned officers also may not use contemptuous words against senior officials, including the defense secretary or the president.

In January, an Army reservist wearing camouflaged fatigues got into trouble for taking the stage during a rally in Iowa with Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul.

Stein was first cautioned by his superiors at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, in 2010 after he launched his Facebook page, criticizing Obama's health care overhaul. Stein volunteered to take down the page while he reviewed the rules at the request of his superiors.

He said he determined he was not in violation and relaunched the page under the shortened account name Armed Forces Tea Party. Last week, he said his superiors told him he couldn't use social media sites on government computers after he posted the message stating he would not follow unlawful orders of the president.

Stein said his statement was part of an online debate about NATO allowing U.S. troops to be tried for the Quran burnings in Afghanistan.

In that context, he said, he was stating that he would not follow orders from the president if those orders included detaining U.S. citizens, disarming them or doing anything else that he believes would violate their constitutional rights.

Another Marine alerted his command about the statement, Stein said.

Stein said he respects the office of the president, but he does not agree with Obama's policies. He said he is within his rights to speak up.

"Just because I'm a Marine doesn't mean I don't have free speech or can't say my personal opinion about the president or other public official just like anybody else," Stein said. "The Constitution trumps everything else."

Stein said it's positive when service members are well-versed on the Constitution and what's going on in government.

"When we know what we're fighting for, we fight harder," he said.

The Marine Corps said Stein is allowed to express his personal opinions as long as they do not give the impression he is speaking in his official capacity as a Marine. Spokesman Maj. Michael Armistead said the Corps is taking a closer look to ensure Stein has not crossed that line.

"At this time, he has not been asked to take down the statement on his page," he said.

Stein appears in a dress shirt and tie on his Facebook page but he also describes himself as "a conservative blogger, speaker, the founder of the Armed Forces Tea Party and active-duty, eight-year Marine Corps veteran."

Marine Sgt. Jerret Wright, who liked Stein's page, said Stein "probably skirted the line a little bit" with his latest message about not following Obama's orders, but his boldness in expressing his views has been refreshing in a community that often feels silenced.

"People assume that we're zombies with an on-and-off switch, and that we listen to orders and do nothing else," Wright said.

Military observers say it's not that simple. They say it is bad form to lash out at the commander in chief. Experts also say his Facebook postings appear to link his professional standing with his political views.

They also point out that the Pentagon policy is necessary in preventing political and religious debates that could divide a unit and disrupt the strong working relationship that is needed to carry out missions, Glazier said.

"There are plenty of examples in the world of militaries heavily involved in influencing political events that have shown that is not conducive to civilian rule of law," he said.

NYPD - If you are a Muslim, you must be a criminal???

NYPD documents: 'Focus' scrutiny on Muslim Americans

Mar. 9, 2012 07:02 AM

Associated Press

NEW YORK -- The New York Police Department kept secret files on businesses owned by second- and third-generation Americans specifically because they were Muslims, according to newly obtained documents that spell out in the clearest terms yet that police were monitoring people based on religion.

The NYPD has faced intense criticism from Muslims, lawmakers and even the FBI for widespread spying operations that put entire neighborhoods under surveillance. Police put the names of innocent people in secret files and monitored the mosques, student groups and businesses that make up the Muslim landscape of the northeastern U.S.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended his department's efforts, saying they have kept the city safe, were completely legal and were not based on religion.

"We don't stop to think about the religion," Bloomberg said at a news conference in August after The Associated Press began revealing the spying. "We stop to think about the threats and focus our efforts there."

In late 2007, however, plainclothes officers in the department's secretive Demographics Unit were assigned to investigate the region's Syrian population. Police photographed businesses and eavesdropped at lunch counters and inside grocery stores and pastry shops. The resulting document listed no threat. And though most people of Syrian heritage living in the area were Jewish, Jews were excluded from the monitoring.

"This report will focus on the smaller Muslim community," the report said.

Similarly, police excluded the city's sizable Coptic Christian population when photographing, monitoring and eavesdropping on Egyptian businesses in 2007, according to the police files.

"This report does not represent the Coptic Egyptian community and is merely an insight into the Muslim Egyptian community of New York City," the NYPD wrote.

Many of those under surveillance were American-born citizens whose families have been here for the better part of a century.

"The majority of Syrians encountered by members of the Demographics Unit are second- or even third-generation Syrian Americans," the Syrian report said. "It is unusual to encounter a first generation or new arrival Syrian in New York City."

The Demographics Unit was conceived in secret years ago as a way to identify communities where terrorists might hide and spot potential problems early. If the plainclothes officers, known as "rakers," overheard anti-American sentiment or violent rhetoric, they flagged it for follow-up investigation.

If police, for example, ever received a tip that an Egyptian terrorist was plotting an attack, investigators looking for him would have the entire community already on file. They would know where he was likely to pray, who might rent him a cheap room, where he'd find a convenient Internet cafe and where he probably would buy his groceries.

As a result, many people were put into police files, not for criminal activities but because they were part of daily life in their neighborhoods. Shopkeepers were named in police files, their ethnicities listed. Muslim university students who attended a rafting trip or discussed upcoming religious lectures on campus were cataloged. Worshippers arriving at mosques were photographed and had their license plate numbers collected by police.

The Demographics Unit is one example of how, since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the NYPD has transformed itself into one of the most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies in the country, operating with little oversight and in areas outside the city such as New Jersey.

Speaking Thursday in Chicago, Bloomberg said: "Let me tell you this, New York City will continue, consistent with the Constitution of the United States, federal, state and city laws to protect the people from our region."

And although civil rights lawyers disagree, the legal question isn't expected to be settled soon. In the meantime, the NYPD has become a flashpoint in the debate over the balance between civil rights and security.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on Thursday he was disturbed by what he's read about the NYPD's surveillance of mosques and Islamic student organizations in New Jersey. "And these are things that are under review at the Justice Department," he said.

Police said they can't afford to become complacent or ignore the reality that Islamic terrorists carried out the 2001 attacks and others. If Muslim neighborhoods feel unfairly singled out, however, it could reinforce the perception that the United States is at war with Islam, which al-Qaida has used as a major recruiting pitch.

Since the AP began reporting on these efforts last year, Bloomberg and the NYPD have offered varying explanations for the clandestine efforts.

At first, police spokesman Paul Browne denied the Demographics Unit existed. When documents proved that it did, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said his department only follows investigative leads.

For instance, after Moroccans were involved in terrorist attacks overseas, the NYPD photographed and eavesdropped in New York businesses where Moroccans might work, shop and eat.

Asked during a City Council meeting in October whether the NYPD maintained similar documents for Irish and Greek neighborhoods, Kelly replied: "We don't do it ethnically. We do it geographically."

Bloomberg echoed those comments in December.

"The communities, whether they're Muslim or Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or whatever, all contribute to this city. We don't target any one of them. We don't target any neighborhood," Bloomberg said.

The AP has since obtained documents outlining NYPD efforts to monitor Albanians, Egyptians and Syrians. Each report focused specifically on ethnicity.

In the case of the Egyptians and Syrians, the reports explicitly focused on Muslims. The Albanian report mentions Albania's diverse religious composition but police only photographed and mapped mosques for the report. There was no indication that criminal leads prompted any of the reports.

In a recent interview on WOR radio, Bloomberg acknowledged for the first time that police were not only following leads and at times conducted these operations without any indications of criminal wrongdoing.

"When there's no lead, you're just trying to get familiar with what's going on, where people might go and where people might be to say something," Bloomberg said. "And you want to listen. If they're going to give a public speech, you want to know where they do it."

The Damascus Bread and Pastry Shop in Brooklyn, where judges and lawyers from the nearby federal courthouse frequently dine on fresh baklava and rugelach, was listed in police files with other businesses that the NYPD described as "Syrian Locations of Concern." Police noted that the building is owned by a Syrian family, adding: "This location mostly sells Middle Eastern pastries, nuts, foreign newspapers and magazines."

"If they want to check on Damascus Bakery, why not, let them check," said Ghassan Matli, 52, when showed the police documents.

But like many whose businesses were monitored, he said he wishes the NYPD would stop by and talk to him so it would get its information right. The people who owned the store at the time of the report, for instance, were the grandchildren of Syrian immigrants. They had been raised as Catholics.

"If they need help, I will help them," said Matli, who is a Christian. "This is the last country we can go to for freedom and to live in freedom. So if they want, why not? Let them check."

Presidential campaign inevitably boosts war with Iran

Source

Presidential campaign inevitably boosts war with Iran

By David Horsey

March 9, 2012, 5:00 a.m.

Who’s ready to go to war with Iran?

Oh, I forgot. Since we now have an army of professionals, none of the rest of us is actually required to go to war. And, since we now allow commanders-in-chief to unilaterally send that army into battle whenever they please, members of Congress don’t have to bother voting for a declaration of war.

War has become a matter of presidential choice. That’s why we should take seriously what the candidates for president have to say about attacking Iran. They can promise to cut the deficit or bring down gas prices or scuttle Obamacare, but, if they promise war, it’s the one promise we know they can keep.

If you happen to be antiwar, your only option is Ron Paul. He has made it clear he does not really care if Iran builds nuclear weapons. Paul wants to stay out of other people’s business and cut the military. In stark contrast, the other Republican candidates are trying to outdo one another in their bellicosity.

I suspect, as on most issues in this primary season, Mitt Romney does not actually mean what he is saying and is not quite as eager to rush to battle as his rivals, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. If Romney were president, in fact, his policy would probably be similar to that of the man he criticizes as too soft on Iran, President Obama.

Obama has pushed tough sanctions on Iran. His hard-edged diplomacy has gotten Europeans to line up with him to demand that Iran refrain from building nukes. The president, showing his grimmest face, insists he is not bluffing when he says that military action is a real and ready option if Iran does not comply with the demands of the international community (at least the international community that does not include Russia and China, which, for obvious self-interested reasons, do not approve of military intervention in countries where the governments are corrupt and authoritarian).

Obama’s rhetoric may be more nuanced than the campaign speeches of Santorum and Gingrich – that is why the Republicans attack him for "apologizing" to America’s adversaries -- but the president’s foreign policy is very much in line with the philosophy that has guided U.S. actions in the world since 1945: engagement everywhere on the globe where there is a perceived national interest, backed by military power that is second-to-none and quick to be employed.

To the rest of the world, it may seem absurd for Republicans to throw charges of weakness at a president who has doubled down on the war in Afghanistan, carried out relentless drone attacks against terrorist targets in Pakistan and sent Navy SEALs to kill Osama bin Laden and fight Somali pirates. But this merely illustrates how Americans measure a president by the way he wields the big stick of military power. And, no matter what Teddy Roosevelt counseled, political reality dictates that it is better to speak loudly when you carry a big stick. Speaking softly is for wimps.

The truth is, Americans are not a peace-loving people. We pretend otherwise because it seems wrong to admit that the United States is a nation that has mostly benefited from war. We were not like the contented Canadians, who patiently waited for the Mother Country to bestow self-government. We went to war and tossed the British out. Through one war with Mexico and relentless wars with Indian tribes, we became a country that spanned a continent. The Spanish-American War and the First World War marked our arrival on the world stage. And the Second World War left us as one of the two preeminent powers on the planet.

Wars in Korea and Vietnam were not popular, but, by the time of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans had become used to fighting wars with ambiguous results. War is now simply what we do. It is part of our national identity; facing any foe, bearing any burden in the twilight struggle to defend freedom.

Put in less idealistic terms, our country is a national security state built on the vast military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about. Our government and our economy are permanently geared up for war, and very few Americans can remember a time when this was not so. It’s hard to imagine any president resisting the temptation to use this awesome force and even harder to imagine that a majority of Americans would ever elect a man who would.

Watch out, Iran, here we come.

aaa_american_war_machine.html#dronestrikemurders12inpakistan

U.S. drone strike murders 12 in Pakistan

Pakistan: U.S. drone strike kills 12 militants

Mar. 9, 2012 07:21 AM

Associated Press

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- An American missile attack killed 12 militants on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border on Friday, one of only a handful of such strikes this year, Pakistani officials said.

The missile struck in the Mandao district of South Waziristan, a rugged militant stronghold where the Pakistani army has staged offensives in the past, the officials said, giving no further details. The officials did not give their names because they were not authorized to speak to journalists.

It took place hours after al-Qaida confirmed that a strike last month in North Waziristan killed one of its commanders -- a success in a CIA-led campaign, but a major source of tension plaguing the relationship between Washington and Islamabad.

The strikes, which began in earnest in 2008, have killed scores of militants, including foreign al-Qaida members involved in plotting attacks on the West. Their frequency increased in 2010, when they hit militants widely seen as being proxies of the Pakistani army, causing friction between the U.S and Pakistan.

Reflecting the tensions, the number of attacks dropped in 2011, and they were cut back even more after November, when U.S. aircraft mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops on the Afghan border. Pakistan blocked U.S. supply routes into Afghanistan in protest and said it was renegotiating its ties with Washington as a result.

Friday's attack was the eighth this year. In contast, in 2010, there were more than 150 such strikes.

Faced with strong public anger over the drone attacks, Pakistani officials publicly condemn them as an unacceptable violations of sovereignty that boost support for extremism. Privately, the program has long had some level of official sanction and even cooperation.

The confirmation of the death of militant commander Badr Mansoor is significant, because he was believed to be behind many of the suicide attacks that have killed scores of Pakistani civilians in recent years. It could be used by supporters of the campaign in Washington and Islamabad as an example of how drone attacks benefit both countries.

The U.S.-based SITE monitoring service said on Friday that the confirmation of Mansoor's death came in a video statement by Ahmad Farooq, al-Qaida's head of media and preaching in Pakistan. The video was released on an Internet jihadist forum.

Local Taliban fighters previously said Mansoor was killed in the Feb. 9 strike, but there was no confirmation from the U.S. or Pakistan. A militant video eulogizing the dead is considered the most reliable way of knowing when a top commander has been killed.

In the nine-minute video, which featured photos of Mansoor alive and dead, Farooq accused Pakistan of collaborating with the strikes.

"America is now more eagerly attacking the Pakistani government's targets," he said. "The drone program is being run with the full consent, permission and cooperation of the Pakistani government."

The issue of drone strikes -- their frequency, targeting and whether Pakistan should be informed ahead of them -- is key to ongoing, back-channel negotiations to restart U.S.-Pakistani relations, which are important for America's hopes of withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Mansoor was said to have run a militant camp in North Waziristan region, an al-Qaida and Taliban stronghold where the Pakistani army doesn't launch offensive operations, giving the militants a safe haven -- aside from the drone strikes.

Mansoor was from Pakistan's largest province, Punjab, and moved to North Waziristan in 2008, where he led a faction of some 230 fighters, local insurgents have said. The enlistment of Punjabis in the Pakistani Taliban has been a serious concern for the government, because it makes it easier for the militants to export violence from the border to the heart of the country, where most Punjabis live.

Also Friday, suspected militants attacked a vehicle carrying Pakistani security forces in North Waziristan, killing seven troops, army and intelligence officials said.

The security forces returned fire, killing eight militants, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

Pakistan wants U.S. to put end to drone strikes

Pakistan wants U.S. to put end to drone strikes

Mar. 13, 2012 11:05 PM

Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON - Pakistan has told the White House it no longer will permit U.S. drones to use its airspace to attack militants and collect intelligence on al-Qaida and other groups, according to officials involved in the talks.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the drone program is classified, called the use of unmanned aerial vehicles a critical element in the Obama administration's anti-terrorism strategy.

Eliminating drone missions would "contribute to a resurgence of extremist groups operating in the tribal areas" along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, said Peter Singer, author of "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century."

Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, Sherry Rehman, met Vice President Joe Biden's national-security adviser Antony Blinken on Friday and told him that Pakistan's political parties have agreed that the drone flights over Pakistan must end, officials involved said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.

Pakistan's sovereignty over its airspace and the civilian casualties that have resulted from drone strikes are emotional issues in Pakistan, where public opinion heavily favors terminating drone missions, Pakistani officials say.

The United States will try to reach an accommodation with Pakistani leaders, two American officials said. The U.S. gave Pakistan $4.4 billion in economic assistance, counterinsurgency funding and military reimbursements in 2010, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The only chance for a compromise, Pakistani officials said, may be if the U.S. agrees to share intelligence.

Accused American soldier flown out of Afghanistan

Accused American soldier flown out of Afghanistan

Mar. 14, 2012 02:03 PM

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The American soldier accused of shooting 16 Afghan villagers in a pre-dawn killing spree was flown out of Afghanistan on Wednesday to an undisclosed location, even as many Afghans called for him to face justice in their country.

Afghan government officials did not immediately respond to calls for comment on the late-night announcement. The U.S. military said the transfer did not preclude the possibility of trying the case in Afghanistan, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said the soldier could receive capital punishment if convicted.

Many fear a misstep by the U.S. military in handling the case could ignite a firestorm in Afghanistan that would shatter already tense relations between the two countries. The alliance appeared near the breaking point last month when the burning of Qurans in a garbage pit at a U.S. base sparked protests and retaliatory attacks that killed more than 30 people, including six U.S. soldiers.

In recent days the two nations made headway toward an agreement governing a long-term American presence here, but the massacre in Kandahar province on Sunday has called all such negotiations into question.

Afghan lawmakers have demanded that the soldier be publicly tried in Afghanistan to show that he was being brought to justice, calling on President Hamid Karzai to suspend all talks with the U.S. until that happens.

The U.S. staff sergeant, who has not been named or charged, allegedly slipped out of his small base in southern Afghanistan before dawn, crept into three houses and shot men, women and children at close range then burned some of the bodies. By sunrise, there were 16 corpses.

The soldier was held by the U.S. military in Kandahar until Wednesday evening, when he was flown out of Afghanistan "based on a legal recommendation," said Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman.

"We do not have appropriate detention facilities in Afghanistan," Kirby said, explaining that he was referring to a facility for a U.S. service member "in this kind of case."

The soldier was transported aboard a U.S. military aircraft to a "pretrial confinement facility" in another country, a U.S. military official said, without saying where. The official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to release the information publicly, would not confirm if that meant an American military base or another type of facility. He said the Afghan government was informed of the move.

Kirby said the transfer did not necessarily mean the trial would be held outside Afghanistan, but the other military official said legal proceedings would continue outside Afghanistan.

U.S. officials had previously said it would be technically possible to hold proceedings in Afghanistan, noting other court-martial trials held here.

The decision to remove the soldier from the country may complicate the prosecution, said Michael Waddington, an American military defense lawyer who represented the ringleader of the 2010 thrill killings of three Afghan civilians by soldiers from the same Washington state base as the accused staff sergeant.

The prosecutors won't be able to use statements from Afghan witnesses unless the defense is able to cross-examine them, he said.

Waddington said the decision to remove the suspect was likely a security call.

"His presence in the country would put himself and other service members in jeopardy," Waddington said.

But the patience of Afghan investigators has already appeared to be wearing thin regarding the shootings in Panjwai district.

The soldier was caught on U.S. surveillance video that showed him walking up to his base, laying down his weapon and raising his arms in surrender, according to an Afghan official who viewed the footage.

The official said Wednesday there were also two to three hours of video footage covering the time of the attack that Afghan investigators are trying to get from the U.S. military. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

U.S. authorities showed their Afghan counterparts the video of the surrender to prove that only one perpetrator was involved in the shootings, the official said.

Some Afghan officials and residents in the villages that were attacked have insisted there was more than one shooter. If the disagreement persists, it could deepen the distrust between the two countries.

Panetta, in a series of meetings with troops and Afghan leaders Wednesday, said the U.S. must never lose sight of its mission in the war, despite recent violence including what appeared to be an attempted attack near the runway of a military base where he was about to land.

It wasn't clear whether it was an attempt to attack the defense chief, whose travel to southern Afghanistan was not made public before he arrived. Panetta was informed of the incident after landing.

"We will not allow individual incidents to undermine our resolve to that mission," he told about 200 Marines at Camp Leatherneck. "We will be tested we will be challenged, we'll be challenged by our enemy, we'll be challenged by ourselves, we'll be challenged by the hell of war itself. But none of that, none of that, must ever deter us from the mission that we must achieve."

According the Pentagon spokesman, an Afghan stole a vehicle at a British airfield in southern Afghanistan and drove it onto a runway, crashing into a ditch about the same time that Leon Panetta's aircraft was landing.

The pickup truck drove at high speed onto the ramp where Panetta's plane was intended to stop, Kirby said. No one in Panetta's party was injured.

--

Jelinek reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann and Sebastian Abbot contributed from Kabul, Lolita C. Baldor from Camp Leatherneck, Mirwais Khan from Kandahar, and Gene Johnson contributed from Seattle.

Kinder, gentler TSA thugs won't break your legs if you are over 75????

Less screening tested for air travelers over 75

Mar. 14, 2012 11:51 AM

Associated Press

CHICAGO -- Some air travelers over the age of 75 will soon get a break at U.S. airport security checkpoints under a test program announced Wednesday that could allow them to keep their shoes and light jackets on and to skip pat-downs.

The new guidelines from the Transportation Security Administration, which take effect Monday at four U.S. airports, are part of an effort to move away from one-size-fits-all security procedures and speed lower-risk passengers through. Similar changes were made last fall for travelers 12 and younger.

Since the 9/11 terror attacks led to tighter security, air travelers have criticized what they say is a lack of common sense in screening all passengers the same way, including young children and the elderly. That criticism grew louder in 2010 when the government began using a more invasive pat-down that involves screeners feeling a traveler's genital and breast areas through their clothing.

The change in guidelines will be introduced at a limited number of security lanes at Chicago's O'Hare International, Denver International, Orlando International and Portland International. Those airports were chosen because they have a higher percentage of travelers 75 and older, said agency spokesman Jim Fotenos. He said the rules will be relaxed indefinitely at the four airports with the intention of expanding elsewhere if it is a success.

"The TSA recognizes that the vast majority of air travelers present no risk to aviation security," Fotenos said. "But it's how we identify those (travelers) and expedite the process that we're working on right now."

In November, two passengers in their 80s traveling separately through New York's Kennedy Airport complained that they were effectively strip-searched. One was made to remove a back brace so it could be X-rayed. The other said she was humiliated when two female screeners made her lower her sweat pants so they could examine her colostomy bag. The TSA has disputed parts of their accounts while acknowledging that screeners violated rules by asking to examine their medical devices.

In another incident that sparked outrage, a 6-year-old girl was reduced to tears after screeners frisked her at New Orleans airport in March 2011 -- a scene recorded on video and posted on YouTube.

To reduce the number of pat-downs given to children and the elderly, screeners in the test programs are being told to send those passengers through metal detectors or walk-through imaging machines multiple times to capture a clear picture, according to the TSA.

The agency is also expanding a program that allows vetted travelers in certain frequent flier programs to go through expedited screening, keep their shoes on and leave liquids and laptops in their bags.

Removing shoes during checkpoint screening has been a common complaint among airline travelers since security was increased after an al-Qaida operative tried to set off a bomb built into his shoe on an American Airlines flight in December 2001.

Afghans attempt to assassinate Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta???

Afghan interpreter tried to run down Marines, official says [Updated]

March 15, 2012 | 12:39 am

REPORTING FROM KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- An Afghan interpreter who breached the security perimeter at a southern Afghanistan airbase Wednesday tried to run over a squad of U.S. Marines assembled to meet Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta's plane, an American military official said.

The man, who worked for Western troops but has not been named, died early Thursday because of extensive burns, Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti told reporters.

After the incident, U.S. officials initially said it wasn't clear whether it was a premeditated attack.

But Scaparrotti said Thursday he believed that the interpreter, who died before he could be questioned, was carrying out an attack when he stole a pickup, drove onto the runway ramp as Panetta's plane was landing, and emerged from his vehicle in flames.

The incident is the latest attempt to attack Americans by Afghans in the military or working for the coalition since the accidental burning of Korans last month by U.S. soldiers.

"My personal opinion is yes, I think he had an intent to harm. I think he tried to hit people" Scaparrotti said at a press conference with reporters traveling with Panetta. The Defense secretary met Thursday with President Hamid Karzai in the capital.

He added that there was no evidence that the attack was aimed at Panetta's plane. But the timing of the incident suggested that the attacker may have intended to target the plane's arrival at the airbase, whether or not he knew Panetta was aboard.

The driver was carrying a canister containing some kind of fuel that he appears to have ignited after the car ran into a ditch following his attempt to run over the Marines, Scaparrotti said.

[Updated 4:31 a.m.: A military dog was slightly burned "in pursuit and the restraint of the driver," a military official said.]

"There was some kind of container. It may have had fuel in it in the car," he said.

He stole the truck on the base, injuring a British soldier in the process.

Aides to Panetta withheld public news about the incident for nine hours Wednesday and insisted Panetta was never in danger.

Honest, we are winning the war in Afghanistan

Karzai tells NATO pull back, Taliban-U.S. talks off

Mar. 15, 2012 08:30 AM

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The American campaign in Afghanistan suffered a double blow Thursday: President Hamid Karzai demanded NATO troops immediately pull out of rural areas in the wake of the killing of 16 civilians, and the Taliban broke off talks with the U.S.

The setbacks effectively paralyze the two main tracks for ending the 10-year-old war. Part of that exit strategy is to gradually transfer authority to Afghan forces while another tack is to pull the Taliban into some sort of political discussions with the Afghan government.

Karzai also said he now wants Afghan forces take the lead for countrywide security in 2013, a year ahead of schedule. He spoke as Afghan lawmakers were expressing outrage that the U.S. flew the soldier suspected in civilian killings to Kuwait Wednesday night when they were demanding he be tried in the country.

"Afghan security forces have the ability to keep the security in rural areas and in villages on their own," Karzai said in a statement after meeting visiting U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. He said he had conveyed his demand to Panetta during their meeting.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai confirmed that Karzai was asking for NATO to immediately pull back from villages and rural areas to main bases.

Karzai is confident that Afghan security forces know "a thousand times better than any foreign troops the culturally sensitive ways of dealing with their own people," Mosazai said.

If the NATO troops did pullback, it would leave vast areas of the country unprotected and essentially mean the end of the strategy of trying to win hearts and minds by working with and protecting the local populations.

The American accused of killing 16 civilians on Sunday was stationed on just such a base, where a small group of soldiers worked with villagers to try to set up local defense forces and strengthen government.

Leaving rural areas would also mean pulling back U.S. forces from the border areas with Pakistan.

The accused soldier, who has not been named, is suspected of going on a shooting rampage in villages near his base in southern Afghanistan, killing nine children and seven other civilians and then burning some of their bodies.

Karzai told Panetta that the weekend shootings in southern Afghanistan were cruel and that everything must be done to prevent any such incidents in the future. He said that was the reason he was demanding the pullout from rural areas now and early transfer of security.

President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron said in Washington on Wednesday that they and their NATO allies were committed to shifting to a support role in Afghanistan in 2013.

Obama gave his fullest endorsement yet for the mission shift, but he said the overall plan to gradually withdraw forces and hand over security in Afghanistan will stand.

In January, after French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that foreign forces speed up their timetable for handing combat operations to Afghan forces in 2013, Karzai said he would be in favor of that -- if it were achievable.

The call for an immediate exit from rural areas is a new demand however, and it is unclear how it will affect the transition strategy and ongoing talks with the U.S. about how to manage a long-term U.S. military presence in the country.

Karzai is known for making dramatic demands then backing off under U.S. pressure. Even if he eventually changes his tone, the call for a pullback will likely become another issue of contention between the Afghans and their international allies at a time of growing war weariness in the United States and other countries of the international coalition.

The Taliban said it was suspending talks with the U.S. because the Americans failed to follow through on their promises, made new demands and falsely claimed the militant group had entered into multilateral negotiations.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement that they had agreed to discuss two issues with the Americans: the establishment of the militant group's political office in Qatar and a prisoner exchange. The Taliban said the U.S. initially agreed to take practical steps on these issues, but then "turned their backs on their promises" and came up with new conditions for the talks.

"So the Islamic Emirate has decided to suspend all talks with Americans taking place in Qatar from today onwards until the Americans clarify their stance on the issues concerned and until they show willingness in carrying out their promises instead of wasting time."

"We must categorically state that the real source of obstacle in talks was the shaky, erratic and vague standpoint of the Americans therefore all the responsibility for the halt also falls on their shoulders."

The Taliban also said Karzai falsely claimed the Afghan government was involved in three-way peace talks with the militants and the U.S. The Taliban said talking to the Afghan government was "pointless."

Panetta applauded Karzai last month for telling an interviewer that the U.S., Afghan government and the Taliban recently held three-way talks aimed at moving toward a political settlement of the war.

The Taliban denied the claim at the time.

Afghan officials told The Associated Press that the U.S. had agreed in January to include representatives of the Karzai government in future meetings, but U.S. officials would not confirm that. U.S. officials did say that if this initial trust-building phase of contacts with the Taliban blossoms into full peace negotiations, the U.S. would sit alongside the Taliban and the Afghan government.

The secretary of the Afghan peace council, which has been pushing for talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, said it was not clear why the Taliban stopped negotiations with the United States.

Mohammad Ismail Qasimyar speculated that it could be related to the Taliban's request that five top Taliban leaders be released from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

He said Afghan government needs to be involved in the negotiations.

"In the past, we did a lot of preliminary work to build trust and goodwill for talks," he said, if the Afghans are not involved, any peace process won't work.

More on assassination attempt on Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s

Pentagon: Afghan security breach was more serious than reported

By Craig Whitlock, Thursday, March 15, 10:41 AM

The Pentagon acknowledged Thursday that a security breach during Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s visit to Afghanistan was much more serious than officials first reported, saying that an Afghan man tried to ram a stolen truck into a group of VIPs who were waiting to greet Panetta just moments after his plane landed at a military base.

The driver set himself on fire Wednesday and apparently tried but failed to ignite containers of gasoline in the cab of the truck as he attempted to run over several high-ranking Marine officers and others who were waiting for Panetta’s plane to park, said Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman.

“He took a vehicle by force, drove it onto a ramp, at a high rate of speed, drove it at individuals who had to get out of the way to keep from getting hit by it, and then a flash of smoke and fire in the cab,” Kirby told reporters.

The Afghan man was quickly apprehended and sustained severe burns that later proved fatal. Panetta’s plane was diverted to another parking ramp at Camp Bastion, a British installation adjoining the U.S. Marines’ Camp Leatherneck base in the southern province of Helmand.

U.S. military officials withheld news of the attack for 10 hours from reporters who were traveling on the same plane with Panetta, releasing sketchy information about it only after British news media broke the story. They have sought to downplay the seriousness of the incident, saying Panetta was never in danger. The officials also said Wednesday that they could not confirm that the incident was an attempted attack or even that it was linked to Panetta’s visit.

On Thursday, Panetta also tried to minimize his close brush with danger, saying he did not think the attack was aimed at him.

“I have absolutely no reason to believe that any of this was directed at me,” he told reporters before he left the country. “Whatever happened here was directed at others who were there on the field, not me or my plane or anything associated with me.”

Kirby said the Afghan man, a civilian interpreter who worked on contract for NATO officials, hijacked the truck by force at Camp Bastion 30 minutes before Panetta landed. He said no firearms or detonators were found on the individual or inside the truck, but could not rule out that the man had been armed earlier. A British soldier was reported injured when the truck was stolen.

The Pentagon said it could not answer questions about whether Panetta’s security detail had been warned in advance of the security breach on the base or whether an alert had been issued about the stolen truck, saying an investigation was still underway.

The Afghan interpreter later died of burns to over 70 percent of his body. Kirby said investigators were unable to interview him before he died. He added that he did not know whether the man made any unsolicited comments or gave any hints about his motive after he was apprehended.

“There’s reason to believe he intended harm,” Kirby said. “We can’t interview him, so I don’t know that we’re going to get much more.”

He said military officials “don’t have any indication that he knew who was on that airplane.” But he said investigators could not rule out that Panetta was the intended target.

How did OUR American "rare-earth metals" get into Chinese soil???

Source

Loosening China’s grip on rare-earth metals

By Editorial Board, Published: March 15

THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC of China controls 97 percent of the world’s supply of rare-earth metals. Lucky for China — but not so lucky for the rest of the world, because these 17 minerals, with names like europium and neodymium, are used in the manufacture of everything from clean-energy devices to the U.S. military’s precision-guided munitions. That gives China more market power in more critical areas than the United States, Europe and Japan can comfortably afford. The risks became all too evident in 2010 when Beijing suddenly cut off rare-earth exports to Japan during a flare-up of the two countries’ long-standing dispute over maritime boundaries. That de facto embargo lasted only a short while, but China still maintains production limits and export quotas on rare earths.

So President Obama is absolutely right to file a World Trade Organization (WTO) case against China, in partnership with Europe and Japan. China asserts that it has curtailed supply because of concerns that unlimited mining was damaging fragile ecosystems. There’s some truth to that — unregulated rare-earth mining can be devastating to the environment. But industry experts generally agree that China’s principal purpose was to create a competitive advantage for its own manufacturers of advanced products that contain rare earths. If so, that is the sort of behavior China’s membership in the WTO was supposed to discourage. By taking the issue to the WTO, Mr. Obama and the U.S. allies are doing nothing more than exercising their legal right to let a neutral party decide.

Whether the case can lessen U.S. dependence on Chinese rare earths in the short term is another question. Mr. Obama did not claim that his goal was to eliminate the need for imports from China, only to ensure that China maintain a level playing field between China’s buyers of the materials and those in the rest of the world. The Defense Department, which has previously downplayed its dependency on Chinese rare-earths, must still persuade a skeptical Congress that it has a plan to deal with potential supply disruptions.

Rare-earth prices have come down from their 2010 peak, and a U.S. firm, Molycorp, is bringing a large California rare-earth mine into production, which should help restore the United States as a leading producer over the next few years. Molycorp recently took over a Canadian firm that refines rare-earth ore in China, suggesting that some of the U.S. company’s supply could wind up abroad — though the company says Chinese processors will handle only the minority of ore that Molycorp cannot process in the United States. The U.S. government and the private sector here and in Japan and Europe need to continue their efforts to diversify global sources of rare-earths. With luck, this strategic vulnerability will already be easing in a couple of years, which is about how much time it may take for the WTO to rule on the Obama administration’s complaint.

Romney firm supports the Chinese police state?

Firm Romney Founded Is Tied to Chinese Surveillance

Keith Bedford for The New York Times

BEIJING — As the Chinese government forges ahead on a multibillion-dollar effort to blanket the country with surveillance cameras, one American company stands to profit: Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney.

In December, a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust has holdings purchased the video surveillance division of a Chinese company that claims to be the largest supplier to the government’s Safe Cities program, a highly advanced monitoring system that allows the authorities to watch over university campuses, hospitals, mosques and movie theaters from centralized command posts.

The Bain-owned company, Uniview Technologies, produces what it calls “infrared antiriot” cameras and software that enable police officials in different jurisdictions to share images in real time through the Internet. Previous projects have included an emergency command center in Tibet that “provides a solid foundation for the maintenance of social stability and the protection of people’s peaceful life,” according to Uniview’s Web site.

Such surveillance systems are often used to combat crime and the manufacturer has no control over whether they are used for other purposes. But human rights advocates say in China they are also used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents. “There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear,” said Loksag, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu Province. He said the cameras helped the authorities identify and detain nearly 200 monks who participated in a protest at his monastery in 2008.

Mr. Romney has had no role in Bain’s operations since 1999 and had no say over the investment in China. But the fortunes of Bain and Mr. Romney are still closely tied.

The financial disclosure forms Mr. Romney filed last August show that a blind trust in the name of his wife, Ann Romney, held a relatively small stake of between $100,000 and $250,000 in the Bain Capital Asia fund that purchased Uniview.

In a statement, R. Bradford Malt, who manages the Romneys’ trusts, noted that he had put trust assets into the fund before it bought Uniview. He said that the Romneys had no role in guiding their investments. He also said he had no control over the Asian fund’s choice of investments.

Mr. Romney reported on his August disclosure forms that he and his wife earned a minimum of $5.6 million from Bain assets held in their blind trusts and retirement accounts. Bain employees and executives are also among the largest donors to his campaign, and their contributions accounted for 10 percent of the money received over the past year by Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney “super PAC.” Bain employees have also made substantial contributions to Democratic candidates, including President Obama.

Bain’s decision to enter China’s fast-growing surveillance industry raises questions about the direct role that American corporations play in outfitting authoritarian governments with technology that can be used to repress their own citizens.

It also comes at a delicate time for Mr. Romney, who has frequently called for a hard line against the Chinese government’s suppression of religious freedom and political dissent.

As with previous deals involving other American companies, critics argue that Bain’s acquisition of Uniview violates the spirit — if not necessarily the letter — of American sanctions imposed on Beijing after the deadly crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square. Those rules, written two decades ago, bar American corporations from exporting to China “crime-control” products like those that process fingerprints, make photo identification cards or use night vision technology.

Most video surveillance equipment is not covered by the sanctions, even though a Canadian human rights group found in 2001 that Chinese security forces used Western-made video cameras to help identify and apprehend Tiananmen Square protesters.

Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia, who frequently assails companies that do business with Chinese security agencies, said calls by some members of Congress to pass stricter regulations on American businesses have gone nowhere. “These companies are busy making a profit and don’t want to face realities, but what they’re doing is wrong,” said Mr. Wolf, who is co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission.

In public comments and in a statement posted on his campaign Web site, Mr. Romney has accused the Obama administration of placing economic concerns above human rights in managing relations with China. He has called on the White House to offer more vigorous support of those who criticize the Chinese Communist Party.

“Any serious U.S. policy toward China must confront the fact that China’s regime continues to deny its people basic political freedoms and human rights,” according to the statement on his Web site. “The United States has an important role to play in encouraging the evolution of China toward a more politically open and democratic order.”

In recent years, a number of Western companies, including Honeywell, General Electric, I.B.M. and United Technologies, have been criticized for selling sophisticated surveillance-related technology to the Chinese government.

Other companies have been accused of directly helping China quash perceived opponents. In 2007, Yahoo settled a lawsuit asserting that it had provided the authorities with e-mails of a journalist who was later sentenced to 10 years in prison for sending an e-mail that prosecutors charged contained state secrets.

Cisco Systems is fighting a lawsuit in the United States filed by a human rights group over Internet networking equipment it sold to the Chinese government. The lawsuit asserts that the system, tailored to government demands, allowed the authorities to track down and torture members of the religious group Falun Gong.

Bain defended its purchase of Uniview, stressing that the Chinese company’s products were advertised as instruments for crime control, not political repression. “China’s increasingly urban population will face growing needs around personal safety and property protection,” the company said in a statement. “Video surveillance is part of the solution to that, as it is anywhere in the world.” The company also said that only one-third of Uniview’s sales were to public security bureaus.

William A. Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council in Washington, said it was up to the American government, not individual companies, to set the guidelines for such business ventures. “A lot of the stuff we’re talking about is truly dual use,” said Mr. Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration. “You can sell it to a local police force that will use it to track down speeders, but you can also sell it to a ministry of state security that will use it to monitor dissidents.”

But Adam Segal, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on the intersection of technology and domestic security in China, said American companies could not shirk responsibility for the way their technology is used, especially in the wake of recent controversies over the sales of Western Internet filtering systems to autocratic rulers in the Arab world. “Technology companies have to begin to think about the ethics and political implications of selling these technologies,” he said.

Uniview is proud of its close association with China’s security establishment and boasts about the scores of surveillance systems it has created for local security agencies in the six years since the Safe Cities program was started.

“Social management and society building pose new demands for surveillance and control systems,” Uniview says in its promotional materials, which include an interview with Zhang Pengguo, the company’s chief executive. “A harmonious society is the essential nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Mr. Zhang says.

Until now, Bain’s takeover of Uniview has drawn little attention outside China. The company was formerly the surveillance division of H3C, a joint venture between 3Com and Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant whose expansion plans in the United States have faced resistance from Congress over questions about its ties to the Chinese military.

In 2010, 3Com, along with H3C, became a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard in a $2.7 billion buyout deal.

H3C also sells technology unrelated to video surveillance, including Internet firewall products, but it was the video surveillance division alone that drew Bain Capital’s interest.

In December, H3C announced that Bain had bought out the surveillance division and formed Uniview, although under terms of the buyout, H3C provides Uniview with products, technical support and, for a period of time, the use of its brand name. Bain controls Uniview but says it has no role in its day-to-day operations.

Bain is, however, well positioned to profit. According to the British firm IMS Research, the Chinese market for security camera networks was $2.5 billion last year, a figure that is expected to double by 2015, with more than two-thirds of that demand coming from the government. Uniview currently has just 1 percent of the market, the firm said.

Chinese cities are rushing to construct their own surveillance systems. Chongqing, in Sichuan Province, is spending $4.2 billion on a network of 500,000 cameras, according to the state news media. Guangdong Province, the manufacturing powerhouse adjacent to Hong Kong, is mounting one million cameras. In Beijing, the municipal government is seeking to place cameras in all entertainment venues, adding to the skein of 300,000 cameras that were installed here for the 2008 Olympics.

By marrying Internet, cellphone and video surveillance, the government is seeking to create an omniscient monitoring system, said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. “When it comes to surveillance, China is pretty upfront about its totalitarian ambitions,” he said.

For the legion of Chinese intellectuals, democracy advocates and religious figures who have tangled with the government, surveillance cameras have become inescapable.

Yang Weidong, a politically active filmmaker, said a phalanx of 13 cameras were installed in and around his apartment building last year after he submitted an interview request to President Hu Jintao, drawing the ire of domestic security agents. In January, Ai Weiwei, the artist and public critic, was questioned by the police after he threw stones at cameras trained on his front gate.

Li Tiantian, 45, a human rights lawyer in Shanghai, said the police used footage recorded outside a hotel in an effort to manipulate her during the three months she was illegally detained last year. The video, she said, showed her entering the hotel in the company of men other than her boyfriend.

During interrogations, Ms. Li said, the police taunted her about her sex life and threatened to show the video to her boyfriend. The boyfriend, however, refused to watch, she said.

“The scale of intrusion into people’s private lives is unprecedented,” she said in a phone interview. “Now when I walk on the street, I feel so vulnerable, like the police are watching me all the time.”

They will say anything to get your vote!!!!

Source

No ‘Afghanistan’ in new Obama campaign video

By Olivier Knox | The Ticket

President Barack Obama's re-election campaign late Thursday released a Hollywood-caliber campaign film, 16 minutes and 56 seconds of Tom Hanks-narrated footage that trumpets Obama's achievements since taking office three years ago, highlights the challenges still ahead—and never once mentions America's longest war, the conflict in Afghanistan, by name.

The movie, directed by Oscar-winner Davis Guggenheim, defends Obama's handling of the economic collapse of 2007-2008, highlights the auto industry bailout, puts the May 2011 raid in Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden at the center of his argument for another four years in the White House, lays out the immediate benefits of his landmark health care overhaul, and notes he fulfilled his promise to withdraw from Iraq.

But Obama's controversial decision to "surge" troops into Afghanistan, and his plan to withdraw American forces by the end of 2014, never appear in the film, which was released in full just days after an American soldier allegedly slaughtered 16 Afghan civilians and plunged already frayed relations into a new crisis.

The only Republican critic cited by name is Mitt Romney, whose November 2008 op-ed entitled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" appears at 5 minutes and 13 seconds into the film.

Former president Bill Clinton—who appears several times—defends the bailout, while former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel sticks the shiv a little further into Romney, describing his approach as a callous "let it (the auto industry) go … can't be saved …"

Republicans quickly assailed the film, with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus saying: "We don't need a Hollywood movie to know what the president accomplished over the past three years."

"Unfortunately Americans live Obama's accomplishments every day from higher gas prices, food prices, health care costs, unemployment and record debt. Hollywood may not be able to find anything wrong with Obama's first term but Americans literally can't afford to find out what another four years looks like under Obama," Priebus said.

Obama himself does not speak directly to the camera until 8 minutes and 49 seconds into the film, and does so to defend in poignant, personal terms the Affordable Care Act that Republicans scornfully dubbed "Obamacare."

"When my mom got cancer, she wasn't a wealthy woman, and it pretty much drained all her resources," the president says.

He later gives voice to uniquely presidential worries about the May 2011 raid to kill Osama bin Laden at his fortified compound in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad.

"A lot of people have asked, 'How did you feel when you first heard that it was bin Laden and he had been killed?' And the truth is I didn't have time for a lot of feelings at that point, because our guys were still in that compound, and it wasn't until I knew that they were across the border, they were safe, everybody was accounted for—including the dog—that I allowed some satisfaction," he says.

Vice President Joe Biden casts the go-ahead decision as far from the obvious choice. He relates the tense atmosphere in the White House's Situation Room as Obama asks his top advisers what he should do.

"And they say 'well, 49 percent chance he's there, 51. It's a close call, Mister President,'" says Biden. "If he was wrong, his presidency was done. Over."

"It was the ultimate test of leadership," says Hanks, who calls the raid "a victory for our nation."

The video also highlights Obama's kept promise to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq, showing him meeting with General David Petraeus in the Oval Office, before cutting to soldiers on patrol, and then the president telling returning troops, "Welcome home."

With the fragile U.S. economy—and stubbornly high unemployment still over 8 percent—weighing heavily on Obama's re-election efforts, the film casts the situation he inherited as a "horror movie" scenario that shocked the new president and his top aides at a meeting shortly after the 2008 election.

"All I was thinking at that moment was 'could we get a recount?'" quips senior campaign strategist David Axelrod.

The film revives the famous "bikini graph" that the president's supporters use to illustrate the turnaround in job creation since Obama took office.

At 13 minutes in, the film turns into something of a laundry list: It describes the benefits of Obama's health care law in some detail; highlights his commitment to improved fuel efficiency and renewable energy; cites achievements in education standards, student loan reform, and the Dodd-Frank rewrite of Wall Street rules; and trumpets his recess appointment of Richard Cordray—over stiff Republican objections—to head the consumer protection bureau created by the health care law.

It shows Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama, celebrating the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act aimed at erasing some gender-based disparities in pay. It lingers over the swearing-in ceremonies for Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

And it notes that the U.S. auto industry has recovered.

The final words are from Hanks, who urges voters to "look forward to the work still to be done."

Obama administration says San Diego cross should stay

Obama, f*ck the 1st Amendment, I need the vote of the religious right!!

Obama administration says San Diego cross should stay

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau

March 17, 2012

Reporting from Washington -- The Obama administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow a 43-foot-tall cross that serves as a war memorial to remain atop Mt. Soledad in San Diego, arguing that the cross has been there since 1954 and is not an endorsement of religion.

The government should not be required "to tear down a cross that has stood without incident for 58 years as a highly venerated memorial to the nation's fallen service members," Solicitor Gen. Donald B. Verrilli Jr. said in a new appeal to the high court.

He urged the justices to reverse a decision last year by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that said the cross was primarily a Christian symbol and therefore unconstitutional. Its prominent display on public land in La Jolla amounted to an official "endorsement of religion" in violation of the 1st Amendment, the panel of judges said in a 3-0 ruling.

If the Supreme Court takes up the case this year — which is likely — the justices could be forced to finally resolve whether religious symbols, such as crosses or depictions of the Ten Commandments, can be prominently displayed on public land.

Two years ago, the high court rejected a challenge to the display of a small cross in the Mojave National Preserve, but the five justices in the majority disagreed on the reasons. The 9th Circuit's latest opinion mostly ignored that ruling.

Since 1989, lawsuits from several veterans have challenged the Mt. Soledad cross, arguing that a single religious symbol did not speak for all veterans. But the San Diego city government and, more recently, Congress have intervened to preserve the cross.

Critics say the cross is unquestionably a religious symbol, not a universal symbol that honors all fallen soldiers. The 9th Circuit judges said the cross "has never been used to honor all American soldiers in any military cemetery." For example, Jewish soldiers often have a Star of David on their headstones in military cemeteries.

The 9th Circuit judges also noted that until the 1980s, the Mt. Soledad cross was a gathering place for Christians and a scene for Easter services. Its role as a war memorial came only after the litigation began, the judges said.

Defenders of the cross say it serves as a symbol of sacrifice and a memorial to honor the nation's fallen soldiers dating back to World War I. In 2006, Congress moved to take possession of Mt. Soledad and its cross to preserve the memorial.

If the Supreme Court were to deny the appeal, Verrilli said the cross would have to be taken down. Such an act "unnecessarily fosters the very divisiveness" over religion that the Constitution was designed to avoid, he said.

The justices are likely to decide this spring whether to hear the case, known as U.S. vs. Trunk.

david.savage@latimes.com

Karzai says he's at 'end of rope'

Karzai says he's at 'end of rope' over American killing of civilians

by Robert Burns - Mar. 16, 2012 11:34 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he's at "the end of the rope," and a majority of Americans feel the same way.

Of all the past decade's setbacks in the endeavor to form a solid alliance with Afghanistan and defeat the Taliban, the war effort has been driven to a new low by the slaughter of nine Afghan children and seven adults, allegedly by a U.S. soldier whose identity had been kept secret until late Friday.

He is Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 38, of Lake Tapps, Wash., his attorney confirmed.

Late Friday, the soldier arrived at the maximum-security prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., after being flown from a U.S. military detention facility in Kuwait, though Karzai demanded anew that he be tried under the Afghan justice system.

Karzai also is now insisting that U.S. forces retreat from rural areas immediately and let Afghans take the lead in security next year.

But the White House and the Pentagon said Friday that nothing will collapse the war plan, even after the massacre, inadvertent Quran burnings by U.S. soldiers and the deaths of seven American servicemen at the hands of their allies.

Polls have indicated that up to 60 percent of Americans believe it's time to end the war in Afghanistan. And that's not lost on the administration.

"The Afghan people are tired of war," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, just back from Afghanistan, said on Friday. "The American people share some of that tiredness after 10 years of war, as well. All of that's understandable."

But he also said he is confident that Americans realize the U.S. needs to finish its work of stabilizing Afghanistan to ensure that al-Qaida cannot again use that country as a launching pad to attack the United States. His theme, patience, is likely to dominate the discourse in Washington and in allied capitals in the lead-up to a NATO summit meeting in Chicago in May.

President Barack Obama called Karzai on Friday seeking clarification on the demand concerning U.S. troops in rural areas, and White House press secretary Jay Carney said the leaders agreed to keep discussing the matter, which is at the heart of the military strategy.

"I think that the two men were very much on the same page" about gradually handing over security responsibility to Afghan forces, with U.S. and other international troops switching to a support role throughout Afghanistan sometime in 2013, Carney said. A final transition to Afghan control is supposed to happen by the end of 2014.

Another pillar of the war strategy is creating meaningful peace talks with the Taliban insurgents, but that, too, suffered cracks in the aftermath of the village massacre. The Taliban said they were no longer talking on terms set by the Americans.

A senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions said American officials presume that the timing of the Taliban announcement following Sunday's killings was an attempt to gain greater leverage. Officials have long calculated that the Taliban would not engage seriously in peace talks unless they had lost more ground militarily.

Despite calls for the Army suspect to be tried in Afghanistan, Bales was flown Wednesday to a military detention facility in Kuwait, where that country's officials expressed unhappiness that they were not first consulted.

Karzai has often been critical of the American effort, and on Friday, he toughened his talk even more in addressing a group of villagers visiting Kabul from the Panjwai District in Kandahar province, where the slaughter of the 16 civilians took place.

"The fight is not in the villages, not in the houses of Afghanistan," he said, repeating a familiar theme. "It is not safe for you (U.S. troops) in the villages, and it is creating a bad name for you." He added: "Continuously, I have told the Americans to leave our villages. You are not needed in our villages. There is no terrorism ... so what are you doing in the villages?"

Karzai has often said the insurgent problem in his country springs from support across the border in Pakistan, not from unrest in villages. Critics of the U.S. and NATO military plan also have said that a large military presence, especially in conservative rural districts, encourages violence and bolsters the Taliban argument that they are fighting a foreign occupier.

But a central tenet of the war strategy is that the presence of U.S. and international troops in certain towns and villages is necessary to separate the population from the insurgents, creating space for local, provincial and national government to take firmer root.

The apparently unprovoked killing spree Sunday in two villages in southern Afghanistan, allegedly by the 38-year-old Army staff sergeant trained as a sniper, is only the latest in a string of missteps by American forces.

Their mistaken burning of Muslim holy books at an air base in Bagram last month triggered a wave of violent protests across the country and an apology by Obama.

"As tragic as incidents like these are -- and there have been a string of tragic incidents in recent weeks -- it would be just as tragic, if not more, if we let it affect the overall mission, which is having success," said Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman. "And it's just as wrong to extrapolate from those incidents some sort of overarching belief or notion that it (the U.S.-Afghan partnership) is failing."

The events stole attention from what Kirby and other U.S. officials believe is important battlefield progress, at least in the south and southwestern sectors of Afghanistan.

Panetta visited the country this week.

U.S. accelerating cyberweapon research

Source

U.S. accelerating cyberweapon research

By Ellen Nakashima, Published: March 18

The Pentagon is accelerating efforts to develop a new generation of cyberweapons capable of disrupting enemy military networks even when those networks are not connected to the Internet, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The possibility of a confrontation with Iran or Syria has highlighted for American military planners the value of cyberweapons that can be used against an enemy whose most important targets, such as air defense systems, do not rely on Internet-based networks. But adapting such cyberweapons can take months or even years of arduous technical work.

When U.S. military planners were looking for ways to disable Libya’s air defense system before NATO’s aerial attacks last year, they discussed using cybertechnology. But the idea was quickly dismissed because no effective option was available, said current and former U.S. officials.

They estimated that crafting a cyberweapon would have taken about a year, including the time needed to assess the target system for vulnerabilities.

“We weren’t ready to do that in Libya,” said a former U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions. “We’re not ready to do that now, either.”

Last year, to speed up the development of cyberweapons, as well as defensive technology, then-Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III and Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed $500 million over five years into the budget of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, one of the Defense ­Department’s premier research organizations.

The agency also has launched new ­cyber-development initiatives, including a “fast-track” program.

“We need cyber options that can be executed at the speed, scale and pace” of other military weapons, Kaigham J. ­Gabriel, DARPA deputy director, said in testimony last month to Congress.

Pentagon officials, meanwhile, are developing a congressionally mandated strategy for the rapid acquisition of cyberweapons that can keep pace with threats and technology.

Officials are researching cyberweapons that can target “offline” military systems in part by harnessing emerging technology that uses radio signals to insert computer coding into networks remotely.

“To affect a system, you have to have access to it, and we have not perfected the capability of reaching out and accessing a system at will that is not connected to the Internet,” said Joel Harding, an independent consultant who is a former military officer and former director of the Information Operations Institute.

Even if an operator gains access, he said, “unless you already have custom-written code for a system, chances are we don’t have a weapon for that because each system has different software and updates.”

In some cases, as with command-and-control systems, military assets rely on Internet connections, making them theoretically easier to target.

Without that connectivity, an attacker would have to rely on other means — for instance, physically inserting into those systems portable devices such as thumb drives or computer components that have been altered.

But such approaches lack the control and predictability that military commanders desire, experts say.

The amount of disclosed spending by the Pentagon on cybersecurity and cybertechnology — offensive and defensive — is $3.4 billion this year. The U.S. Cyber Command, based at Fort Meade, was created in 2010 and has a budget of $154 million this year.

U.S. officials say that existing cyberweaponry has the potential to disable components of a weapon system, ­although it is not likely to destroy the system.

Cyber tools might be used in conjunction with other tactics and weapons. Cybertechnology might, for example, enable an attack by delaying enemy recognition of it until it is underway.

“It will probably never be just a standalone cyberattack on a network,” said Lt. Gen. Charles R. Davis, commander of the Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, who buys the tools and software that support the Air Force’s offensive and defensive cyber activities.

Cybertechnology was not a significant factor in military operations 10 years ago, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during an Atlantic Council discussion in December. ­“Cyber is a significant factor today.”

In Iraq, during the 2007 surge of U.S. combat forces, the National Security Agency used cyber tools to muddle the signals of the cellphones and laptop computers that insurgents used to coordinate their strikes, according to previously published reports confirmed by former U.S. officials. U.S. cyber operators used those techniques to deceive the enemy with false information, in some cases leading fighters into an ambush by U.S. troops.

But countering Libya’s air defenses was a different story. The operation arose quickly. Officials had not foreseen the Arab Spring uprising against Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi, and no intelligence and engineering work had been done to exploit the vulnerabilities of the Libyan air defense system.

Some experts believe that Israel may have used a cyberweapon to blind Syrian radar before bombing a suspected nuclear facility in September 2007, but several former U.S. officials say that the technique more likely used was conventional electronic warfare or radar jamming using signals emitted from an airplane.

The Stuxnet computer virus that reportedly disabled some 900 centrifuges in an Iranian uranium-enrichment plant in 2009 and 2010 — while it has been dubbed by control-system expert Ralph Langner as the world’s “first digital warhead” — lacked the precision, predictability and control that a military commander would need during combat, experts said.

“If I’m trying to knock down an air defense system, I have to know precisely what’s going to happen and when it will happen,” said a former military official. “It’s a fundamentally different approach than Stuxnet.”

DARPA plans to focus an increasing portion of its cyber research on “offensive capabilities to address military-specific needs,” Gabriel said recently in testimony before the House Armed Services subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities.

Over the past decade, instances have been reported in which cyber tools were contemplated but not used because of concern they would result in collateral damage. For instance, defense and intelligence agencies discussed using cybertechnology to freeze money in Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s bank accounts just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to blunt his efforts to mount a defense. The plan was aborted because of concern that the cyberattack could disrupt financial systems in Europe and beyond.

Within a war zone, the use of a cyberweapon may be limited by other considerations. There is the danger of collateral damage to civilian systems, such as disrupting a power supply to a hospital. A destructive computer code, once released, could be reverse-engineered and sent back at vulnerable U.S. targets or adapted for use by foreign spy agencies. Cybertechnology also is not always the most efficient way to attack a target — sometimes bombs or electronic warfare are easier or more reliable.

Within the Pentagon, more money is being spent on defending against cyber­attacks than on preparing to deploy offensive cyber operations, officials say. That is appropriate, they say, when adversaries are trying to develop similar cyberweapons to use against U.S. military targets that may not be secure against attack and when Pentagon networks are probed thousands of times daily.

But more money needs to be spent on developing cyperweapons, say some former officials. “You’ve got to start moving investment to the offensive side,” Cartwright said.

Pentagon spending on cybertechnology is growing even as other areas of its budget are shrinking, officials say.

“I am still not remotely satisfied with where we are in cyber,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter said at the Credit Suisse and McAleese and Associates defense conference in Arlington this month.

“I dare say,” he said, “we’d spend a lot more if we could figure out where to spend it.”

Drones at Issue as U.S. Rebuilds Ties to Pakistan

Drones at Issue as U.S. Rebuilds Ties to Pakistan

By DECLAN WALSH, ERIC SCHMITT and IHSANULLAH TIPU MEHSUD

Published: March 18, 2012

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Making up is never easy. But as Pakistan and the United States try to restart their troubled relationship after a year of spectacular crises, the difference could come down to drones.

For the Obama administration, facing a faltering war effort and increasingly distrustful allies in Afghanistan, the covert C.I.A. drone strike campaign centered on North and South Waziristan in northwestern Pakistan has acquired new relevance.

Although the drones are best known for targeting senior commanders of Al Qaeda — two more were reported killed in January — they also play a vital role in combating cross-border infiltration from Taliban havens inside Pakistan. Of the 10 confirmed strikes so far this year, 6 hit vehicles filled with fighters that, in several cases, were headed for the Afghan border, a senior United States official said.

“We must protect the troops, and almost all of that stuff is in Waziristan,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the drone program is classified.

Interviews with militants in those areas leave little doubt that the drones have disrupted their operations, driving fugitive leaders deeper into the mountains. But that matters little in mainstream Pakistan, where public discourse rings with thunderous condemnations of breached sovereignty and civilian casualties. Here, the C.I.A. campaign is as unpopular as ever — and could stymie efforts over the coming days to revive diplomatic relations with Washington that have been frozen for four months now.

On Tuesday, President Asif Ali Zardari will convene a special sitting of Parliament that aims to improve his government’s strained ties with the United States, which have been suspended since American warplanes killed 24 Pakistani troops on the Afghanistan border in November. Public outrage over the shooting capped a tumultuous year for the countries’ relationship, already rocked by a shooting by a C.I.A. contractor in Lahore and the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

“We want this relationship to be transparent and predictable,” said Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington.

American officials hope that the parliamentary debate will pave the way for a normalization of relations by early April, end a months-long blockade of NATO supply lines through Pakistan and boost faltering efforts to draw the Afghan Taliban into peace talks. All those issues are critical to American plans to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014. But signs are that the Pakistani debate will be dominated by strident calls for an end to drone strikes.

“The drones are killing innocent bystanders, including children and women,” said Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the leader of the opposition in Parliament, in an interview. “They must be stopped forthwith.”

American officials say there is no question of grounding the unmanned aircraft, which have become a central weapon in the Obama administration’s counterterrorism arsenal. A senior American official in Washington said that the C.I.A. had consistently taken precautions to reduce the risk to civilians, and noted that some strikes had killed Pakistan’s insurgent enemies, too. “These efforts have been extremely precise and effective,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the program’s covert status.

In North and South Waziristan, the tribal districts where 95 percent of about 265 strikes ordered by the Obama administration have occurred, the drones have sown fear and paranoia among Taliban fighters who, facing a technologically superior enemy, have adopted some unusual countermeasures.

During an interview last month in Shawal, a thickly-forested district of plunging valleys that became a haven for Al Qaeda after 2001, a senior Taliban commander, Wali ur-Rehman, ordered his fighters to scan a newly arrived car with a camcorder. Mr. Rehman explained that the camera could somehow detect otherwise invisible signals from the “patrai” — local slang for small electronic tracking devices that, many tribesmen believe, guide American missiles to their target.

“This is our new weapon,” said Mr. Rehman, who has a $5 million United States government bounty on his head, pointing to the Sony camera. “It has saved a lot of lives.”

Whether that was true is unclear, although a former C.I.A. official confirmed that the agency does use tracking devices to identify targets. Either way, Mr. Rehman’s camcorder served a gruesome secondary purpose: recording the last testimony of tribesmen accused of spying for the United States, dozens of whom have been tortured and executed. Yet that, too, was a sign of vulnerability.

Another militant commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the killing of several innocent tribesmen by the Taliban’s “spy squads” had provoked discord in militant ranks over the past year, and led to a drop in summary executions.

On the American side, the drone program is also evolving. The pace has relented, with 64 strikes recorded in 2011, down from 117 in 2010, according to the Long War Journal, a Web site that closely monitors the strikes. A lively debate inside the Obama administration last summer gave the State Department greater say in the strikes. The final say, however, still rests with David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director.

The Afghan war also affects the program’s momentum. Gen. John R. Allen, the top allied commander in Afghanistan, now receives more timely information about C.I.A. strikes in Pakistan than he did just a few months ago, an American military official said. That allows the general’s commanders to direct attacks more effectively on the Afghan side of the border.

In January, President Obama publicly acknowledged the covert program for the first time. “This thing is kept on a very tight leash,” he said.

In Waziristan, though, many take those assurances with skepticism. On a visit to Islamabad last week, Noor Magul, a farmer from North Waziristan, spoke of his anger at the death of three relatives who were killed last Oct. 30 when a drone struck the car in which they were traveling. Naming the men as Khastar Gul, Mamrud Khan and Noorzal Khan, Mr. Magul insisted they had no militant links but worked in a local chromite mine.

“I have revenge in my heart,” said the 64-year-old, fingering his ash-colored beard. “I just want to grab a drone by the tail and smash it into the ground.”

Accounts of civilian casualties play a major role in Pakistani anger toward the drones. An extraordinary claim by President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, last June that there had not been “a single collateral death” over the previous year drew an indignant response. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which monitors the toll, counted “credible media accounts” of between 63 and 127 nonmilitant deaths in 2011, and a recent Associated Press investigation found evidence that at least 56 villagers and tribal police had been killed in the 10 largest strikes since August 2010. But analysts, American officials and even many tribesmen agree the drones are increasingly precise. Of 10 strikes this year, the local news media have alleged civilian deaths in one case. The remainder of those killed — 58 people, by conservative estimates — were militants.

“The overriding concern is to avoid collateral damage,” another senior United States official said.

For diplomats on both sides, the drone issue has become the Rubik’s Cube of their relationship — a puzzle with no easy solution. “Things are at a very delicate point right now,” one senior United States official said.

Some officials suggest that the diplomatic deadlock could be broken by sharing more information with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. But patience with Pakistan in Washington has been so low since the Bin Laden raid in May that such changes could be a tough sell in Congress, said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a former member of the National Security Council.

“It’s not in the U.S. interest to have a drone program with limits,” she said. “The administration wants utmost flexibility.”

Whatever this week’s debate brings, many in Pakistan are cynical that it will change much. “I can tell you how all this will end,” said Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, a former interior minister. “The Pakistani people will keep on protesting. And the drone strikes will keep taking place.”

Didn't Emperor Obama just tell us we won the Iraq war????

Source

Explosions across Iraq kill at least 43

Kareem Raheem and Aseel Kami Reuters

5:17 a.m. CDT, March 20, 2012

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - At least 16 near-simultaneous explosions struck cities and towns across Iraq on Tuesday, killing at least 43 people and wounding more than 200, despite a massive security clampdown ahead of next week's Arab League summit.

It was Iraq's deadliest day in nearly a month, and the breadth of coordinated bombs in more than a dozen cities showed an apparent determination by insurgents to prove that the government cannot keep the country safe ahead of the summit.

Iraq is due to host the meeting for the first time in 20 years and the government is determined to show it can maintain security following the withdrawal of U.S. troops in December.

Tuesday's deadliest incident occurred in the southern Shi'ite Muslim holy city of Kerbala, where twin explosions killed 13 people and wounded 48 during the morning rush hour, according to Jamal Mahdi, a Kerbala health department spokesman.

"The second explosion caused the biggest destruction. I saw body parts, fingers, hands thrown on the road," 23-year-old shop owner Murtadha Ali Kadhim told Reuters.

"The security forces are stupid because they always gather at the site of an explosion and then a second explosion occurs. They become a target."

Within about two hours blasts also struck in the capital, in Kirkuk, Baiji, Samarra, Tuz Khurmato, Daquq and Dhuluiya to the north, in Ramadi in the west, and Hilla, Latifiya and Mahmudiya in the south. Police defused bombs in Baquba and Falluja.

Most of the blasts targeted police checkpoints and patrols.

"This latest spate of attacks is very likely to have been co-ordinated by a large and well-organized group. It is likely an attempt to show the authorities that their security measures are insignificant," said John Drake, a senior risk consultant at AKE Group, which studies security in Iraq for corporate clients.

Army and police forces are frequently targeted in Iraq, where bombings and shootings still occur on a daily basis. Sunni Muslim insurgent groups say that despite the withdrawal of U.S. forces, they will not lay down arms and will continue to battle the Shi'ite-led government.

Although overall violence has declined since the height of sectarian fighting in 2006 and 2007, many Iraqis worry whether their government has the wherewithal to impose security nine years after the U.S.-led invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein.

Tuesday's attacks were the biggest since February 23 when dozens of explosions across the country killed at least 60 people in one of the bloodiest days of violence this year.

EXTRA SECURITY

The Arab League summit is due to be held in Baghdad on March 27-29 and security has been stepped up across the city's checkpoints, where thorough searches have backed up traffic for hours this week.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, two car bombs exploded near a police headquarters, killing nine people and wounding 42, police and health sources said. In Baghdad, a car bomb near the provincial council building killed four and wounded 11.

Police in the northeastern city of Baquba said they had found and defused eight bombs and police in Falluja in the west said they had defused a roadside bomb.

By midday, the toll from all the bombings compiled by Reuters from police and hospital sources stood at 43 killed and 233 wounded.

On Monday evening, bombers struck five times in the northern province of Diyala, killing at least three people and wounding more than 30, police said.

(Reporting by Kareem Raheem and Aseel Kami in Baghdad, Mustafa Mahmoud in Kirkuk, Imad al-Khuzaie in Diwaniya and Habib al-Zubaidi and Ali al-Rubaie in Hilla; Writing by Serena Chaudhry; Editing by Peter Graff and Andrew Heavens)

Only terrorists take photos of the Statute of Libertry

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

H. L. Mencken

Iran has conducted surveillance in NYC, police say

Mar. 21, 2012 11:31 AM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Authorities have interviewed at least 13 people since 2005 with ties to Iran's government who were seen taking pictures of New York City landmarks, a senior New York Police Department official said Wednesday.

Police consider these instances to be pre-operational surveillance, bolstering their concerns that Iran or its proxy terrorist group could be prepared to strike inside the United States, if provoked by escalating tensions between the two countries.

Mitchell Silber, the NYPD's director of intelligence analysis, told Congress that New York's international significance as a terror target and its large Jewish population make the city a likely place for Iran and Hezbollah to strike.

Silber testified before the House Homeland Security about the potential threat. Much of what Silber said echoed his previous statements on the potential threat, but he offered new details Wednesday about past activities in New York.

In May 2005, Silber said, tips led the NYPD to six people on a sight-seeing cruise who were taking pictures and movies of city landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge. In September 2008, police interviewed three people taking pictures of railroad tracks. And in September 2010, federal air marshals saw four people taking pictures and videos at a New York heliport. Interviews with law enforcement revealed that all were associated with the Iranian government, but they were ultimately released and never charged, Silber said.

U.S. officials long have worried that Iran would use Hezbollah to carry out attacks inside the United States. And Iran was previously accused in a disrupted plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. here last year, a plan interpreted in the U.S. intelligence community as a clear message that Iran is not afraid to carry out an attack inside the U.S.

In January, James Clapper, the top U.S. intelligence official, said some Iranian officials are probably "more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime."

But government officials have said there are no known or specific threats indicating Iranian plans to attack inside the U.S.

Marine sergeant being dismissed for criticizing Obama

Source

Marine sergeant being dismissed for criticizing Obama

March 21, 2012 | 7:12 pm

The Marine Corps is moving to boot out a Marine for having made "political statements" about the commander-in-chief on a Facebook page.

Sgt. Gary Stein, 26, a nine-year veteran, put comments on a Facebook page called the Armed Forces Tea Party page that said he would not follow unlawful orders from President Obama such as ordering the killing of Americans or taking guns away from Americans. He also criticized comments made by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about Syria.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits uniformed personnel from making comments critical of their chain of command, including the commander-in-chief, or engaging in political activity in a context that suggests that are acting as military members.

An investigation into Stein's comments was ordered March 8 by the commanding officer of the weapons and field training battalion at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. On Wednesday, the Marine Corps announced that rather than file charges against Stein, the matter is being handled "through administrative action."

Stein, an Iraq veteran who hoped to reenlist, told the Associated Press that he plans to fight the Marine Corps' intention to dismiss him.

"I'm completely shocked that this is happening," he told the AP. "I've done nothing wrong. I've only stated what our oath states: That I will defend the Constitution and that I will not follow unlawful orders. If that's a crime, what is America coming to?"

Stein, a weather specialist, had come to the attention of his superiors two years ago for using the Internet to criticize Obama's healthcare proposal. At that time, he offered to take down the comments.

His most recent postings came during a Facebook discussion about events in Afghanistan. In one posting, he said he believes that military personnel should be allowed to express their political opinions because they are required to risk their lives to advance political objectives.

Laws let military members cheat people out of their debts????

The U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians did not pay a $1.5 million judgment for defrauding an elderly client in a stock scheme, and remains shielded from the obligation as long as he remains in the military, legal experts said.

Source

Afghan shooting suspect did not pay fraud judgment

Reuters

By Peter Henderson and Jed Horowitz

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan left for war without paying a $1.5 million judgment for defrauding an elderly client in a stock scheme, and remains shielded from the obligation as long as he remains in the military, legal experts said.

Before beginning his military career in November, 2001, Robert Bales worked almost five-and-a-half years at a series of largely intertwined brokerages that received repeated regulatory censures, according to regulatory records.

Bales joined the Army 18 months after an Ohio investor filed an arbitration complaint alleging unauthorized trading, breach of contract and other abuses against him, his securities firm and the firm's owner. In 2003, the arbitration panel ordered them to pay the investor $1.2 million, including $637,000 in punitive damages for willful or malicious conduct and $216,500 in attorneys' fees.

Bales never appeared before the panel and did not hire a lawyer to represent him.

Earle Frost, a lawyer for the victim, Gary Liebschner, said his client never received any of the payment ordered by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) panel.

He said Liebschner could have taken Bales to court to enforce the award, but "we couldn't find him."

By that time, Bales had embarked on an Army career that included three tours of duty in Iraq and a fourth in Afghanistan.

Even if Bales's victim had pressed the claim, Bales had protection under laws that shield members of the military from some financial obligations.

Any active-duty member of the military can apply for relief from outstanding financial obligations as long as he or she makes less in the service than before, said John Odom, a retired Air Force colonel and a partner at the law firm of Jones & Odom in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Bales, a staff sergeant, is expected to be charged this week in the March 11 killings of nine children and seven other civilians, who were gunned down in a late-night rampage.

His financial troubles add to the complex portrait of the man accused of the massacre.

His lawyer, John Henry Browne, did not respond to a request for comment on the NASD arbitration ruling. He has said Bales joined the army to defend the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

His service in Afghanistan was complicated by mounting financial pressures back home, his lawyer has acknowledged. His home in Washington state had been listed for sale shortly before the alleged massacre.

Bales began his financial industry career in 1996 at Hamilton-Shea Group, a brokerage in Florida that was expelled from NASD in 2001 and fined $1.4 million over several issues, according to records from NASD and its successor organization, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

Hamilton-Shea was "the kind of place where you learn to cold call, to 'pump and dump,'" said Joseph Dehner, a lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio, who specializes in cases involving rogue brokers and firms.

Pump and dump refers to a practice in which firms artificially raise the prices of stocks they hold by aggressively selling shares to clients and then selling their own shares.

At least three Hamilton-Shea brokers who worked briefly with Bales pleaded guilty to violations of securities law after he left Florida to work in Ohio at Quantum Capital Corp., according to records from FINRA. Quantum also owned Hamilton-Shea.

Bales left Quantum in early 1998 to join Michael Patterson Inc., or MPI, whose eponymous owner had worked with him at both Hamilton-Shea and Quantum. Bales remained there until late 1999, then worked for two other Ohio brokerages until December 2000.

Patterson, whose firm was shuttered one month after Bales joined the Army, could not be reached for comment.

Neither FINRA nor the Ohio Divison of Securities ever suspended Bales, who simply let his securities license lapse, according to regulators. If an arbitration award is not paid within 30 days, FINRA can suspend a broker and would not allow him or her to join another firm during the suspension.

(Reporting By Nick Carey, Jed Horowitz and Peter Henderson.; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson, David Brunnstrom and Paul Simao)

Uncle Sam is spying on you

U.S. to keep data on citizens with no terror ties

by Eileen Sullivan - Mar. 22, 2012 08:53 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The U.S. intelligence community will be able to store information about Americans with no ties to terrorism for up to five years under new Obama administration guidelines.

Until now, the National Counterterrorism Center had to destroy immediately information about Americans that already was stored in other government databases when there were no clear ties to terrorism.

Giving the NCTC expanded record-retention authority had been urged by members of Congress, who said the intelligence community did not connect strands of intelligence held by multiple agencies leading up to a failed bombing attempt on a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas 2009.

"Following the failed terrorist attack in December 2009, representatives of the counterterrorism community concluded it is vital for NCTC to be provided with a variety of datasets from various agencies that contain terrorism information," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement late Thursday. "The ability to search against these datasets for up to five years on a continuing basis as these updated guidelines permit will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively."

The new rules replace guidelines issued in 2008 and have privacy advocates concerned about the potential for data-mining information on innocent Americans.

"It is a vast expansion of the government's surveillance authority," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said of the five-year retention period.

The government put in strong safeguards at the NCTC for the data that would be collected on U.S. citizens for intelligence purposes, Rotenberg said. These new guidelines undercut the Federal Privacy Act, he said.

"The fact that this data can be retained for five years on U.S. citizens for whom there's no evidence of criminal conduct is very disturbing," Rotenberg said.

"Total Information Awareness appears to be reconstructing itself," he said, referring to the Defense Department's data-mining research program that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but was stopped in 2003 because of privacy concerns.

The Washington Post first reported the new rules Thursday.

The Obama administration said the new rules come with strong safeguards for privacy and civil liberties, as well.

The NCTC was created after the Sept. 11 attacks to analyze and integrate intelligence regarding terrorism.

New counterterrorism guidelines

New counterterrorism guidelines permit data on U.S. citizens to be held longer

By Sari Horwitz and Ellen Nakashima, Published: March 22

The Obama administration has approved guidelines that allow counterterrorism officials to lengthen the period of time they retain information about U.S. residents, even if they have no known connection to terrorism.

The changes allow the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the intelligence community’s clearinghouse for terrorism data, to keep information for up to five years. Previously, the center was required to promptly destroy — generally within 180 days — any information about U.S. citizens or residents unless a connection to terrorism was evident.

The new guidelines, which were approved Thursday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., have been in the works for more than a year, officials said.

The guidelines have prompted concern from civil liberties advocates.

Those advocates have repeatedly clashed with the administration over a host of national security issues, including its military detention without trial of individuals in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, its authorization of the killing of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, and its prosecution of an unprecedented number of suspects in the leaking of classified information.

Officials said the guidelines are aimed at making sure relevant terrorism information is readily accessible to analysts, while guarding against privacy intrusions. Among other provisions, agencies that share data with the NCTC may negotiate to have the data held for shorter periods. That information can pertain to noncitizens as well as to “U.S. persons” — American citizens and legal permanent residents.

The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., has signed off on the changes.

“A number of different agencies looked at these to try to make sure that everyone was comfortable that we had the correct balance here between the information-sharing that was needed to protect the country and protections for people’s privacy and civil liberties,” said Robert S. Litt, the general counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NCTC.

Although the guidelines cover a variety of issues, the retention of data was the primary focus of negotiations with federal agencies. Those agencies provide the center with information such as visa and travel records and data from the FBI.

The old guidelines were“very limiting,” Litt said. “On Day One, you may look at something and think that it has nothing to do with terrorism. Then six months later, all of a sudden, it becomes relevant.”

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the government has taken steps to break down barriers in information-sharing between law enforcement and the intelligence community, but policy hurdles remain.

The NCTC, created by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, collects information from numerous agencies and maintains access to about 30 data sets across the government. But privacy safeguards differ from agency to agency, in some cases hindering timely and effective analysis, senior intelligence officials said.

“We have been pushing for this because NCTC’s success depends on having full access to all of the data that the U.S. has lawfully collected,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee. “I don’t want to leave any possibility of another catastrophic attack that was not prevented because an important piece of information was hidden in some filing cabinet.”

The shootings at Fort Hood, Tex., and the attempted downing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 gave new impetus to efforts to aggregate and analyze terrorism-related data more effectively.

In the case of Fort Hood, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan had had contact with Awlaki but that information had not been shared across the government. The name of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the 2009 airliner plot, had been placed in a master list housed at the NCTC but not on a terrorist watch list that would have prevented him from boarding the plane.

Officials said the privacy safeguards in the new guidelines include limits on the NCTC’s ability to redistribute information to other agencies.

“Within the intelligence community, there’s one set of controls for terrorism purposes, a stricter set of controls for non-terrorism purposes, and an even stricter set of controls for dissemination outside the intelligence community,” an official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. An entire database cannot be shared; only specific information within that data set can be shared, and it must be with the approval of the agency that provided the data, the official said.

Privacy advocates said they were concerned by the new guidelines, despite the safeguards.

The purpose of the safeguards is to ensure that the “robust tools that we give the military and intelligence community to protect Americans from foreign threats aren’t directed back against Americans,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security policy counsel, Michael German. “Watering down those rules raises significant concerns that U.S. persons are being targeted or swept up in these collection programs and can be harmed by continuing investigations for as long as these agencies hold the data.”

Other homeland security experts said the guidelines give officials more flexibility without compromising individual privacy.

“Five years is a reasonable time frame,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior Department of Homeland Security policy official. “I certainly think 180 days was way too short. That’s just not a realistic understanding” of how long it takes analysts to search large data sets for relevant information, he said.

Events focus on genocide awareness

Events focus on genocide awareness

Film screenings, exhibits on display around the Valley

by Luci Scott - Mar. 25, 2012 09:18 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

April is Genocide Awareness Month in Arizona, and it kicks off early with a screening of a documentary, "The Last Survivor," on Tuesday at Arizona State University in Tempe.

One of the film's directors, Michael Kleiman, will be present to talk about the making of the film and how genocide survivors can be helped.

The film, to be screened at 6 p.m. in Room 241-C in ASU's Memorial Union, tells stories of survivors and focuses on genocide prevention and civic activism.

Another film, "Kony 2012," about African war criminal Joseph Kony, will be shown at 7 p.m. April 3 in Room 228 of the Memorial Union.

The film is being presented by the non-profit group Invisible Children, which works to combat the practice of using children as soldiers. This film is longer than the one that has gone viral on the Internet and stirred controversy over its accuracy.

On April 2, Scottsdale Community College will host an interactive event with two features: booths staffed by international groups and Camp Darfur, described as a traveling refugee camp consisting of a group of tents representing previous and current genocides.

The daylong activity will be in the mall west of the Applied Sciences Building.

"It brings attention to the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan," said John Liffiton, co-coordinator, with Larry Tualla, of the college's Honors Program, the host of the activities.

Visitors will learn about modern Darfur as well as such previous mass murders as the Holocaust, the Turks' slaying of Armenians during World War I and mass killings in Cambodia and Rwanda.

"When people think of the Holocaust, they think of World War II, but genocide is still happening today," Liffiton said.

He is a professor in the college's English department and director of the English as a Second Language Program.

Camp Darfur is open to the public April 3-4 at GateWay Community College, 108 N. 40th St.

On April 5, a screening of "Kony 2012" is scheduled for 7 p.m. in the auditorium of Dobson High School, 1501 W. Guadalupe in Mesa. It is free and open to the public.

An entire day of activities for the students will include guest speakers and films as well as the Camp Darfur exhibit, said English teacher Kim Klett, who teaches a course on the Holocaust.

For more information, go to darfurandbeyond.org.

Lawmakers call airport screeners ineffective, rude

"It was not known whether any of those caught were terrorists" - I think it is rather well documented that the Patriot Act has caught almost NO terrorist whatsoever. I think the offical statistics are about one half of one percent of the people arrested are alleged terrorists. Almost all of the people arrested as a result of the unconstitutional Patriot Act are drug dealers.

Source

Lawmakers call airport screeners ineffective, rude

Mar. 26, 2012 02:52 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON --House members of both parties on Monday teed off against the agency in charge of airport and port anti-terrorist screening, saying it uses ineffective tactics, wastes money on faulty equipment and treats travelers rudely.

"We're not cattle," said Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., adding that 'barking orders" undermines the good work of the Transportation Security Administration.

TSA officials told a hearing that airport screening is getting better for U.S. travelers, because the agency is moving away from a one-size-fits-all system. Instead, the TSA is expanding programs to identify travelers posing a risk, while allowing those who provide personal information in advance to go through a fast line.

A report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative agency, agreed with lawmakers that several key programs of the TSA have been flawed.

Stephen Lord, director of the GAO's homeland security program, offered the investigators' assessment of the TSA at a joint hearing of the committees on Transportation and Infrastructure; and Oversight and Government Reform: The findings:

--TSA deployed its Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques program nationwide before determining whether it was valid to use behavior and appearance to reliably identify passengers posing a risk. It was not known whether any of those caught were terrorists. Rather, the program nabbed illegal aliens, drug offenders, those carrying fraudulent documents and people with outstanding warrants.

--While 640 full-body scanners were deployed to detect both liquids and metals, some of the units were not being used regularly, thereby decreasing benefits of machines that cost $250,000 each to buy and install.

--The Transportation Worker Identification Credential program used for 2.1 million workers at ports and on ships has been unable to provide reasonable assurance that only qualified individuals can acquire the card.

Christopher McLaughlin and Stephen Sadler, two TSA assistant administrators, emphasized that help is on the way, but spent most of the hearing fending off lawmakers' angry comments.

McLaughlin said TSA is working on easing the checkpoint experience for children and senior citizens, including ending a requirement for them that shoes be removed and conducting less intrusive pat downs.

He said that the TSA Pre-Check system, the fast-lane screening program, has been expanded to a dozen airports and more than 500,000 passengers and received positive feedback. He said any U.S. citizen in the Customs and Border Protection's trusted traveler programs will qualify for streamlined screening when flying from 14 international locations.

None of this satisfied the committee members.

Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said TSA wasted millions of taxpayer dollars developing equipment that didn't work, leaving in its wake "a dire picture of ineffectiveness."

Rep. Tom Petri, R-Wis., said TSA treated traveling Americans "like prisoners."

The chairman of the Transportation Committee, Republican John Mica of Florida, said faulty equipment was hauled away from a storage site "as our investigators were appearing on the scene."

And Issa read comments from Americans who accepted his Internet invitation to write about their experiences on the committee's Facebook site.

A Marine in dress blues said he was forced to remove his trousers because his shirt stays spooked a screener. A disabled person complained about constant groping. So did a traveler with a medical device that can't go through machines generating radiation. And a 61-year-old traveler who had an artificial leg since age 4 gave up traveling, tired of having her breast checked rather than her leg.

Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Memphis, said screeners went through all the items of a woman known as one of the richest in his town.

He said it should have been obvious from her expensive possessions that "this woman wants to live."

American military empire expands in Australia!!!

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U.S., Australia to broaden military ties amid Pentagon pivot to SE Asia

By Craig Whitlock, Published: March 26

The United States and Australia are planning a major expansion of military ties, including possible drone flights from a coral atoll in the Indian Ocean and increased U.S. naval access to Australian ports, as the Pentagon looks to shift its forces closer to Southeast Asia, officials from both countries said.

The moves, which are under discussion but have drawn strong interest from both sides, would come on top of an agreement announced by President Obama and Prime Minister Julia Gillard in November to deploy up to 2,500 U.S. Marines to Darwin, on Australia’s northern coast.

The talks are the latest indicator of how the Obama administration is rapidly turning its strategic attention to Asia as it winds down a costly decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. government is finalizing a deal to station four warships in Singapore and has opened negotiations with the Philippines about boosting its military presence there. To a lesser degree, the Pentagon is also seeking to upgrade military relations with Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.

Although U.S. officials say the regional pivot is not aimed at any single country, analysts said it is a clear response to a rising China, whose growing military strength and assertive territorial claims have pushed other Asian nations to reach out to Washington.

The Pentagon is reviewing the size and distribution of its forces in northeast Asia, where they are concentrated on Cold War-era bases in Japan and South Korea. The intent is to gradually reduce the U.S. military presence in those countries while enhancing it in Southeast Asia, home to the world’s busiest shipping lanes and to growing international competition to tap into vast undersea oil and gas fields.

“In terms of your overall influence in the Asia-Pacific zone, the strategic weight is shifting south,” said a senior Australian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the military talks. “Australia didn’t look all that important during the Cold War. But Australia looks much more important if your fascination is really with the Southeast Asian archipelago.”

Australia is a long-standing ally of the United States, and one of its closest partners in intelligence and military matters. More than 20,000 Australian troops spent time in Iraq between 2003 and 2009. About 1,500 Australian troops are now in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led coalition.

An official interim review of Australia’s military basing structure recently concluded that the chances of the country coming under direct military attack are “currently remote.”

But it urged the government to strengthen its forces along the northern and western coasts, near where most of its mineral wealth is concentrated and where its defenses are relatively sparse. Australia is blessed with an abundance of natural resources and has become China’s leading supplier of coal and iron ore.

The strategic review also advises the government to tailor its basing plans by considering U.S. security interests.

For instance, the review urges a major expansion of the Stirling naval base in Perth, its primary port in western Australia, noting that the installation“could also be used for deployments and operations in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean by the U.S. Navy.”

Specifically, the review suggests that Stirling be upgraded in part so it could service U.S. aircraft carriers, other large surface warships and attack submarines.

Australian officials said a decision about Stirling’s future is not imminent, but the Pentagon’s interest has intensified recently. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus is scheduled to visit Perth and Darwin this month, following up on a February visit to Australia by Adm. Mark Ferguson, the vice chief of naval operations.

“The Australians have been one of our oldest, strongest allies,” Mabus said in an interview. “It’s fair to say that we will always take an interest in what the Australians are doing and want to do.”

Perth’s drawback is its isolation. It is about 2,400 miles south of Singapore, and 1,600 miles southwest of Darwin. But Pentagon officials say they are looking at the location because it could give the Navy a sorely needed place to refuel, re-equip and repair ships on the Indian Ocean.

“Australia is the only ally that we have on the Indian Ocean,” said a senior U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategic planning. “We see the Indian Ocean as an area that we need to spend a little more time on, where we have fewer well developed relations with countries, compared to the western Pacific.”

Elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, the United States operates a key joint naval and air base on the British island territory of Diego Garcia, about 1,000 miles south of the tip of India. But U.S. officials said operations are crowded, with little room to expand. In addition, the base’s future is uncertain; the U.S. lease will expire in 2016.

Partly as a result, U.S. officials are eyeing another coral atoll 1,700 miles to the east: the Cocos Islands, a remote Australian territory.

U.S. and Australian officials said the atoll could be an ideal site not only for manned U.S. surveillance aircraft but for Global Hawks, an unarmed, high-altitude surveillance drone. The U.S. Navy is developing a newer version of the Global Hawk, known as the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance drone, or BAMS, that is scheduled to become operational in 2015. Aircraft based in the Cocos would be well-positioned to launch spy flights over the South China Sea.

Pentagon officials said they are intrigued by the potential offered by Perth and the Cocos Islands, as well as another Australian proposal to build a new fleet base at Brisbane, on the east coast. But U.S. officials cautioned that nothing has been decided.

They also emphasized that the U.S. military is interested in operating only as a guest and is not seeking to develop its own bases.

Peter Leahy, a former Australian army chief, said the agreement to deploy U.S. Marines in Darwin is the first step as the military partnership expands.

“I think the discussions are well advanced and will lead to quite substantial arrangements,” said Leahy, now director of the National Security Institute at the University of Canberra. “Marines are important and I love them dearly, but the decisive plays in this region will come from the Navy and Air Force.”

Hugh White, a former Australian defense official, said that the Australian security alliance with the United States is essential but that Beijing could perceive the moves as too bellicose.

“This is all about China, of course,” said White, a professor of strategic studies at Australian National University in Canberra. “Australia is in a very complicated position in this. None of us want to live in an Asia dominated by China, but none of us want to have an adversarial relationship with China.”

In November, some influential Chinese voices criticized the deal to bring Marines to Darwin, with the state-run People’s Daily warning that Australia could be “caught in the crossfire” if it allowed the U.S. military to harm China’s interests.

Australian officials have played down such talk as predictable rhetoric.

“From our point of view, we want the Chinese not to be sensitive,” said the senior Australian official. “But having said that, they also understand that the relationship between the United States and Australia predates any American concern with them. China accepts that Australia does things with the U.S.”

FBI spies on California Muslims

FBI said to have gathered intelligence on California Muslims

Dan Levine Reuters

7:24 p.m. CDT, March 27, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - U.S. civil liberties advocates said on Tuesday the FBI had engaged in secretly collecting intelligence about Muslims in the San Francisco Bay area in recent years, including details about a sermon delivered at a mosque.

The American Civil Liberties Union called for an inquiry into the FBI's data collection, citing investigative practices from between 2004 and 2008 that it said raised the possibility of privacy violations.

The FBI defended its actions, saying the information in question was gathered as part of authorized law-enforcement activities, some intended to bolster ties with the Muslim community.

Police monitoring of Muslim organizations has been a concern across the country. According to reports by the Associated Press, the New York Police Department kept tabs on Muslim neighborhoods in New York and surrounding areas by sending undercover officers into mosques, meetings of college campus groups and local businesses, and keeping records of what they found.

The ACLU said records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request showed FBI agents visited the Seaside Mosque in northern California five times in 2005. Government personnel documented the subject of a sermon and discussions about a property purchase for a new mosque.

The FBI also met with representatives of a Turkish-oriented non-profit group called Bay Area Cultural Connections and used one meeting participant's cellphone number to search Department of Motor Vehicle records and obtain detailed information about him.

"By exploiting the good faith of Muslim groups and their members, the FBI is undermining community support for the government's legitimate law enforcement activities," Mike German, the ACLU's senior policy counsel and a former FBI agent, said in a statement.

The FBI labeled information collected from its "mosque outreach" program as "positive intelligence" and disseminated it to other agencies, "placing the people and organizations involved at risk of greater law enforcement scrutiny as potential national security threats," the ACLU said in a statement.

"The FBI is casting a cloud of suspicion on American Muslim religious organizations based on their faith alone, which raises grave constitutional concerns," Julia Harumi Mass, an ACLU staff lawyer, said.

FBI Assistant Director Michael Kortan responded that some of the information was collected through FBI activities designed to strengthen its relationships in the community.

"Since that time, the FBI has formalized its community relations program to emphasize a greater distinction between outreach and operational activities," Kortan said in a statement.

(Reporting By Dan Levine; Editing by Steve Gorman, Cynthia Johnston and Eric Beech)

Jail may await Afghan women fleeing abuse, rape

Jail may await Afghan women fleeing abuse, rape: HRW

Reuters

By Jack Kimball | Reuters

KABUL (Reuters) - For Afghan women, the act of fleeing domestic abuse, forced prostitution or even being stabbed repeatedly with a screwdriver by an abusive husband, may land them in jail while their abusers walk free, Human Rights Watch said.

Running away is considered a "moral crime" for women in Afghanistan while some rape victims are also imprisoned, because sex outside marriage - even when the woman is forced - is considered adultery, another "moral crime".

"From the first time I came to this world my destiny was destroyed," 17-year-old Amina, who has spent months in jail after being forced into prostitution, told researchers from Human Rights Watch in a report published on Wednesday.

Despite progress in women's rights and freedom since the fall of the Taliban a decade ago, women throughout the country are at risk of abduction, rape, forced marriage and being traded as commodities.

It can be hard for women to escape violence at home because of huge social pressure and legal risks to stay in marriages.

"The treatment of women and girls accused of 'moral crimes' is a black eye on the face of the post-Taliban Afghan government and its international backers, all of whom promised that respect for women's rights would distinguish the new government from the Taliban," the New York-based group said.

"This situation has been further undermined by President (Hamid) Karzai's frequently changing position on women's rights. Unwilling or unable to take a consistent line against conservative forces within the country, he has often made compromises that have negatively impacted women's rights."

The influential rights organization said that there were about 400 women and girls being held in Afghanistan for "moral crimes", and they rarely found support from authorities in a "dysfunctional criminal justice system".

The plight of a woman called Nilofar illustrates the problem. She was stabbed repeatedly with a screwdriver in the head, chest, and arms by her husband who accused her of adultery for inviting a man into the house, the rights group said.

But afterwards, she was arrested, he was not.

"The way he beat her wasn't bad enough to keep him in jail. She wasn't near death, so he didn't need to be in prison," the prosecutor of the case told Human Rights Watch.

"HE WILL KILL ME"

The dire treatment of women was the main reason Western countries gave for refusing to recognize the Taliban government as legitimate when it was in power.

As Afghan and Western leaders seek a negotiated end to more than 10 years of war, the future for women is uncertain.

The United States and NATO - who are fighting an unpopular war as they prepare to pull out most combat troops by the end of 2014 - have stressed that any settlement must ensure the constitution, which says the two sexes are equal, is upheld.

A law, passed in August 2009, supports equality for women, including criminalizing child and forced marriage, selling and buying women for marriage or for settling disputes, as well as forced self-immolation, among other acts.

But women, especially in rural areas, lack shelters to flee abuse while only one percent of police are female, according to the report based on interviews from October to November with 58 women and girls as well as prosecutors, judges, government officials and civil society.

The ordeal for women does not stop with jail though.

Once leaving prison, women and girls face strong social stigma in the conservative country and may be killed in so-called "honor killings".

"I just want a divorce. I can't go back to my father because he will kill me. All my family has left me behind," 20-year-old Aisha, who was sentenced to three years for fleeing an abusive husband she was forced to marry, told researchers.

(Reporting by Jack Kimball; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani and Robert Birsel)

If you don't love the government you must be a criminal???

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U.S. militia members cleared of conspiracy to attack government

by Ed White - Mar. 27, 2012 10:24 PM

Associated Press

DETROIT - A federal judge on Tuesday gutted the government's case against seven members of a U.S. militia, dismissing the most serious charges in an extraordinary defeat for federal authorities who insisted they had captured homegrown rural extremists poised for war.

Judge Victoria Roberts said the members' expressed hatred of law enforcement didn't amount to a conspiracy to rebel against the government. The FBI had secretly planted an informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia starting in 2008 to collect hours of anti-government audio and video that became the cornerstone of the case.

"The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level," the judge said on the second anniversary of raids and arrests that broke up the group.

Roberts granted requests for acquittal on the most serious charges: conspiring to commit sedition, or rebellion, against the U.S. and conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. Other weapons crimes tied to the alleged conspiracies also were dismissed.

"The judge had a lot of guts," defense attorney William Swor said. "It would have been very easy to say, 'The heck with it,' and hand it off to the jury. But the fact is she looked at the evidence, and she looked at it very carefully."

The trial, which began Feb. 13, will resume Thursday with only a few gun charges remaining against militia leader David Stone and son Joshua Stone. They have been in custody without bond for two years.

Prosecutors said Hutaree members were anti-government rebels who combined training and strategy sessions to prepare for a violent strike against federal law enforcement, triggered first by the slaying of a police officer.

But there never was an attack. Defense lawyers said highly offensive remarks about police and the government were wrongly turned into a high-profile criminal case.

David Stone's "statements and exercises do not evince a concrete agreement to forcibly resist the authority of the United States government," Roberts said Tuesday. "His diatribes evince nothing more than his own hatred for -- perhaps even desire to fight or kill -- law enforcement; this is not the same as seditious conspiracy."

U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade declined to comment. Two years ago, when militia members were arrested, she said it was time to "take them down."

The FBI had put a local informant, Dan Murray, inside the militia in 2008 and paid him $31,000. An FBI agent also was embedded. Steve Haug posed as a trucker and spent months secretly recording talks with Stone. Haug told jurors that he was "shocked" by Stone's knowledge of explosives.

Obama has USA declare economic war on Iran?????

Obama increases pressure on Iran

by Joby Warrick - Mar. 30, 2012 11:33 PM

Washington Post

WASHINGTON - Coordinated pressure by the Obama administration and its European allies has caused a rapid fall in oil revenue to Iran, squeezing that nation's economy ahead of nuclear talks next month, U.S. officials and industry analysts said Friday.

The financial pain is only likely to increase in the months ahead. On Friday, the White House formally certified that global oil supplies are sufficient to accommodate deeper cuts in Iranian oil imports, a technical step that clears the way for the implementation of even tougher economic sanctions set to take effect three months from now.

U.S. officials say the threat of harsher sanctions, combined with a European oil embargo scheduled to begin July 1, is already costing Iran billions of dollars in lost revenue as the country's traditional customers begin to turn elsewhere for petroleum. At the same time, administration officials and oil analysts say they are increasingly confident that Saudi Arabia and other suppliers can make up for Iran's shortfall, easing the risk of global shortages and further price spikes.

"We are fully prepared to go forward with these sanctions," a senior administration official told reporters Friday. "The best outcome here is to have the broadest number of countries working together to send a clear message to Iran."

The new measures are intended to pressure Iran into agreeing to strict curbs on its nuclear program at negotiations set to begin in mid-April. Western officials are describing the talks as a last best chance for a diplomatic settlement of an Iranian nuclear crisis that has driven up oil prices while spurring fears of military strikes.

The price of Brent crude rose 49 cents Friday to finish at $122.88 per barrel.

Western intelligence agencies believe Iran is using its ostensibly civilian nuclear infrastructure to develop the components for nuclear weapons, a charge Iran vehemently denies.

The administration's decision to press forward with deeper sanctions highlights the political risks confronting President Barack Obama. Sharp cuts in Iranian oil could drive energy prices higher, alienating middle-class voters upon whom Obama depends for re-election.

At the same time, a failure to back painful sanctions against Iran could invite attacks by the president's Republican rivals while also raising the risk of a unilateral military strike by Israel against Iranian nuclear facilities.

The new sanctions, signed into law in December, target the Central Bank of Iran, the financial institution that processes payments for nearly all of Iran's foreign oil sales. One provision, set to take effect June 28, imposes sanctions on any foreign bank or company that continues to engage in oil transactions with the Iranian central bank.

The administration has granted waivers to 11 countries that have agreed to end or sharply reduce oil imports from Iran, and its diplomats are encouraging Iran's remaining customers to agree to similar cuts. On Friday, Turkey, a major consumer of Iranian oil, announced that it would slash Iranian imports by 10 percent. Turkish officials were in talks with Saudi Arabia about making up the shortfall.

Already, the cuts have had an impact on Iran's economy and its currency, the rial. The pressure will soon become "greater than anything Iran has faced before," said a senior administration official, who insisted on anonymity in describing the conclusions of U.S. economic assessments.

"It is already far beyond what anyone anticipated two years ago," the official said.

Many oil analysts predict that Iran's exports could eventually fall by half, amounting to 1 million barrels per day, as the July embargo by the European Union kicks in and the United States pressures its allies not to buy Iranian crude.

Countries including Japan and Italy are already cutting back on purchases, and Iran's exports fell by 300,000 barrels daily in March, according to the Swiss oil-shipping firm Petro-Logistics.

Oil prices rose slightly Friday, continuing a steady advance, and analysts said prices were likely to remain high as countries wean themselves from oil from Iran, which now exports about about 2 million barrels a day, or 2.8 percent of the global market.

Saudi Arabia has increased production by about 600,000 barrels per day since October, making up for much of the shortfall, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' spare capacity was at about 2.7 million barrels per day.

Although that is fairly low by historical standards, there are signs it might be enough for now. Global oil demand has been restrained this year, and a recent surge in oil production from North America has given the world some breathing room.

It's unclear just how much Iran's exports will actually be squeezed. Much depends on whether the country can make up the drop in European and Japanese demand by selling elsewhere in the world.

"China is one of the biggest unknowns," said David Pumphrey, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

While China cut back on imports from Iran in February over a pricing dispute, it's unclear whether China can continue to shun Iranian oil. Its domestic-oil companies have difficulty passing on high prices to Chinese consumers, and they may find the prospect of discounted Iranian oil too good to pass up.

On the other hand, China may also be wary of flouting globally coordinated sanctions.

Other countries, meanwhile, may pick up the slack. India's imports from Iran surged in January, and Iran may find buyers for its oil in countries such as Thailand and Myanmar.

From Iran's end, the biggest calculation to make is whether the drop in exports will hurt more than the benefit it is gaining from rising oil prices as tensions flare. Last year, because of increasing prices, the country earned an estimated $97 billion from oil sales, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Do you prefer the French Police State to the American Police State???

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Fighting Terrorism, French-Style

By STEVEN ERLANGER

Published: March 30, 2012

FRANCE and the United States have different notions of liberty, equality and fraternity, though the words look roughly the same in both languages. Methods of combating homegrown terrorism — another French word dating from 1789 — are also quite different, stemming from different histories, legal systems and conceptions of the state.

The horrors in Toulouse — the murders of seven people in a bit more than a week by Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old French citizen of Algerian-born parents who claimed membership in Al Qaeda — created a fierce debate in France about whether the police and security services failed to identify him in time. The police also failed to take him alive, making it harder to discover the true breadth of his contacts and of his path to terrorism.

Mr. Merah clearly slipped through the French net, which relies heavily on human intelligence and judgment. The French are asking why, and whether he might have been more easily identified by the more automated — and expensive — American-style reliance on computerized monitoring of phone calls and the Internet. That question is unanswerable, of course. But the differences between the two countries and their methods are considerable.

“In the United States, it is the system that counts; in France, it is the men,” says Marc Trévidic, a senior investigating magistrate for terrorism in France.

After 9/11, the Americans threw enormous resources of manpower, money and computer time into the “global war on terrorism,” which was also about tracking the potential terrorist at home, in a country with a tiny and mostly well-integrated Muslim population. The French, with a colonial history, have been dealing with terrorism (and Islam) for much longer. With the largest number of Muslims in Europe — nearly 10 percent of the population, often concentrated in poorer neighborhoods — and closer proximity to the Middle East and North Africa, France has focused more on preventing the recruitment of potential terrorists through a regular infiltration of mosques and radical Islamic networks.

Partly because of their history and partly because of more limited budgets, the French rely more on human contacts, local intelligence and human resources and less on automated phone tapping and surveillance than the Americans do. That can make the French well informed but less systematic, less able to “connect the dots” than the Americans, who have tried to learn from their own failure to uncover the 9/11 plot before it happened. In general, Judge Trévidic said, the French have one-tenth of the resources of the Americans for any given case.

The French state is highly centralized, not federal. Fed up with a series of bombings in the 1980s, France tried to better coordinate domestic and foreign intelligence with the establishment in 1984 of the Unité de coordination de la lutte anti-terroriste (the coordination unit of the anti-terrorist struggle), or Uclat, and tried something similar within the Justice Ministry.

French law governing intelligence was reformed in 1986 and refined again after 1995 and 2001, with another reform in 2006 by Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, to give even more margin of maneuver to the investigating judges and the police. The Central Directorate of Domestic Intelligence was founded in 2008 as a merger of the intelligence services of the Interior Ministry, which were responsible for counterterrorism and counterespionage, and of the state police.

THE fight against terrorism is more decentralized in the United States. That is not without complications. The tensions among the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and local or state agencies are legendary, especially between the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department, which has its own counterterrorism intelligence unit. That tension forms a sometimes entertaining, sometimes disconcerting spine for Christopher Dickey’s 2009 book, “Securing the City.”

“France is a country with only two police forces,” Mr. Dickey notes, “both national, so there is less rivalry among agencies.”

Legally, too, the French have centralized terrorism cases in one court and tried to reintegrate procedures for fighting terrorism into regular law, but with more flexibility for terrorism investigations to act on suspicion, order wiretaps or surveillance and hold suspects for a longer period of time. The United States is still trying to reconcile due process of law with fighting terrorism — look at the difficulty in finally shutting the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, or whether to hold criminal trials or military tribunals for detainees like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

While easy to oversimplify, the French state also has a lot of power to pry into the lives of citizens and arrest suspects in the name of pre-emption.

“France has a very aggressive system, and before 9/11 they were centralizing the intelligence process and fixing laws to let them grab people very early to disrupt anything in advance,” says Gary Schmitt, an intelligence expert and resident scholar in security studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “They do a lot of things, including telephone intercepts, that make the Patriot Act look namby-pamby. In the U.S., we talk of pre-emption in military terms, but the French talk of it on the home front, to discover plots and conspiracies.”

The French approach has been criticized for overzealousness, racial bias and the abuse of civil rights. And, when it fails, it faces scathing criticism. Why were the authorities unable to stop the cold-blooded murder of seven unarmed people, three soldiers, three children and a rabbi, shot in cold blood by a man who was already on France’s radar for his trips to the Afghan-Pakistani border and his interest in Salafist Web sites?

Not since 1995, when a spate of bombings terrorized Paris, have the French faced an attack on the scale that occurred in Toulouse — some things are clearly working. Still, for the French, that is little consolation, just as America’s success in preventing another 9/11 on its soil can do little to atone for the errors that preceded it.

The Paris bureau chief of The New York Times.

Maïa de la Baume contributed reporting.

Will Obama's economic war on Iran drive up oil prices? Probably!!!

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Obama Finds Oil in Markets Is Sufficient to Sideline Iran

By ANNIE LOWREY

Published: March 30, 2012

WASHINGTON — After careful analysis of oil prices and months of negotiations, President Obama on Friday determined that there was sufficient oil in world markets to allow countries to significantly reduce their Iranian imports, clearing the way for Washington to impose severe new sanctions intended to slash Iran’s oil revenue and press Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

The White House announcement comes after months of back-channel talks to prepare the global energy market to cut Iran out — but without raising the price of oil, which would benefit Iran and harm the economies of the United States and Europe.

Since the sanctions became law in December, administration officials have encouraged oil exporters with spare capacity, particularly Saudi Arabia, to increase their production. They have discussed with Britain and France releasing their oil reserves in the event of a supply disruption.

And they have conducted a high-level campaign of shuttle diplomacy to try to persuade other countries, like China, Japan and South Korea, to buy less oil and demand discounts from Iran, in compliance with the sanctions.

The goal is to sap the Iranian government of oil revenue that might go to finance the country’s nuclear program. Already, the pending sanctions have led to a decrease in oil exports and a sharp decline in the value of the country’s currency, the rial, against the dollar and euro.

Administration officials described the Saudis as willing and eager, at least since talks started last fall, to undercut the Iranians.

One senior official who had met with the Saudi leadership, said: “There was no resistance. They are more worried about a nuclear Iran than the Israelis are.”

Still officials said, the administration wanted to be sure that the Saudis were not talking a bigger game than they could deliver. The Saudis received a parade of visitors, including some from the Energy Department, to make the case that they had the technical capacity to pump out significantly more oil.

But some American officials remain skeptical. That is one reason Mr. Obama left open the option of reviewing this decision every few months. “We won’t know what the Saudis can do until we test it, and we’re about to,” the official said.

Worldwide demand for oil was another critical element of the equation that led to the White House decision on sanctions. Now, projections for demand are lower than expected because of the combination of rising oil prices, the European financial crisis and a modest slowdown in growth in China.

As one official said, “No one wants to wish for slowdown, but demand may be the most important factor.”

Nonetheless, the sanctions pose a serious challenge for the United States. Already, concerns over a confrontation with Iran and the loss of its oil — Iran was the third-biggest exporter of crude in 2010 — have driven oil prices up about 20 percent this year.

A gallon of gas currently costs $3.92, on average, up from about $3.20 a gallon in December. The rising prices have weighed on economic confidence and cut into household budgets, a concern for an Obama administration seeking re-election.

On Friday afternoon, oil prices on commodity markets closed at $103.02 a barrel, up 24 cents for the day.

Moreover, the new sanctions — which effectively force countries to choose between doing business with the United States and buying oil from Iran — threaten to fray diplomatic relationships with close allies that buy some of their crude from Tehran, like South Korea.

But in a conference call with reporters, senior administration officials said they were confident that they could put the sanctions in effect without damaging the global economy.

Iran currently exports about 2.2 million barrels of crude oil a day, according to the economic analysis company IHS Global Insight, and other oil producers will look to make up much of that capacity, as countries buy less and less oil from Iran. A number of countries are producing more petroleum, including the United States itself, which should help to make up the gap.

Most notably, Saudi Arabia, the world’s single biggest producer, has promised to pump more oil to bring prices down.

“There is no rational reason why oil prices are continuing to remain at these high levels,” the Saudi oil minister, Ali Naimi, wrote in an opinion article in The Financial Times this week. “I hope by speaking out on the issue that our intentions — and capabilities — are clear,” he said. “We want to see stronger European growth and realize that reasonable crude oil prices are key to this.”

By certifying that there is enough supply available, the administration is also trying to gain some leverage over Iran before a resumption of negotiations, expected on April 14.

The suggestion that Saudi Arabia is prepared to make up for any lost Iranian production is intended to remove Iran’s ability to threaten a major disruption in the world oil supply if it does not cede to Western and United Nations demands to halt uranium enrichment.

However, administration officials concede that it is unclear how the oil markets will react to Iranian threats even with the president’s latest certification that there is sufficient oil to fill the gap. “We just don’t know how much negotiating advantage we have gained,” said one senior administration official who has been involved in developing the policy.

In a statement, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said the administration acknowledged that the oil market had become increasingly tight, with output just besting demand.

“Nonetheless, there currently appears to be sufficient supply of non-Iranian oil to permit foreign countries” to cut imports, he said.

American officials have also discussed a coordinated release of oil from the national strategic reserves with French and British officials.

Some energy experts question whether Saudi Arabia really has enough spare capacity to make up for the loss of Iran’s oil. But the determination of the United States and Europe to combat high prices might be enough to quiet the markets.

The White House “can have a very limited material impact on the size of supplies,” said David J. Rothkopf, the president of Garten Rothkopf, a Washington-based consultancy. “But they can have a much larger impact on perceptions. In this case, it’s not so much the producers as the energy traders who are moving market prices — and that’s where the White House wants to play a role.”

Additionally, the White House has the ability under the law to waive the new sanctions if they threaten national security or if oil prices spurt, increasing the flow of money to Iran’s government.

Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Burlington, Vt., and David E. Sanger from Cambridge, Mass.

Military surplus a bonanza for law enforcement

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Military surplus a bonanza for law enforcement

G.W. Schulz,Andrew Becker, California Watch

Saturday, March 31, 2012

San Francisco may be known for antiwar movements and peace rallies, but when local law enforcement agencies needed help with supplies, they've turned to the U.S. military.

Over the past two decades, San Francisco authorities have acquired infrared devices, combat helmets, chemical protective gloves, vehicles and even a boat as discarded hand-me-downs free of charge from the Department of Defense.

In total, the San Francisco police and sheriff's departments have taken $1.4 million in equipment, from a $20 pair of evidence boxes to "climber's equipment" worth $325,000 in 1996.

Several other government agencies in California also have tapped the vast supply of free military surplus goods, equipping themselves with assault-style weapons and even tanks, first as part of the war on drugs and later in the name of fighting terrorism.

The agencies and their employees accumulated more equipment during 2011 than any other year in the program's two-decade history, according to a California Watch analysis of U.S. Department of Defense data.

A total of 163,344 new and used items valued at $26.2 million - from bath mats acquired by the sheriff of Sonoma County to a full-tracked tank for rural San Joaquin County - were transferred last year to state and local agencies.

Police nationwide sought $498 million worth of equipment, including 60 aircraft and thousands more weapons than in 2010. Listed dollar amounts are based on what the military initially paid for the equipment.

More than 17,000 public agencies across the nation - including police, sheriff and fire departments - have taken advantage of the equipment giveaway of an estimated $2.8 billion since Congress enacted laws in the 1990s that created the program.

For the sheriff of Orange County, it was hundreds of flashlights, exercise equipment, four trumpets and gun parts. The Vacaville Police Department got "combat coats," pistol holsters and canteens.

The Alameda County Sheriff's Department, which in years past picked up a $4.4 million, 85-foot patrol boat as well as a grenade launcher, in 2011 asked for four rifles and more than 200 pillowcases, along with tools, a $200 medical treatment table and other equipment.

The program is run online and open to law enforcement and other public agencies that sign up with the Department of Defense. Once the goods are transferred, the civilian police departments are responsible for maintenance and storage. Offensive capabilities

Police are allowed to sell or transfer the military surplus after a year. But weapons and anything else with "offensive military capability" can't be sold - the equipment technically belongs to the Department of Defense and is considered on permanent loan to the civilian police agencies.

The program has ballooned despite congressional largesse that since 2002 has resulted in billions of dollars worth of homeland security grants - including $3.8 billion for California alone - set aside for disaster preparation and counterterrorism.

Erroll Southers, a former top state homeland security official, said the combat-ready equipment can look intimidating to the public, but it enhances safety during critical, high-stress calls.

"I don't know how it could not look threatening, but that's not the intent," said Southers, now an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California.

Officials attribute the recent surge in demand to better promotion and outreach, an influx of equipment with the war in Iraq winding down, and money woes that have left police across the state scrambling to fill their needs.

"State and local budgets are rapidly diminishing and dwindling, so they're getting pretty creative about looking for alternative sources of equipment," said Twila Gonzales of the Defense Logistics Agency, which oversees military transfers to police.

Tactical vehicles

On New Year's Eve 1984, Kenneth Mohar, a 39-year-old with a history of alcohol abuse, stood in the doorway of his Concord home, pointing a hunting rifle at his roommate's head. After an argument, Mohar shot and killed the roommate in the driveway.

When local police arrived, they feared Mohar wasn't finished. So they dialed up the nearby Concord Naval Weapons Station to ask if they could borrow something: a Peacekeeper armored personnel carrier.

Nearly three decades later, Concord police no longer need to borrow armored trucks. In November, the military's excess equipment program enabled the city to obtain its own 8 1/2-ton bulletproof tactical vehicle, among other discarded equipment.

"Without the surplus program, these are probably items that we as an agency couldn't afford," said Concord police Lt. Bill Roche. "It provides us with an ability to remain competitive with the criminal community."

Much of the gear sought last year across California had nothing to do with firearms or bulletproof vehicles and served more everyday needs - treadmills, parkas, computers, tweezers, cameras and office supplies.

Big-ticket items

But some agencies have used the program to get big-ticket items that might otherwise be no more than a fantasy under today's budget belt-tightening.

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department has taken in more than $13.8 million worth of surplus equipment since the late 1990s, including four helicopters that account for much of that money.

Spokesman Drew Sugars said the aircraft help deputies reach lost or stranded hikers in isolated areas of the county that include parts of the Los Padres National Forest.

Other departments can't resist free machinery that most people would have difficulty imagining on America's streets, even if it might not fit their image or needs.

The San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office, for example, last year picked up a full-tracked tank, even though it had a sophisticated, $532,000 mobile-command vehicle that it bought with federal grant money. A spokesman said the county has since gotten rid of the tank because it didn't meet the agency's "mission needs."

Demand for surplus equipment doesn't appear to be slowing.

"There's a lot of competition for it," said Sgt. Jon Zwolinski, who leads the effort to track down excess property for the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department. "The longer you delay in ordering it, the more likely the chances someone else is going to get it. So you just have to be quick on the draw." Searchable database

Look up free military surplus equipment in your community at links.sfgate.com/ZLIS.

California Watch, the state's largest investigative reporting team, is part of the independent, nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. www.californiawatch.org. gwschulz@cironline.org, abecker@cironline.org

Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool

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Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: March 31, 2012

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

But civil liberties advocates say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.

The internal documents, which were provided to The New York Times, open a window into a cloak-and-dagger practice that police officials are wary about discussing publicly. While cell tracking by local police departments has received some limited public attention in the last few years, the A.C.L.U. documents show that the practice is in much wider use — with far looser safeguards — than officials have previously acknowledged.

The issue has taken on new legal urgency in light of a Supreme Court ruling in January finding that a Global Positioning System tracking device placed on a drug suspect’s car violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches. While the ruling did not directly involve cellphones — many of which also include GPS locators — it raised questions about the standards for cellphone tracking, lawyers say.

The police records show many departments struggling to understand and abide by the legal complexities of cellphone tracking, even as they work to exploit the technology.

In cities in Nevada, North Carolina and other states, police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track cellphone signals back to cell towers as part of nonemergency investigations to identify all the callers using a particular tower, records show.

In California, state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.

In Ogden, Utah, when the Sheriff’s Department wants information on a cellphone, it leaves it up to the carrier to determine what the sheriff must provide. “Some companies ask that when we have time to do so, we obtain court approval for the tracking request,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a written response to the A.C.L.U.

And in Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment.

Cell carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200 for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect, records show.

Most of the police departments cited in the records did not return calls seeking comment. But other law enforcement officials said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits.

The police in Grand Rapids, Mich., for instance, used a cell locator in February to find a stabbing victim who was in a basement hiding from his attacker.

“It’s pretty valuable, simply because there are so many people who have cellphones,” said Roxann Ryan, a criminal analyst with Iowa’s state intelligence branch. “We find people,” she said, “and it saves lives.”

Many departments try to keep cell tracking secret, the documents show, because of possible backlash from the public and legal problems. Although there is no evidence that the police have listened to phone calls without warrants, some defense lawyers have challenged other kinds of evidence gained through warrantless cell tracking.

“Do not mention to the public or the media the use of cellphone technology or equipment used to locate the targeted subject,” the Iowa City Police Department warned officers in one training manual. It should also be kept out of police reports, it advised.

In Nevada, a training manual warned officers that using cell tracing to locate someone without a warrant “IS ONLY AUTHORIZED FOR LIFE-THREATENING EMERGENCIES!!” The practice, it said, had been “misused” in some standard investigations to collect information the police did not have the authority to collect.

“Some cell carriers have been complying with such requests, but they cannot be expected to continue to do so as it is outside the scope of the law,” the advisory said. “Continued misuse by law enforcement agencies will undoubtedly backfire.”

Another training manual prepared by California prosecutors in 2010 advises police officials on “how to get the good stuff” using cell technology.

The presentation said that since the Supreme Court first ruled on wiretapping law in 1928 in a Prohibition-era case involving a bootlegger, “subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government.”

Technological breakthroughs, it continued, have made it possible for the government “to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.”

In interviews, lawyers and law enforcement officials agreed that there was uncertainty over what information the police are entitled to get legally from cell companies, what standards of evidence they must meet and when courts must get involved.

A number of judges have come to conflicting decisions in balancing cellphone users’ constitutional privacy rights with law enforcement’s need for information.

In a 2010 ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, said a judge could require the authorities to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before demanding cellphone records or location information from a provider. (A similar case from Texas is pending in the Fifth Circuit.)

“It’s terribly confusing, and it’s understandable, when even the federal courts can’t agree,” said Michael Sussman, a Washington lawyer who represents cell carriers. The carriers “push back a lot” when the police urgently seek out cell locations or other information in what are purported to be life-or-death situations, he said. “Not every emergency is really an emergency.”

Congress and about a dozen states are considering legislative proposals to tighten restrictions on the use of cell tracking.

While cell tracing allows the police to get records and locations of users, the A.C.L.U. documents give no indication that departments have conducted actual wiretapping operations — listening to phone calls — without court warrants required under federal law.

Much of the debate over phone surveillance in recent years has focused on the federal government and counterterrorism operations, particularly a once-secret program authorized by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. It allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on phone calls of terrorism suspects and monitor huge amounts of phone and e-mail traffic without court-approved intelligence warrants.

Clashes over the program’s legality led Congress to broaden the government’s eavesdropping powers in 2008. As part of the law, the Bush administration insisted that phone companies helping in the program be given immunity against lawsuits.

Since then, the wide use of cell surveillance has seeped down to even small, rural police departments in investigations unrelated to national security.

“It’s become run of the mill,” said Catherine Crump, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who coordinated the group’s gathering of police records. “And the advances in technology are rapidly outpacing the state of the law.”

Britons Protest Government Eavesdropping Plans

Britons Protest Government Eavesdropping Plans

By ALAN COWELL

Published: April 2, 2012

LONDON — British lawmakers and rights activists joined a chorus of protest Monday against plans by the government to give the intelligence and security services the ability to monitor the phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Internet use of every person in the country.

In a land where tens of thousands of surveillance cameras attest to claims by privacy advocates that Britain is the Western world’s most closely monitored society, the proposal has touched raw nerves, compounding arguments that its citizens live under what critics call an increasingly intrusive “nanny state.”

The debate in recent years has pitted those who justify greater scrutiny by reference to threats of terrorism and organized crime against those who cleave to more traditional notions of individual privacy.

But the current proposal would go a step further, raising the question of how security agencies can themselves keep track of a proliferation of newer technologies such as Skype, instant messaging and social networking sites that permit instant communication outside more traditional channels.

“What we do need to make sure is that as technology changes we are able to maintain our current capability in this area,” a spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron said, speaking in return for anonymity under departmental rules.

The Home Office said the new measures were vital to provide police and security services with “communications data to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public.”

Under the proposal, made public in The Sunday Times of London, a law to be introduced this year would allow the authorities to order Internet companies to install hardware enabling the government’s monitoring agency, known by its initials, GCHQ, to examine individual communications without a warrant.

A similar effort to enhance the authorities’ powers was made by the previous Labour government in 2006, but it was abandoned after ferocious opposition, including from the two parties that now form the coalition government — the dominant Conservatives and the smaller Liberal Democrats — and are now re-introducing the same legislation..

Currently, government eavesdroppers and police need a warrant to monitor specific communications. But the new system would permit the authorities to track communications data like “time, duration and dialing numbers of a phone call or an e-mail address,” the Home Office said in a statement.

“It does not include the content of any phone call or e-mail, and it is not the intention of the government to make changes to the existing legal basis for the interception of communications,” the statement said.

Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister and a Liberal Democrat, defended the plan, saying he was “totally opposed to the idea of governments’ reading people’s e-mails at will or creating a new central government database.”

“The point is, we are not doing any of that and I wouldn’t allow us to do any of that,” he said, arguing that the authorities wanted to update “the rules which currently apply to mobile telephone calls to allow the police and security services to go after terrorists and serious criminals and updating that to apply to technology like Skype, which is increasingly being used by people who want to make those calls and send those e-mails.”

However, opponents, like the Conservative lawmaker David Davis, said the measures would give the authorities far greater powers to intrude into areas that have traditionally been private.

“It is not focusing on terrorists or criminals,” Mr. Davis said. “It is absolutely everybody. Historically, governments have been kept out of our private lives.”

“Our freedom and privacy has been protected by using the courts, by saying, ‘If you want to intercept, if you want to look at something, fine; if it is a terrorist or a criminal, go and ask a magistrate and you’ll get your approval.’ You shouldn’t go beyond that in a decent, civilized society, but that is what is being proposed.”

“This is an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary innocent people in vast numbers,” he said.

“The problem we have had in the past is this information has been leaked, lost, stolen,” said Malcolm Bruce, a Liberal Democrat member of Parliament. “I think there would be very, very real concerns that it could be open to all kinds of abuse.”

“We have had a situation where police have been selling information to the media,” he said, referring to testimony at a judicial inquiry into media ethics and practices. “I think we are in a very, very dangerous situation if too much information is being passed around unnecessarily,” he said.

GCHQ stands for Government Communications Headquarters, which is run in close collaboration with the National Security Agency in the United States.

It is one of three British intelligence agencies, along with the domestic MI5 security unit and the overseas MI6 secret intelligence service. Its operations are conducted mainly from its headquarters near the spa town of Cheltenham, where most of its 5,500 staff members work, according to its Web site.

Information gathered by GCHQ has played a major part in the security service’s efforts to foil purported terrorist plots since the July 7, 2005, London bombings.

British officials have taken to warning that London will be a potential target for terrorism when it hosts the 2012 Olympics this summer, strengthening the case for enhanced powers to intercept communications. But opponents of the proposed legislation are pointing out that the coalition came into office promising to respect individual rights.

Nick Pickles, director of a privacy advocacy group called Big Brother Watch, said “no amount of scare-mongering can hide the fact” that the planned law had been attacked by lawmakers in all major parties. “The government has offered no justification for what is unprecedented intrusion into our lives, nor explained why promises made about civil liberties are being junked,” he said.

Iraq the same police state it was when Saddam was in power???

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Iraq weighs expanding human-rights restrictions

by Alice Fordham - Apr. 4, 2012 09:16 PM

Washington Post

BAGHDAD - The Iraqi government is debating proposed laws that would impose strict controls on freedom of speech and association, prompting fears that the authorities are playing a growing and increasingly oppressive role in citizens' lives.

As the country settles into its new identity as a sovereign state, about four months after the departure of the last American troops, some Iraqis are nervous that the government is moving back toward the heavy-handed monitoring of citizens that was a hallmark of life under dictator Saddam Hussein.

In Parliament, there has been fierce debate of several draft laws. One would carry harsh penalties for online criticism of the government. Another would require demonstrators to get permission for any gathering.

Local and international human-rights groups say the proposed legislation is vague and would give the government power to move against people or parties critical of the government.

"In Iraq, we need to respect all the ideas," said an activist and blogger known as Hayder Hamzoz who is campaigning against a proposed information-technology law that would mandate a year's imprisonment for anyone who violates "religious, moral, family, or social values" online.

The proposed law also contains a sentence of life imprisonment for using computers or social networks to compromise "the independence of the state or its unity, integrity, safety."

Hamzoz, who does not use his real name out of concern for his safety, said the legislation is intended to allow the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to control social media. The government essentially did just that more than a year ago, when it swiftly smothered an uprising inspired by the Arab Spring revolts sweeping the region.

Activists and nongovernmental organizations have criticized the proposed laws that would impose rules on gatherings and forbid meetings in religious establishments, universities and government buildings for anything other than the facilities' primary purpose.

Many argue that the country, which is emerging from more than 30 years of autocracy under Hussein and then years of conflict and instability after the U.S. invasion, needs tough laws to establish clear ground rules.

Navy Plowing Ahead on New Coastal Ship, Despite Woes

Navy Plowing Ahead on New Coastal Ship, Despite Woes

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: April 5, 2012

MOBILE, Ala. — The Navy’s newest ship is designed to battle Iranian attack boats, clear mines from the Strait of Hormuz, chase down Somali pirates and keep watch on China’s warships. The ones built here even look menacing, like Darth Vader on the sea.

“It’s going to scare the hell out of folks,” said Representative Jo Bonner, the Alabama Republican who represents Mobile and is one of the ship’s biggest boosters in Congress.

Mr. Bonner acknowledged that the ship has needed a “tweak” here and there — his allusion to one of the most tortured shipbuilding programs in Navy history, a decade-long tale of soaring costs, canceled contracts and blown deadlines.

One of the two $700 million ships completed so far has had a major leak and crack in its hull, while the other is at sea, testing equipment that is failing to distinguish underwater mines from glints of light on the waves. More ominously, a report late last year by the Pentagon’s top weapons tester said the ship “is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment.”

But for better or worse, the Pentagon and the Obama administration are embracing the Littoral Combat Ship as the future of naval warfare and just what is needed to meet 21st-century threats.

Able to operate on the high seas and along shallow coastlines (the “littorals”), the fast, maneuverable ship is central to President Obama’s strategy of projecting American power in the Pacific and Persian Gulf. It adds a relatively small and technologically advanced ship — part of what former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld envisioned as a lean, proficient military — to America’s traditional blue-water Navy of aircraft carriers and destroyers.

“This ship is the right ship at the right time,” Robert O. Work, the undersecretary of the Navy, said in a recent interview. “We’ve got to prove it to all the naysayers.”

For a Pentagon that must make deep budget cuts — about $450 billion over the next decade, and possibly up to $1 trillion if Congress does not make alternative reductions — the shallow-water ship is a priority. Relatively inexpensive, at least compared with a $2 billion destroyer, it remains critical to the Navy’s goal of reaching a 300-ship fleet, assuming that all 55 littoral combat ships are built as planned. Right now the Navy has 285 ships, making it, as Mitt Romney, the leading Republican presidential candidate points out, the smallest Navy since 1917.

(“An accurate observation that is totally irrelevant,” Mr. Work said. In 1917, “we didn’t have any airplanes in the fleet. We didn’t have any unmanned systems. We didn’t have Tomahawk cruise missiles.”)

The Pentagon has made only the most modest of cutbacks on the new ships by delaying purchases of two of them in future years, and prospects for continued Congressional support for the program are good, despite years of objections from some on Capitol Hill. “The story of this ship is one that makes me ashamed and embarrassed as a former Navy person,” Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and onetime Navy pilot, said in late 2010, citing billions of dollars in cost overruns.

But the Navy now insists that they have brought the costs down and that the ships will each cost less than $400 million, and that after an “utter procurement mess” — Mr. Work’s words — the problems are being solved. (The first ship, despite the leak and crack, is expected to be deployed to Singapore next year, at the southern edge of the South China Sea, and the one now in sea trials could be ready by 2014.) Analysts say an important factor driving the Navy and Congress is that the vessels the ships are meant to replace — frigates and minesweepers — are aging, and that there is little else in the pipeline. The combat ship is seen as too far along in production to be killed now.

“It’s one of those things that once the snowball goes down the hill, it just keeps rolling,” said Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who has been one of the ship’s biggest critics but said he was bowing to the inevitable. “The Navy likes it. There’s no way I’m going to stop it.”

Here in Mobile, General Dynamics and an American division of an Australian ship maker, Austal USA, are under contract to build 10 of the ships by 2019. The shipyard is booming and expects to soon have 4,500 workers, making it one of the largest private employers in the state and the darling of city fathers and Mr. Bonner. (Another version of the ship, which has a different appearance, is being built by Lockheed Martin in Wisconsin.)

A tour at the Mobile yard of a ship that is nearly complete, the U.S.S. Coronado, shows a bridge with consoles of video screens that allow the captain to drive the ship by a joystick or from a laptop. The 400-foot ships can go faster than 40 knots, or nearly 50 miles an hour, (the ones built in Mobile have aluminum trimaran hulls — creating less drag in the water and more speed) and are able to operate in 20 feet of water. They have relatively small crews of 75, decks for helicopters and a variety of equipment “modules” that can be swapped for different missions, like mine-hunting, submarine warfare or special operations.

One ship still to be built will be named the U.S.S. Gabrielle Giffords, after the former Arizona congresswoman who was shot by a constituent last year.

The U.S.S. Independence, one of the two completed ships, is now testing the mine-hunting equipment, with uneven results, in the Gulf of Mexico. Should it eventually work, it would revolutionize a slow and dangerous business that requires ships to drags cables through the water that sever mines from their moorings and pop them to the surface. Once there, divers attach explosives to the mines and remotely blow them up.

The Navy says that ideally, a littoral combat ship would go nowhere near a minefield. Instead a helicopter would take off from its deck and use a laser to find a mine, then lower a small drone attached to a cable into the water to shoot an explosive at the mine. The combat ship would also have on board a larger underwater drone that could be lowered into the sea to hunt for a mine and then blow it up.

In trials, the helicopter laser has been registering too many false positives — it is finding mines, but also reading light glints on the water as mines. “We’re developing new algorithms and software to improve it,” said Christopher G. Johnson, a spokesman for the Naval Sea System Command.

As for the ship’s inability to survive in a combat environment, missiles could more easily penetrate its hull and do more damage than to a larger, more powerful ship. It also has fewer and far less sophisticated defenses. Still, the Navy argues that it will be heavily armed with guns and missiles and will operate in hostile waters, like the Persian Gulf, only with larger ships nearby.

“If you use smart tactics, techniques and procedures, we believe the ship is survivable,” Mr. Work said, making an argument that Mr. Hunter, the congressman, finds specious.

If seven Iranian attack boats should come at the new ship, Mr. Hunter said, “it backs away, it can’t take any major hits.” In short, he said, “it’s not going to stand there and trade punches with anybody.”

But perhaps its appearance could frighten potential enemies. As Joseph J. Rella, the president of Austal USA said in a recent interview: “If I was a pirate in a little boat, I’d be scared to death.” [Yea, and as a taxpayer these $700 million ships scare me to death!!!!]

Military persecutes Marine for selling Nobama stickers

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Marine sold 'Nobama' stickers, prosecutors say

Apr. 5, 2012 02:25 PM

Associated Press

CAMP PENDLETON, California -- A Marine is facing dismissal from the military for posting Facebook images of President Barack Obama's face superimposed on a jackass and for selling "Nobama" bumper stickers online, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Sgt. Gary Stein, 26, acted irresponsibly and disregarded repeated warnings that his anti-administration postings violated Pentagon policy involving members of the military, Marine Corps Capt. John Torresala said during a hearing at Camp Pendleton.

Comments that were prejudicial to good order and discipline were posted on the Facebook page used by military meteorologists and could have influenced junior Marines, the prosecutor said.

Stein's security clearance was taken away and he has no future in the Marine Corps because he can't do his job, Torresala said.

Backed by a team of lawyers and congressmen, Stein is fighting to stay in the military and test its longtime policy of limiting the free speech of members.

His lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union contend his views are protected by the First Amendment.

Stein has rallied support since he was notified last month that the military was moving to discharge him after determining he was in violation of the Pentagon policy barring service members from engaging in political activities.

"The military may be different from the civilian world, but it's not exempt from the First Amendment," said David Loy, legal director for the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial counties. "Sgt. Stein didn't say anything for which the Marine Corps has any right to punish him."

The Marine Corps has said it decided to take administrative action after Stein declared on Facebook that he would not follow unlawful orders from Obama.

In addition to being discharged, Stein said, he would have his rank reduced to lance corporal if he is proven to be in violation.

He said he was removed from his job at the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot in San Diego on Wednesday and given a desk job with no access to computers.

Loy said Stein did not threaten order or discipline or take positions that anyone would attribute to the Corps. Instead, the Corps is threatening loyalty and morale in its ranks by persecuting a Marine for exercising his free speech rights, Loy said.

Stein, a nine-year member of the Marine Corps, has said he started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party to encourage fellow service members to exercise their rights.

Defense lawyers began the hearing Thursday by asking board members about their understanding of military policy limiting members from engaging in political activities and the guidelines on expressing their personal opinions.

California federal Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, a former Marine, wrote a letter to Stein's commanding officer stating the sergeant should not face dismissal for an opinion shared by a majority of Marines. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, also has expressed support for Stein.

Stein said his statement about Obama was part of an online debate about NATO allowing U.S. troops to be tried for the Quran burnings in Afghanistan. In that context, he said, he was stating that he would not follow orders from the president if it involved detaining U.S. citizens, disarming them or doing anything else that he believes would violate their constitutional rights.

The military has had a policy since the Civil War limiting the free speech of service members, including criticizing the commander in chief. Military law experts have said Stein may have crossed the line.

Pentagon directives say military personnel in uniform cannot sponsor a political club; participate in any TV or radio program or group discussion that advocates for or against a political party, candidate or cause; or speak at any event promoting a political movement.

Commissioned officers also may not use contemptuous words against senior officials, including the defense secretary or the president.

Russian arms dealer sentenced to 25 years

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Russian arms dealer sentenced to 25 years

by Tom Hays - Apr. 6, 2012 08:13 AM

Associated Press

NEW YORK -- The notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, dubbed the Merchant of Death, made it clear he had heard enough in court, although a federal prosecutor was only two minutes into an argument urging a harsh prison sentence.

"It's a lie!" Bout blurted out in English -- a rare show of raw defiance for a defendant facing a possible life term on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan.

Despite Bout's outburst and his insistence that he was framed, he received only the mandatory minimum 25 years in prison in a case that demonstrated the U.S. government's determination to bring him to justice.

The way federal agents went about capturing Bout -- an elaborate sting that lured him to Thailand -- appeared to play in his favor at his sentencing.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin said 25 years -- not the life sentence wanted by prosecutors -- was sufficient and appropriate because there was no evidence the 45-year-old Bout would have been charged with seeking to harm Americans if not approached by informants posing as Colombian rebels.

"But for the approach made through this determined sting operation, there is no reason to believe Bout would ever have committed the charged crimes," she said.

Bout's sentencing came four years after his arrest in Bangkok, where he was held before his extradition to the U.S. for trial in late 2010, and months after a jury convicted him of four conspiracy charges relating to his support of a Colombian terrorist organization.

The judge also ordered a $15 million forfeiture.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was quoted by the Russian news agency ITAR-Tass as saying Friday in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, that he will discuss the sentence with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"We are not being guided by a desire to take revenge, but by the desire to ensure the observance and respect of the rights of our countryman. We will actively support the appeal that Bout's lawyers plan and in any case will secure his return to his homeland."

"We have legal instruments for this in relations with the United States," he is quoted as saying.

Separately, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement: "The Russian Foreign Ministry is taking all necessary measures for the return of Viktor Bout to his homeland, using existing international legal mechanisms. This matter, without a doubt, will remain among our priorities in the Russian-American agenda."

The statement called the sentence "baseless and biased."

"In spite of the unreliability of the evidence, the illegal character of his arrest with the participation of U.S. special services agents in Thailand and the subsequent extradition, American legal officials, having carried out an obvious political order, ignored the arguments of lawyers and numerous appeals from all levels in defense of this Russian citizen," it said.

For nearly two decades, Bout built a worldwide air cargo operation, amassing a fleet of more than 60 transport planes, hundreds of companies and a fortune reportedly in excess of $6 billion -- exploits that were the main inspiration for the Nicholas Cage film "Lord of War."

His aircraft flew from Afghanistan to Angola, carrying everything from raw minerals to gladiolas, drilling equipment to frozen fish. But, according to authorities, the network's specialty was black market arms -- assault rifles, ammunition, anti-aircraft missiles, helicopter gunships and a full range of sophisticated weapons systems, almost always sourced from Russian stocks or from Eastern European factories.

In the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S., British and United Nations authorities heard growing reports that Bout's planes and maintenance operations, then headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, were aiding the Taliban while it sheltered al-Qaida militants in Afghanistan. Bout later denied that he worked with the Taliban or al-Qaida -- and denied ever participating in black market arms deals.

In 2008, while under economic sanctions and a U.N. travel ban, Bout was approached in Moscow by a close associate about supplying weapons on the black market to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Bout was told that the group wanted to use drug-trafficking proceeds to pay for surface-to-air missiles and other weapons, making it clear it wanted to attack helicopter pilots and other Americans in Colombia, prosecutors said. He finalized the phony deal with the two DEA informants in a bugged hotel room in Bangkok in March 2008.

Throughout the case, Bout maintained he was a legitimate businessman who wasn't selling arms when the American operatives came knocking.

But in court papers, federal prosecutors said the government initiated its investigation in 2007 because Bout "constituted a threat to the United States and to the international community based on his reported history of arming some of the world's most violent and destabilizing dictators and regimes."

The Merchant of Death moniker was attached to Bout by a high-ranking minister at Britain's Foreign Office, who had drawn attention to his 1990s notoriety for running a fleet of aging Soviet-era cargo planes to conflict-ridden hotspots in Africa.

The nickname was included in the U.S. government's indictment of Bout, and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara referenced it when he announced Bout's extradition in late 2010, saying: "The so-called Merchant of Death is now a federal inmate."

After the sentencing, Bharara in a statement called the sentence "a fitting coda for this career arms trafficker of the most dangerous order."

Russia Slams US Over 'Merchant of Death' Sentencing

Russia Slams US Over 'Merchant of Death' Sentencing

ABC NewsBy KIRIT RADIA and LEE FERRAN | ABC News

The Russian government blasted the United States today for its "unjustified" decision to sentence Viktor Bout, the infamous international arms dealer called the "Merchant of Death" by some, to 25 years in prison and vowed to take the Russian national back home.

"The verdict of the U.S. court sentencing Viktor Bout to 25 years in prison is unjustified and agenda-driven," Russia's Foreign Ministry said on its English-language Twitter account. "The [Foreign Ministry] will do all it can to arrange Viktor Bout's return to his home country. This issue will remain a priority on the Russia – U.S. agenda."

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later added that Russia will support Bout's efforts to appeal the sentence. Lavrov suggested Bout's conviction last November was the result of "unprecedented pressure" from the United States government that interfered with the independence of the court.

Bout, a Russian citizen and ex-Soviet air force officer, was convicted in November 2011 of attempting to sell millions of dollars-worth of arms to Colombia's Marxist rebel group the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) which was targeting Americans.

After years evading capture, Bout was arrested in Thailand in 2008 in a sting operation led by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Court records say Bout agreed during conversations with undercover DEA informants to supply surface-to-air missiles, AK-47 rifles, anti-personnel landmines, C-4 plastic explosive, night vision goggles and unmanned drones.

Bout is also believed to have sold arms to terror groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban. He has been accused of fueling conflicts from Africa to South America to Asia, sometimes even allegedly arming both sides. He was mentioned in a 2000 United Nations report as a former air force officer "strongly suspected to be connected to Russian organized crime." The U.N. said he "supplied military equipment and other necessities to all conflict areas in Africa."

He was the inspiration for the arms dealing protagonist played by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 film "Lord of War."

Bout is believed to have strong connections to top Russian officials who helped protect him before his capture. Russia bitterly fought against his extradition to the United States, which was delayed until 2010.

On the eve of his sentencing, an attorney for Bout reportedly sent a letter to the U.S. court protesting his prosecution and the entire court process.

"We have called the prosecution of Viktor Bout 'outrageous governmental conduct.' That does not go nearly far enough -- it's a disgrace," the letter said, according to Russia's state-owned RIA Novosti.

In a recent interview with a Russian radio station, Bout, who has maintained his innocence, said the U.S. wasn't looking for the truth in his case.

"Some American arms smugglers are even more guilty but they enjoy freedom," Bout said Wednesday, The Voice of Russia reported.

ABC News' Aaron Katersky contributed to this report. Lee Ferran reported from New York.

A fog of drugs and war

Of course the only sane solution to this drug problem is to legalize all drugs and stop the government from playing doctor, psychologist, priest and mommy.

Source

A fog of drugs and war

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

April 7, 2012, 3:24 p.m.

SEATTLE — U.S. Air Force pilot Patrick Burke's day started in the cockpit of a B-1 bomber near the Persian Gulf and proceeded across nine time zones as he ferried the aircraft home to South Dakota.

Every four hours during the 19-hour flight, Burke swallowed a tablet of Dexedrine, the prescribed amphetamine known as "go pills." [Nothing wrong with taking a little "speed" to help you stay awake!!! Of course if Patrick Burke was a civilian truck driver or college student taking some dexes to stay awake this would be a crime he would be jailed for using illegal drugs] After landing, he went out for dinner and drinks with a fellow crewman. They were driving back to Ellsworth Air Force Base when Burke began striking his friend in the head.

FOR THE RECORD:

An earlier version of this story said that Bart Billings, a former military psychologist, hosts an annual conference at Camp Pendleton on combat stress. He now holds the conference at other venues.

"Jack Bauer told me this was going to happen — you guys are trying to kidnap me!" he yelled, as if he were a character in the TV show "24."

When the woman giving them a lift pulled the car over, Burke leaped on her and wrestled her to the ground. "Me and my platoon are looking for terrorists," he told her before grabbing her keys, driving away and crashing into a guardrail.

Burke was charged with auto theft, drunk driving and two counts of assault. But in October, a court-martial judge found the young lieutenant not guilty "by reason of lack of mental responsibility" — the almost unprecedented equivalent, at least in modern-day military courts, of an insanity acquittal.

Four military psychiatrists concluded that Burke suffered from "polysubstance-induced delirium" brought on by alcohol, lack of sleep and the 40 milligrams of Dexedrine he was issued by the Air Force.

In a small but growing number of cases across the nation, lawyers are blaming the U.S. military's heavy use of psychotropic drugs for their clients' aberrant behavior and related health problems. Such defenses have rarely gained traction in military or civilian courtrooms, but Burke's case provides the first important indication that military psychiatrists and court-martial judges are not blind to what can happen when troops go to work medicated.

After two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently disclosed to The Times by the U.S. Army surgeon general. Nearly 8% of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6% is on antidepressants — an eightfold increase since 2005.

"We have never medicated our troops to the extent we are doing now.... And I don't believe the current increase in suicides and homicides in the military is a coincidence," said Bart Billings, a former military psychologist who hosts an annual conference on combat stress.

The pharmacy consultant for the Army surgeon general says the military's use of the drugs is comparable to that in the civilian world. "It's not that we're using them more frequently or any differently," said Col. Carol Labadie. "As with any medication, you have to look at weighing the risk versus the benefits of somebody going on a medication."

But the military environment makes regulating the use of prescription drugs a challenge compared with the civilian world, some psychologists say.

Follow-up appointments in the battlefield are often few and far between. Soldiers are sent out on deployment typically with 180 days' worth of medications, allowing them to trade with friends or grab an entire fistful of pills at the end of an anxious day. And soldiers with injuries can easily become dependent on narcotic painkillers.

"The big difference is these are people who have access to loaded weapons, or have responsibility for protecting other individuals who are in harm's way," said Grace Jackson, a former Navy staff psychiatrist who resigned her commission in 2002, in part out of concerns that military psychiatrists even then were handing out too many pills.

For the Army and the Marines, using the drugs has become a wager that whatever problems occur will be isolated and containable, said James Culp, a former Army paratrooper and now a high-profile military defense lawyer. He recently defended an Army private accused of murder, arguing that his mental illness was exacerbated by the antidepressant Zoloft.

"What do you do when 30-80% of the people that you have in the military have gone on three or more deployments, and they are mentally worn out? What do you do when they can't sleep? You make a calculated risk in prescribing these medications," Culp said.

The potential effect on military personnel has special resonance in the wake of several high-profile cases, most notably the one involving Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of murdering 17 civilians in Afghanistan. His attorneys have asked for a list of all medicines the 38-year-old soldier was taking.

"We don't know whether he was or was not on any medicines, which is why [his attorney] has asked to be provided the list of medications," said Richard Adler, a Seattle psychiatrist who is consulting on Bales' defense.

***

While there was some early, ad hoc use of psychotropic drugs in the Vietnam War, the modern Army psychiatrist's deployment kit is likely to include nine kinds of antidepressants, benzodiazepines for anxiety, four antipsychotics, two kinds of sleep aids, and drugs for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a 2007 review in the journal Military Medicine.

Some troops in Afghanistan are prescribed mefloquine, an antimalarial drug that has been increasingly associated with paranoia, thoughts of suicide and violent anger spells that soldiers describe as "mefloquine rage."

"Prior to the Iraq war, soldiers could not go into combat on psychiatric drugs, period. [This is 100 percent BS. During Vietnam US troops routinely smoked marijuana on the battle field, which of course was illegal, but that didn't stop them.] Not very long ago, going back maybe 10 or 12 years, you couldn't even go into the armed services if you used any of these drugs, in particular stimulants," said Peter Breggin, a New York psychiatrist who has written widely about psychiatric drugs and violence.

"But they've changed that.... I'm getting a new kind of call right now, and that's people saying the psychiatrist won't approve their deployment unless they take psychiatric drugs."

Military doctors say most drugs' safety and efficacy is so well-established that it would be a mistake to send battalions into combat without the help of medications that can prevent suicides, help soldiers rest and calm shattered nerves.

Fueling much of the controversy in recent years, though, are reports of a possible link between the popular class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) — drugs such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, which boost serotonin levels in the brain — and an elevated risk of suicide among young people. The drugs carry a warning label for those up to 24 — the very age of most young military recruits.

Last year, one of Culp's clients, Army Pfc. David Lawrence, pleaded guilty at Ft. Carson, Colo., to the murder of a Taliban commander in Afghanistan. He was sentenced to only 121/2 years, later reduced to 10 years, after it was shown that he suffered from schizophrenic episodes that escalated after the death of a good friend, an Army chaplain.

Deeply depressed and hearing a voice he would later describe as "female-sounding and never nice," Lawrence had reportedly feared he would be thrown out of the Army if he told anyone he was hearing voices — a classic symptom of schizophrenia. Instead, he'd merely told doctors he was depressed and thinking of suicide. He was prescribed Zoloft, for depression, and trazodone, often used as a sleeping aid.

The voices got worse, and Lawrence began seeing hallucinations of the chaplain, minus his head. Eventually, Lawrence walked into the Taliban commander's jail cell and shot him in the face.

"They give him this, and they send him out with a gun," said his father, Brett Lawrence.

Up until the Burke case, there had been few if any recent rulings exonerating military defendants claiming to be incapacitated by medications.

Burke's case may have marked a turning point. Four Army doctors concluded that he wasn't mentally responsible for his actions — a finding none of them would have made had he been merely drunk.

"Three drinks over an entire evening is not enough to black somebody out, but I don't remember 99% of what happened over the rest of that evening," Burke said in an interview. "It was kind of like I was misfiring on the cylinders."

***

Both the American Psychological Assn. and the American Psychiatric Assn. in a 2010 congressional hearing urged the Army to stay the course on psychotropic drugs.

The real danger, said the psychologists' spokesman, M. David Rudd, dean of the college of social and behavioral science at the University of Utah, is if soldiers are frightened out of access to potentially life-saving medication.

The Army surgeon general's office said no one without specific approval is allowed to go on deployment using psychotropic drugs, including antidepressants and stimulants, until they've been stabilized. Soldiers who need antipsychotic agents are not allowed to go to combat.

But are those precautions enough? Julie Oligschlaeger said her son, Chad, a Marine corporal based at Twentynine Palms, came home from his second tour in Iraq in 2007 complaining of nightmares and hallucinations. He was taking trazodone, fluoxetine, Seroquel, Lorazepam and propranolol, among other medications.

"I didn't realize how many pills he was on until it was too late," said Oligschlaeger. "He sometimes would slur his words, and I would think, 'OK, are you drinking? What is going on?' And he'd say, 'Oh, I'm taking my pills, and I'm taking them when I'm supposed to.' I never thought to look."

In 2008, two months before Chad was scheduled to get out of the Marines, start college, and marry his fiancee, the young corporal was found dead on the floor of his room in the barracks. An autopsy concluded the death was accidental due to multiple-drug toxicity — interactions among too many drugs.

At the memorial service, Oligschlaeger looked her son's commander in the eye and reminded him that Chad had waited in vain for a bed in a combat stress treatment facility. "I asked him, 'Why didn't you have your eyes on your Marine?'" she said. "He didn't answer me. He just stood there with his hands behind his back. And he looked at me."

kim.murphy@latimes.com

Government is protecting the military from us civilians

Source

Arizona's solar energy plans vex military

by Rebekah L. Sanders, and Ryan Randazzo - Apr. 7, 2012 11:16 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

A solar tower nearly twice the height of the Empire State building. Hundreds of spinning 200-foot-tall wind turbines. A 500-mile high-voltage power line from central New Mexico to southern Arizona.

Those are among the projects the renewable-energy industry sees in Arizona's future.

But for the U.S. military, that vision translates into fears of unusable airspace, equipment failures and plane-crash risks.

Across the country, the burgeoning green-energy industry has faced military concerns about threats to the safety of its pilots and high-tech operations. Air Force officials, in particular, are wary. They say solar projects can obstruct flight paths and reflect sunlight into pilots' eyes, wind farms can jam radar, and transmission lines can disrupt testing equipment.

Energy developers in states such as Oregon, Nevada and California have spent years and made costly changes to projects to satisfy military objections.

No projects in Arizona have caused problems for military installations, but there are potentially dozens of energy-development plans on the state's horizon. Aggressive renewable-energy goals in Arizona and California, plus wide-open land and year-round sunshine that are attractive to the solar industry, mean military bases here could soon raise similar concerns.

The potential problems echo drawn-out battles that have been fought in the Valley over encroachment of new housing subdivisions near Luke Air Force Base. For more than a decade, officials at the Glendale base warned of concerns about suburban rooftops rising nearby, and government officials moved to limit builders.

When it comes to renewable energy, the Pentagon effectively can kill any project by raising concerns during the permitting process.

For example, structures taller than 200 feet require a Federal Aviation Administration permit. The FAA gets feedback from other government agencies, including the Defense Department and Homeland Security. If Defense says there is a conflict, the project is essentially dead.

"If they determine it is a hazard, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to raise financing for your project," said Tom Vinson, senior director for federal regulatory affairs with the American Wind Energy Association. "The bank is going to want to see that FAA clearance."

The emergence of renewable-energy projects means the debate over private development vs. military needs is going to continue.

In anticipation, political leaders, military-base officials and economic-development boosters have agreed Arizona should seek to grow its renewable-energy industry while protecting longtime military bases, which add billions of dollars to the state's economy.

A screening process rolled out by the Department of Defense to streamline review of solar and wind projects could help.

Vinson said the Defense Department has been working much more closely with the industry since Congress last year required the department to work with renewable-energy firms to minimize conflicts, ensure that projects get built and find ways to mitigate any issues they cause for the military.

"The landscape has changed significantly," he said. "Conflicts certainly could flare up on individual locations ... but both sides have worked well together."

Glendale Mayor Elaine Scruggs, a staunch supporter of Luke Air Force Base, which is on the western edge of her city, was an early champion of state and military officials planning for renewable-energy projects. Both military and solar efforts should thrive in Arizona, she said.

"This is not about denying renewable-energy projects. This is about finding compatibility," she said. "You don't want to bring in a brand-new industry and tell your (multibillion-dollar) military industry, 'Sorry, you have to go away.' "

Renewable-energy developers say they recognize the need to work with military bases if they are going to be successful building projects in the West.

Monitoring for problems

In a darkened, high-security room at Luke Air Force Base, radar controllers huddle around black screens.

Their eyes track clusters of blue rectangles that inch past each other: miniatures of the F-16s, commercial airliners and pleasure planes crisscrossing the Arizona sky.

The radar controllers can trust that the locations of aircraft are largely accurate as they direct traffic, talking to pilots over the radio, to prevent collisions. But the radar isn't foolproof.

Despite sophisticated computer equipment and multiple radar towers across the Valley, the West Valley's Estrella and White Tank mountains and bad weather can hamper some of the radar feeds.

The potential addition of wind farms in the area could increase that effect.

Like mountains, wind turbines several hundred feet tall can cause "holes" so that controllers can't detect aircraft in those areas. The spinning blades may cause radar to display false aircraft locations.

Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, which manages more cargo and passengers than any other military air terminal in the United States, confronted that issue in 2007.

Developers planned more than 800 wind turbines more than 4 miles from the base.

After Travis officials raised concerns, energy companies, local government and the military formed an alliance to study the potential effects of the wind farms. The alliance agreed to upgrade military radar equipment and added radar feeds from other sides of the wind farm to minimize the radar hole.

The process took three years.

Tall solar towers are another potential risk, according to the Air Force.

Some thermal-based solar projects produce power through heat generated when thousands of mirrors reflect sunlight onto a tower 200 feet tall or higher. The Air Force worries that such towers can create obstacles in the middle of low-altitude flight paths and foil sensitive testing equipment with their heat.

California-based solar developer SolarReserve LLC nearly had one of its projects killed near Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada a few years ago after the base objected. With the project first proposed about 5 miles from the base, military officials suggested another location farther away.

SolarReserve obliged and began planning the 650-foot-tall solar tower about 20 miles from the plant.

But the Air Force came back and said that location would not work. Military officials asked the Interior Department to reject the SolarReserve project, which was planned on federal land, and went to county politicians to push for stricter development limits that largely would have prohibited wind and solar towers.

SolarReserve had to make its case for the project in Washington, D.C., to the secretaries of the Air Force, Defense, Energy and Commerce, and spent several hundred thousand dollars on an independent study of how the tower might affect radar.

The company finally won the base's support after Congress put intense pressure on the military to cooperate and the company hired experts to find ways to minimize potential impacts. That project could be running by 2013.

Other military concerns around the country include transmission lines that may cut through Air Force training ranges and whose electromagnetic fields may disrupt testing equipment; energy projects with lots of metal that may interfere with radar; and reflective solar troughs that may create glare.

Realizing the potential for conflicts ahead, the Natural Resources Defense Council in November released an online mapping tool that allows renewable-power plant developers to identify sites unlikely to interfere with military operations or environmentally sensitive areas. The NRDC did so in hopes of helping renewables develop. Streamlined approval process

Both developers and military leaders have learned it's best to work together early to avoid costlier changes later.

The goal is for developers to approach bases at the "napkin planning stage," said Deborah MacNeill, who works with renewable-energy companies at Nellis Air Force Base's public partnerships office. "We don't want the developer to do land purchases or go through extensive analysis and studies only to find out there might be a Department of Defense concern or a Nellis concern," she said.

Though bases like Nellis and Luke have for years worked early in the planning stages with housing developers, renewable-energy projects just a few years ago were at risk of falling through the cracks because officials like MacNeill used to stay alert for projects only within about 10 miles of a base. Renewable-energy projects may be proposed for many miles away but could still affect a base's flight patterns.

Now, MacNeill's search extends beyond Nevada to California, Arizona and Utah.

As renewable-energy projects have been delayed, pressure has mounted on the Department of Defense to give renewable-energy developers more direction on where to build.

Members of Congress, eager to tout green-energy projects and jobs in their districts, have led the charge.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., for example, backed SolarReserve and wind projects near Nellis. He called on the secretary of the Air Force in meetings and public letters to create a one-stop office for developers to receive a thumbs-up or -down on projects.

That one-stop shop was finally created last year. When Congress passed the fiscal 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, it required the Pentagon to form an office to work through a backlog of projects in just a few months. The Energy Siting Clearinghouse cleared the backlog last summer and, for the first time, renewable-energy developers now have one military office to contact before launching a project.

The retired Air Force commander at the helm of the Pentagon's new clearinghouse knows firsthand about renewable-energy conflicts. David Belote was in charge of Nellis Air Force Base in the midst of the SolarReserve tower difficulties.

The goal is to protect the military's training abilities while supporting renewable-energy development, Belote said, because defense officials understand the need for energy security.

The clearinghouse allows developers to avoid contacting various bases on their own. Developers' applications automatically go to the FAA, Pentagon and local bases for input.

The Pentagon now has just 30 days to make a determination. And the bar for raising an objection is high: Military officials must prove a risk of mission failure.

So far in Arizona, the results have been positive. Last summer, the Pentagon green-lighted eight renewable-energy plants and red-flagged none. Projects to meet energy needs

Until now, Arizona's desolate patches of desert with little but scrub brush and blue sky were almost forgotten. Vacationers drove through them on their way to California, and Air Force pilots could train over them with nothing in sight.

But when energy developers laid eyes on the land, they saw gold. The nearly year-round sunshine, level ground and proximity to energy-hungry California make for ideal conditions to build renewable-energy projects.

Utilities in Arizona and California get a small amount of power from renewables today but face requirements to intensely ramp up their reliance on big wind and solar plants in the next 10 to 15 years.

Dozens of wind- and solar-power plants are being considered around Arizona, and many must come to fruition if utilities are to meet the states' renewable-energy goals.

Arizona requires utilities to get 15 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2025, and California has an even higher standard.

Many of the best sites for solar plants that could feed power to California are in Arizona.

In the past few years, several projects have gotten under way in Arizona, and already they are under the watchful eye of the military.

SolarReserve, the company that moved its project at Nellis Air Force Base's request, has two solar towers under development in Arizona: outside Gila Bend and near Quartzsite. Company officials say they have checked with Air Force officials to ensure compatibility.

"We learned from Nellis," said Andrew Wang, SolarReserve's director of development. "Our experience with Luke has been a good one."

The Quartzite project already has military approval, and the Gila Bend project won approval before the clearinghouse was created, he said.

Wang said that the company makes sure to contact the military first, even if the FAA doesn't signal a conflict, which was the case with its delayed project in Nevada.

"The issue I've found is that the military has been out in these open spaces for a long time, and they are used to having all that space to themselves," Wang said. "When there are other things that encroach on their borders, they start casting an eye and seeing how it might affect their mission. They are not against renewable energy, but (they believe) maybe on a project-by-project basis it needs to be evaluated."

NextEra Energy Resources has two wind farms in northern Arizona and has assessed several others it could develop.

The company's Yavapai Wind Project will be 25 miles south of Seligman and is expected to generate 99.2 megawatts of electricity when the wind is just right. One megawatt is enough electricity to supply about 250 homes. The project is still seeking various permits.

NextEra also built 62 wind turbines in the Perrin Ranch Wind Energy Center north of Williams. The project was one of the first to receive approval from the Defense Department's new streamlined Energy Siting Clearinghouse.

The company always checks with the Air Force before building near a base, said Perrin Ranch project director Matt Gomes.

"The first time we ran into this was in Abilene (Texas) in 2004 in a project immediately adjacent to Dyess Air Force Base," he said.

The project was nearly ready to begin constructing turbines when the Air Force raised concerns and NextEra had to make changes to the turbine layout.

EnviroMission Ltd. of Australia is developing a 2,400-foot-tall concrete solar-power chimney near Quartzsite that would be one of the tallest structures on the planet, nearly twice the height of the Empire State building.

The chimney would use a 4-square-mile greenhouse to heat desert air and funnel it to the power plant. Hot air rising through the chimney would spin turbines to make electricity.

President Chris Davey said that after getting a warning from the Air Force on an earlier project, the company no longer is pursuing a tower in California. But the military is always his first stop, especially when planning a project that would reach so high, he added.

EnviroMission recently reported it has received a commitment for financing, but construction has not begun.

Because the project's layout has not been finalized, it has not received Defense Department approval, Davey said. Privately, though, some Air Force officials express concerns.

When it comes to future projects, the Pentagon's Belote says Arizona's main challenge is likely to come from solar towers, since the solar industry will be larger than wind in Arizona.

One other project the military intends to watch is the planned SunZia transmission line, which would connect wind and solar plants to power substations from central New Mexico to southern Arizona.

The high-voltage power lines would pass by sensitive equipment at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and the Buffalo Soldier Electromagnetic Test Range at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, so military officials have attended meetings with the developer, conducted research and suggested route modifications.

"We're asking a few questions," Belote said. "But all the indications are that we will be able to coexist."

The transmission line was approved by the clearinghouse, dependent on the route changes, last summer. Construction could begin in 2015.

The Gilbert police are listening to you cell phone calls!

This is not a duplicate article. I originally posted the article from the New York Times which preceded this article.

Source

Gilbert police can track cellphones to locate suspects

by Jim Walsh - Apr. 5, 2012 09:55 AM

The Republic | azcentral.com

Gilbert police can track cellphones to locate suspects wanted for violent crimes, as well as missing or suicidal people, by using highly specialized surveillance equipment.

But police resent any inference that they are trampling on constitutional rights to privacy by acting like spies, saying they only use the equipment in a narrow set of circumstances after obtaining a court order. Gilbert appears to be one of the few Valley police agencies to operate such equipment.

Gilbert police acknowledge that the equipment is a powerful investigative tool, arguing it can make the difference between life and death and help get dangerous people behind bars. [You mean like harmless pot smokers???]

"In all cases, we get court orders. We're not here to circumvent the law,'' said Sgt. Bill Balafas, a Gilbert police spokesman. " We're not out here to eavesdrop on people. We don't want to create bad case law.'' [Yea sure! We got a gun and a badge and that means we can do anything we feel like!]

Gilbert's capability to track cellphones was revealed last week in a New York Times story that described a national study by the American Civil Liberties Union. An ACLU survey of 200 law enforcement agencies found that some obtained court orders before tracking cellphones while others did not.

"Technology is far outpacing the privacy laws. Police Departments are taking advantage of this to do an end-run around the Fourth Amendment,'' said Alessandra Meetze, executive director of the ACLU's Arizona chapter.

She said the Gilbert, Glendale and Flagstaff police departments, along with the Maricopa and Pinal County sheriff's offices, confirmed that they used the cellphone tracking investigative techniques. The Times story cited Gilbert as an example of a small police department that obtained the cellphone tracking equipment to bypass the expense of having cell carriers get the information for them.

MSNBC.com went a step further, questioning why a small police department in an affluent suburb would spend $244,000 on "a futuristic spy gadget that sounds more at home in a prime-time drama.''

The 2008 purchase was revealed by Gilbert police in response to an ACLU Public Records request. The device was obtained with a $150,000 federal grant through Arizona's Homeland Security program, The remaining $94,195 came from asset forfeitures from accused criminals. [Almost all of the people arrested by Homeland Security are for drug war crimes, not terrorist crimes. And of course most of the assets forfeitures are stolen from people that commit victimless drug war crimes]

Balafas said the MSNBC story treated Gilbert unfairly.

"If your loved one is out there missing or threatening suicide, wouldn't you want us to use this equipment?'' he said.

He also said Gilbert's equipment cannot monitor cellphone conversations, and is used solely to find people.

Meetze said she is pleased to hear Gilbert is obtaining court orders but called for more accountability.

"That's definitely a positive sign. We would like to see written policies to back that up,'' she said. "The public would have no idea of when police are using an extremely powerful technology.''

She said the ACLU would like to see police keep a record of when Gilbert uses the equipment and under what circumstances.

In reaction to the national spotlight, Balafas said Gilbert Police Chief Tim Dorn directed his staff to develop a formal policy on cellphone tracking. The department will consider whether to create a log or some other record, he said.

"It falls under the premise of being transparent'' as the department increasingly uses cutting-edge technology in many facets of law enforcement to improve efficiency and effectiveness, Balafas said.

Stringent guidelines set up by the department's legal adviser are followed, he said. Gilbert detectives also have used high-tech equipment to help other law enforcements agencies but insist that the same policies be followed, Balafas said.

David Gonzales, U.S. marshal for Arizona, said agencies that operate sophisticated surveillance equipment must be careful not to violate anyone's rights.

"If there are abuses of these types of investigative techniques, it creates a hardship for law enforcement. [What a lie!!! It creates a hardship for the people that the police illegally used the investigative techniques against, not the police! And of course for the people falsely arrested as a result of illegal police surveillance it will cost them thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees] It creates bad case law,'' Gonzales said.

Phoenix Mayor Stanton is a war monger!!!!

Source

Phoenix Mayor Stanton to lead effort to prevent military cuts

by Lynh Bui - Apr. 11, 2012 12:50 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton will lead a national task force of mayors that will work to prevent cuts in military spending that could hurt Arizona jobs.

Stanton made the announcement Wednesday in his inaugural "State of the City" address, saying he is working with U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on the effort.

"Arizona's economy and our nation's security face a serious threat from the federal government's failure to deal with looming, indiscriminate cuts to Pentagon programs," Stanton said during the speech Wednesday afternoon in downtown Phoenix.

"But bearing the biggest brunt of these cuts will be our defense companies and the Arizonans they employ."

Stanton said Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are just a few of the major Arizona defense companies that create thousands of high-wage jobs in the state. He said Arizona companies have the fifth-largest amount of defense contracts in the country.

"But because of partisan politics in Washington, those great jobs are at risk," Stanton said, in reference to potential defense-spending cutbacks.

Growing and protecting jobs and the economy in Arizona was a major theme of Stanton's speech. [Maybe he should change that to "protecting government pork programs"]

Stanton, 42, also made several other announcements related to filling vacant lots in Phoenix, growing the green economy and addressing homeless issues in the city.

The speech suggested Stanton does not want to be perceived as a parochial mayor. He laid out the foundation for policy priorities that spanned across national, global, regional and city initiatives.

Stanton said he also plans to focus on increasing and strengthening business ties with Mexico, Arizona's largest international trading partner.

Stanton, who marked his 100th day in office Wednesday, also focused on what he was doing locally.

He called for the formation of a new downtown organization to inject fresh ideas and leadership into the city's core.

For too long, the city has focused on developing superblocks and large high rises, he said, but now Phoenix must attract festivals, concerts and other cultural events to "create a more modern, more lively center city.

He cited small entrepreneurs such as Charlie Levy with the Crescent Ballroom music venue, Kelly Aubey of Film Bar and the organizers of Food Truck Friday's as the kind of talent driving new energy into downtown Phoenix today.

"Let's capture the creative minds leading the exciting things in our downtown," Stanton said. "We need their leadership as we move forward."

Stanton ended his speech on an optimistic note.

"Our future is right in front of us, and it is ours to define," Stanton said. "Now let's go out and get it."

Secret Service agents like high class hookers????

My problem is when government hypocrites enforce these laws against us serfs, but think that they are above the laws and break them as these Secret Service agents are accused of doing.

Source

Misconduct alleged against Secret Service agents

Apr. 13, 2012 09:55 PM

Associated Press

CARTAGENA, Colombia -- A dozen Secret Service agents sent to Colombia to provide security for President Barack Obama at an international summit have been relieved of duty because of allegations of misconduct.

A caller who said he had knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press the misconduct involved prostitutes in Cartagena, site of the Summit of the Americas. A Secret Service spokesman did not dispute that.

A U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and requested anonymity, put the number of agents at 12. The agency was not releasing the number of personnel involved.

The Washington Post reported that Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said the accusations related to at least one agent having involvement with prostitutes in Cartagena. The association represents federal law enforcement officers, including the Secret Service. Adler later told the AP that he had heard that there were allegations of prostitution, but he had no specific knowledge of any wrongdoing.

Ronald Kessler, a former Post reporter and the author of a book about the Secret Service, told the Post that he had learned that 12 agents were involved, several of them married.

The incident threatened to overshadow Obama's economic and trade agenda at the summit and embarrass the U.S. The White House had no comment.

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan would not confirm that prostitution was involved, saying only that there had been "allegations of misconduct" made against Secret Service personnel in the Colombian port city hosting Obama and more than 30 world leaders.

Donovan said the allegations of misconduct were related to activity before the president's arrival Friday night.

Obama was attending a leaders' dinner Friday night at Cartagena's historic Spanish fortress. He was due to attend summit meetings with regional leaders Saturday and Sunday.

Those involved had been sent back to their permanent place of duty and were being replaced by other agency personnel, Donovan said. The matter was turned over to the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility, which handles the agency's internal affairs.

"These personnel changes will not affect the comprehensive security plan that has been prepared in advance of the president's trip," Donovan said.

U.S. Secret Service agents leave Colombia over prostitution inquiry

U.S. Secret Service agents leave Colombia over prostitution inquiry

By David Nakamura and Joe Davidson, Published: April 13

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating allegations of misconduct by agents who had been sent to Cartagena, Colombia, to provide security for President Obama’s trip to a summit that began there Friday.

Edwin Donovan, an agency spokesman, said that an unspecified number of agents have been recalled and replaced with others, stressing that Obama’s security has not been compromised because of the change. Obama arrived in Cartagena on Friday afternoon for this weekend’s Summit of the Americas, a gathering of 33 of the hemisphere’s 35 leaders to discuss economic policy and trade.

Donovan declined to disclose details about the nature of the alleged misconduct. But Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said the accusations relate to at least one agent having involvement with prostitutes in Cartagena.

In a statement, Donovan said the matter has been turned over to the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which serves as the agency’s internal affairs unit.

“The Secret Service takes all allegations of misconduct seriously,” Donovan said. “These personnel changes will not affect the comprehensive security plan that has been prepared in advance of the President’s trip.”

Adler said the entire unit was recalled for purposes of the investigation. The Secret Service “responded appropriately” and is “looking at a very serious allegation,” he said, adding that the agency “needs to properly investigate and fairly ascertain the merits of the allegations.”

The Washington Post was alerted to the investigation by Ronald Kessler, a former Post reporter and author of several nonfiction books, including the book “In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect.”

Kessler said he was told that a dozen agents had been removed from the trip. He added that soliciting prostitution is considered inappropriate by the Secret Service, even though it is legal in Colombia when conducted in designated “tolerance zones.” However, Kessler added, several of the agents involved are married.

There have been other incidents involving Obama’s security detail over the past year.

In November, Christopher W. Deedy, a federal agent with the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, was charged with second-degree murder after shooting a man during a dispute outside a McDonald’s in Hono­lulu. Though Deedy was off-duty at the time, he was on the island to provide advance security arrangements for Obama’s trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

In August, Daniel L. Valencia, a Secret Service agent, was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving in Decorah, Iowa, where he was helping arrange security for Obama’s bus trip through three Midwestern states. Valencia, who was off-duty at the time of the arrest, was recently sentenced to two days in jail with credit for time served, and a fine of $1,250.

South American governments want to end drug war!!!

Of course the American government is going to stick it's head in the sand and pretend we are winning the insane, unconstitutional drug war.

Source

At Latin America summit, Obama to face push for drug legalization

By Christi Parsons and Brian Bennett, Los Angeles Times

April 13, 2012, 4:45 p.m.

CARTAGENA, Colombia — President Obama will highlight trade and business opportunities in Latin America at a regional summit in Colombia this weekend, but other leaders may upstage him by pushing to legalize marijuana and other illicit drugs in a bid to stem rampant trafficking.

Obama, who opposes decriminalization, is expected to face a rocky reception in this Caribbean resort city, which otherwise forms a friendly backdrop for a U.S. president courting Latino voters in an election year. But the American demand for illegal drugs has caused fierce bloodshed, plus political and economic turmoil, across much of the region.

Colombia's president, Juan Manuel Santos, wants the 33 leaders at the Summit of the Americas to consider whether the solution should include regulating marijuana, and perhaps cocaine, the way alcohol and tobacco are. Other member states also are calling for that dialogue despite the political discomfort it may cause Obama back home.

"You haven't had this pressure from the region before," said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank in Washington. "I think the [Obama] administration is willing to entertain the discussion, but hoping it doesn't turn into a critique of the U.S. and put the U.S. on the defensive."

Obama also is expected to take flak from leaders frustrated by the lack of U.S. movement on two other troublesome issues, immigration reform and the long-standing embargo of Cuba. Cuban leaders are not participating in the summit, but many regional governments oppose the U.S. policy of embargo.

In internal debates, White House officials have weighed the risk of talking about decriminalization, which is still taboo for many U.S. voters, against concern about alienating leaders who bear the brunt of the battle against the heavily armed cartels that supply most marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamines to U.S. markets.

White House officials say Obama will not change his drug policy. They hope to keep talk of legalization behind closed doors while he focuses publicly on other tactics, including improving security forces, reforming governance and enhancing economic opportunities.

The call for change comes from front-line veterans of the drug wars, including Colombia. Santos says he has the moral authority to seek new solutions because his country's citizens and security forces have spilled so much blood fighting drug traffickers.

Also leading the charge isGuatemala'spresident, Otto Perez Molina. After a pre-summit meeting with leaders of Costa Rica and Panama, he called for a "realistic and responsible" discussion of decriminalization in Cartagena.

"We cannot eradicate global drug markets, but we can certainly regulate them as we have done with alcohol and tobacco markets," he wrote in the British newspaper the Observer on April 7.

White House officials plan to argue that no evidence indicates legalization would slow the flow of narcotics or reduce drug-related killings. Vice President Joe Biden offered a preview in Miami Beach last month.

"We should have this debate, and the reason is to dispel some of the myths that exist about legalization," Biden told reporters. "There are those people who say, 'If you legalize, you are not going to expand the number of consumers significantly.' Not true."

U.S. officials also will emphasize administration efforts to reduce illicit drug use in the United States, the world's largest consumer of cocaine and other illegal drugs.

The Justice Department, for example, has added special courts that can sentence drug abusers to treatment programs instead of prison. And the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, assuming it survives Supreme Court review, requires the medical industry to treat substance abuse as a chronic disease.

Marijuana use in America has increased by 15% since 2006, but cocaine use has dropped by 40% in that time, according to theU.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Experts say the global market for cocaine is unchanged because use in Europe more than doubled in the last decade.

The idea of regulating and taxing the production and sale of illegal drugs isn't new. A panel led by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and past presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia concluded in a report in June that the drug war had "failed" and recommended easing penalties for farmers and low-level drug users.

That doesn't make the issue any easier for Obama.

"I don't think anybody thinks the current policy works right now, but public opinion hasn't gotten to the point of accepting the idea of legalization," said David Damore, a political scientist at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas who writes about U.S. and Latino politics. "There's nothing to be gained from it politically, and it opens you up to an attack."

cparsons@latimes.com

brian.bennett@latimes.com

Parsons reported from Cartagena and Bennett from Washington.

America is out of touch with the rest of the world???

The US is alone on it's stance to continue the insane unconstitutional drug war, which is a dismal failure.

The US is also alone on it's stance to isolated Cuba from the rest of the world.

I suspect this quote by H. L. Mencken is one of the reasons for America's political positions:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Source

U.S, Canada alone on Cuba at summit

by Vivian Sequera - Apr. 14, 2012 10:32 AM

Associated Press

CARTAGENA, Colombia -- A summit of 33 Western Hemisphere leaders opens Saturday with the United States and Canada standing firm, but alone, against everyone else's insistence that Cuba join future summits.

The Sixth Summit of the Americas has also taken on a tabloid tinge with 12 U.S. Secret Service agents sent home for alleged misconduct that apparently included prostitutes and days of heavy pre-summit poolside drinking.

U.S. President Barack Obama has been clinging stubbornly to a rejection of Cuban participation in the summits, which everyone but Canada deems unjust.

"This is the last Summit of the Americas," Bolivia's foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, told The Associated Press, "unless Cuba is allowed to take part."

The fate of the summit's final declaration was thrown into uncertainty Friday as the foreign ministers of Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay said their presidents wouldn't sign it unless the U.S. and Canada removed their veto of future Cuban participation.

Vigorous discussion is also expected on drug legalization, which the Obama administration opposes. And Obama will be in the minority in his opposition to Argentina's claim to the British-controlled Falkland Islands.

The charismatic Obama may be able to charm the region's leaders as he did in 2009 with a pledge of being an "equal partner," but he will also have to prove the U.S. truly values their friendship and a stake in their growth.

"The United States should realize that its long-term strategic interests are not in Afghanistan or in Pakistan but in Latin America," the host, Colombian President Juan Santos, said in a speech to business leaders at a parallel CEO summit on Friday.

In large part, declining U.S. influence comes down to waning economic clout, as China gains on the U.S. as a top trading partner. It has surpassed the U.S. in trade with Brazil, Chile, and Peru and is a close second in Argentina and Colombia.

"Most countries of the region view the United States as less and less relevant to their needs -- and with declining capacity to propose and carry out strategies to deal with the issues that most concern them," the Washington-based think tank the Inter-American Dialogue noted in a pre-summit report.

Stereotypes of ugly Americans were, unfortunately, reinforced on summit eve with misconduct allegations

A caller who alerted The Associated Press to the case said the misconduct involved prostitutes.

A Secret Service spokesman did not dispute that. Nor did the U.S. official who, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity, put the number of agents sent home at 12. The agency was not releasing the number of personnel involved.

One employee of the hotel where the agents stayed, the beachfront Caribe, said the agents drank large quantities of alcohol at the poolside daily for about a week before being dressed down by a supervisor and sent home Thursday. The employee spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for his job.

Obama faced challenges enough at the summit without that distraction.

Cuba was proving the biggest.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa was boycotting the summit over Cuba's exclusion, while moderates such as Santos and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil said there should be no more America's summits without the communist island.

Obama's administration has greatly eased family travel and remittances to Cuba, but has not dropped the half-century U.S. embargo against the island, nor moved to let it back into the Organization of American States, under whose auspices the summit is organized.

Another big issue will be drug legalization, which the Obama administration firmly opposes. Santos left it off the official agenda but has said all possible scenarios should be explored and the United Nations should consider them.

Meeting with Argentine President Cristina Fernandez at his request, Obama can expect to discuss that country's claim to the Falkland Islands, known as the Malvinas by the Argentines, after Argentina lost a war with Britain 30 years ago while trying to seize them.

Among the hemisphere's leaders, there is nearly unanimous support for Argentina's position.

One potentially prickly confrontation for Obama was averted Saturday when Venezuela's foreign minister announced that President Hugo Chavez would skip the summit. The minister, Nicolas Maduro, said Chavez took the decision because of a medical recommendation.

Chavez was heading instead to Cuba to continue treatments for cancer.

He has grabbed the spotlight at past summits. But, suffering from an unspecified type of cancer, he has lately been shuttling back and forth to Cuba for radiation treatment.

FCC - F*ck the 5th Amendment, answer our questions or we will fine you $25,000!!!!

Source

FCC aims to fine Google $25,000 for impeding data-collection probe

By Andrea Chang

April 15, 2012, 9:54 a.m.

Google is facing a $25,000 fine for refusing to cooperate with a Federal Communications Commission investigation into the tech giant's data-collection practices.

The world's largest search engine came under fire two years ago when it was revealed that its popular but controversial street-mapping program -- in which cars snap photos of homes, intersections and other neighborhood features -- was also picking up sensitive information from home wireless networks such as email and text messages, passwords and Internet usage history.

The FCC, which filed its 25-page report Friday, said despite Google admitting wrongdoing at the time, the company has since "deliberately impeded and delayed" the agency's probe into the matter, according to the New York Times.

Specifically, the FCC said Google was not responding to email requests for more information and was refusing to identify the employees involved.

Despite the relatively small fine, the FCC noted that the data collection was legal because the information was not encrypted, according to the New York Times.

The investigation raises a fresh round of questions over the right to privacy in an increasingly digital world. In a recent statewide poll, the vast majority of Californians said they were worried about the data collected by smartphone and Internet companies, and most said they distrust even firms that are known for having tens of millions of users, such as Facebook.

Calls and emails to Google were not returned Sunday morning.

Two years ago, a separate probe by the Federal Trade Commission into Google's Street View project led the agency to announce that it was satisfied with the tech firm's explanation into its data-collection practices and would not impose any fines.

Robotic TSA thugs check ID at airports

I wonder if these robotic TSA thugs will be as good at insulting, belittling, inspecting and poking you as the real human TSA thugs are???

Source

TSA tests airport check-in system

By Bart Jansen, USA TODAY

By Josh T. Reynolds, for USA TODAY

The Transportation Security Administration is testing a system that checks identification and boarding passes by machine rather than the standard visual check by officers.

The tests began last week at Washington-Dulles International Airport and will start Tuesday at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston and April 23 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The review will last several months, gauging such things as how fast passengers move through the line and how accurate the machines are.

While TSA officers have been checking identification with black lights and magnifying glasses, the machines are geared to recognize all valid identification, ranging from driver's licenses to tribal IDs and U.S. and foreign passports.

TSA hopes the machines will do a more efficient job weeding out fraudulent documents and getting passengers to their planes.

"For efficiency, it is fantastic," says Domenic Bianchini, TSA director of checkpoint technology. "We think it's a valuable technology, and we think over time we will see the real value added."

As demonstrated at Dulles, passengers step up to the TSA desk and scan the bar codes of their boarding passes, like a can of soup at the self-checkout at a grocery store. The TSA officer scans the identification, which the machine authenticates and compares with the boarding pass.

The machine doesn't store any personal information about the passenger, says Greg Soule, a TSA spokesman.

A discrepancy can lead to more questions or checking the identification more closely. When a TSA officer had a question last week about the identification of a bespectacled man in khakis and a dark blazer, she scrutinized the driver's license under a magnifying glass and then asked a few more questions before sending the passenger on his way.

If a fraudulent document is found, the passenger is referred to law-enforcement officials for possible charges.

The first 30 machines cost $3.2 million, Soule says. Three companies — BAE Systems Information Solutions, Trans Digital Technologies and NCR Government Systems — provided the initial machines that were customized for TSA.

Why people falsely confess to committing murder

Experts examine Lake County's 'epidemic' of false confessions

The "9 Step Reid Method" is essentially an interrogation which uses psychological rubber hoses to mentally beat a suspect into confessing to a crime.

It is very effective and people routinely confess to crimes they did not commit. Of the almost 300 cases people were released from death row when DNA testing proved they did not commit the crime, a large number of then had made false confessions admitting their guilt.

As the article says "False confessions are usually the result of brainwashing, wearing people down or physical abuse" and that is how the "9 Step Reid Method" works.

Source

Experts examine Lake County's 'epidemic' of false confessions

By Lisa Black, Chicago Tribune reporter

11:05 p.m. CDT, April 15, 2012

Juan Rivera, exonerated through DNA in the 1992 rape and murder of an 11-year-old Waukegan girl, returned to Lake County on Sunday for the first time since he was released from prison in January to join a panel discussion on false confessions.

"I am very angry. I am very disappointed that I lost half my life," said Rivera, 39, who added that he wrestles with his emotions, feeling that he should be at peace after 19 years in prison.

"This is a struggle that I go through every day. I don't sleep well. I don't trust anyone," said Rivera, speaking at Lake Forest College.

About 75 people attended the event, which also featured panelists Rob Warden, executive director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Jed Stone, a longtime criminal defense lawyer in Waukegan.

Stone challenged prosecutors and judges to stop ignoring an "epidemic" of false confessions that result in wrongful convictions. He suggested the problem could be partially resolved if officials videotaped all interrogations and made sure that detectives who interview a suspect have no prior knowledge of the case.

He also called for prosecutors to stop relying on police that they know to be dishonest as witnesses, saying he could name five in Lake County.

"I know who is a truth-teller, and I know who I wouldn't buy a car from — and so do the prosecutors," Stone said.

The public generally has a hard time understanding why someone would admit to a crime they did not commit, said Warden, who suggested that police interrogations be limited to four hours per session.

"Our research shows that truthful confessions tend to come relatively quickly," he said. Rivera, for instance, was interrogated off and on for more than 23 hours during one session.

False confessions are usually the result of brainwashing, wearing people down or physical abuse, Warden said.

Rivera's case, he said, was probably an example of when "people are simply worn down to the point they will say absolutely anything to stop the interrogation, thinking: 'If I can just sleep, I'll clear this up tomorrow.'"

"It happens everywhere," Warden said. "It happens nationally. We really need to start taking this phenomenon seriously."

Both candidates for the state's attorney's job, Democrat Chris Kennedy and Republican Michael Nerheim, attended the panel, as did friends and family of people involved in other high-profile cases in Lake County.

During a question-and-answer session, Paul Calusinski stood up and spoke in defense of his daughter, Melissa Calusinski, recently sentenced to 31 years for killing a toddler at a Lincolnshire day center.

Another man handed out fliers advertising a "10,000 Man March Against Injustice" planned for Saturday in North Chicago that stems from the death of Darrin Hanna, 45, who died in November after a violent encounter with police.

Officers tackled, punched and used a Taser on Hanna while trying to subdue him after reports that he was beating a pregnant woman. A Lake County coroner's autopsy blamed his death on chronic cocaine use and sickle cell disease, along with police restraint and trauma.

lblack@tribune.com

Will the American Empire invade the North Pole???

Source

As ice cap melts, militaries vie for Arctic edge

By ERIC TALMADGE

Associated Press

YOKOSUKA, Japan (AP) — To the world's military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.

By Arctic standards, the region is already buzzing with military activity, and experts believe that will increase significantly in the years ahead.

Last month, Norway wrapped up one of the largest Arctic maneuvers ever — Exercise Cold Response — with 16,300 troops from 14 countries training on the ice for everything from high intensity warfare to terror threats. Attesting to the harsh conditions, five Norwegian troops were killed when their C-130 Hercules aircraft crashed near the summit of Kebnekaise, Sweden's highest mountain.

The U.S., Canada and Denmark held major exercises two months ago, and in an unprecedented move, the military chiefs of the eight main Arctic powers — Canada, the U.S., Russia, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland — gathered at a Canadian military base last week to specifically discuss regional security issues.

None of this means a shooting war is likely at the North Pole any time soon. But as the number of workers and ships increases in the High North to exploit oil and gas reserves, so will the need for policing, border patrols and — if push comes to shove — military muscle to enforce rival claims.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its untapped natural gas is in the Arctic. Shipping lanes could be regularly open across the Arctic by 2030 as rising temperatures continue to melt the sea ice, according to a National Research Council analysis commissioned by the U.S. Navy last year.

What countries should do about climate change remains a heated political debate. But that has not stopped north-looking militaries from moving ahead with strategies that assume current trends will continue.

Russia, Canada and the United States have the biggest stakes in the Arctic. With its military budget stretched thin by Iraq, Afghanistan and more pressing issues elsewhere, the United States has been something of a reluctant northern power, though its nuclear-powered submarine fleet, which can navigate for months underwater and below the ice cap, remains second to none.

Russia — one-third of which lies within the Arctic Circle — has been the most aggressive in establishing itself as the emerging region's superpower.

Rob Huebert, an associate political science professor at the University of Calgary in Canada, said Russia has recovered enough from its economic troubles of the 1990s to significantly rebuild its Arctic military capabilities, which were a key to the overall Cold War strategy of the Soviet Union, and has increased its bomber patrols and submarine activity.

He said that has in turn led other Arctic countries — Norway, Denmark and Canada — to resume regional military exercises that they had abandoned or cut back on after the Soviet collapse. Even non-Arctic nations such as France have expressed interest in deploying their militaries to the Arctic.

"We have an entire ocean region that had previously been closed to the world now opening up," Huebert said. "There are numerous factors now coming together that are mutually reinforcing themselves, causing a buildup of military capabilities in the region. This is only going to increase as time goes on."

Noting that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, the U.S. Navy in 2009 announced a beefed-up Arctic Roadmap by its own task force on climate change that called for a three-stage strategy to increase readiness, build cooperative relations with Arctic nations and identify areas of potential conflict.

"We want to maintain our edge up there," said Cmdr. Ian Johnson, the captain of the USS Connecticut, which is one of the U.S. Navy's most Arctic-capable nuclear submarines and was deployed to the North Pole last year. "Our interest in the Arctic has never really waned. It remains very important."

But the U.S. remains ill-equipped for large-scale Arctic missions, according to a simulation conducted by the U.S. Naval War College. A summary released last month found the Navy is "inadequately prepared to conduct sustained maritime operations in the Arctic" because it lacks ships able to operate in or near Arctic ice, support facilities and adequate communications.

"The findings indicate the Navy is entering a new realm in the Arctic," said Walter Berbrick, a War College professor who participated in the simulation. "Instead of other nations relying on the U.S. Navy for capabilities and resources, sustained operations in the Arctic region will require the Navy to rely on other nations for capabilities and resources."

He added that although the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet is a major asset, the Navy has severe gaps elsewhere — it doesn't have any icebreakers, for example. The only one in operation belongs to the Coast Guard. The U.S. is currently mulling whether to add more icebreakers.

Acknowledging the need to keep apace in the Arctic, the United States is pouring funds into figuring out what climate change will bring, and has been working closely with the scientific community to calibrate its response.

"The Navy seems to be very on board regarding the reality of climate change and the especially large changes we are seeing in the Arctic," said Mark C. Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences University of Colorado. "There is already considerable collaboration between the Navy and civilian scientists and I see this collaboration growing in the future."

The most immediate challenge may not be war — both military and commercial assets are sparse enough to give all countries elbow room for a while — but whether militaries can respond to a disaster.

Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the London-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said militaries probably will have to rescue their own citizens in the Arctic before any confrontations arise there.

"Catastrophic events, like a cruise ship suddenly sinking or an environmental accident related to the region's oil and gas exploration, would have a profound impact in the Arctic," she said. "The risk is not militarization; it is the lack of capabilities while economic development and human activity dramatically increases that is the real risk."

FBI didn't notify framed convicts that lab screw up falsely convicted them

Yea, sure you can get a fair trail. The Federal Court system is just as corrupt and unjust as the Arizona courts are! In fact one man may have been falsely executed because of the corrupt FBI crime labs.

I suspect getting a "fair trial" in the American criminal injustice system is about as easy as going to Las Vegas and willing a billion dollars!!!! Honest! Maybe even a little bit easier!

Source

Convicted defendants left uninformed of forensic flaws found by Justice Dept.

By Spencer S. Hsu, Published: April 16

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

In one Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle was executed in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review. Boyle would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, according to a prosecutor’s memo.

The case of a Maryland man serving a life sentence for a 1981 double killing is another in which federal and local law enforcement officials knew of forensic problems but never told the defendant. Attorneys for the man, John Norman Huffington, say they learned of potentially exculpatory Justice Department findings from The Washington Post. They are seeking a new trial.

Justice Department officials said that they met their legal and constitutional obligations when they learned of specific errors, that they alerted prosecutors and were not required to inform defendants directly.

The review was performed by a task force created during an inspector general’s investigation of misconduct at the FBI crime lab in the 1990s. The inquiry took nine years, ending in 2004, records show, but the findings were never made public.

In the discipline of hair and fiber analysis, only the work of FBI Special Agent Michael P. Malone was questioned. Even though Justice Department and FBI officials knew that the discipline had weaknesses and that the lab lacked protocols — and learned that examiners’ “matches” were often wrong — they kept their reviews limited to Malone.

But two cases in D.C. Superior Court show the inadequacy of the government’s response.

Santae A. Tribble, now 51, was convicted of killing a taxi driver in 1978, and Kirk L. Odom, now 49, was convicted of a sexual assault in 1981.

Key evidence at each of their trials came from separate FBI experts — not Malone — who swore that their scientific analysis proved with near certainty that Tribble’s and Odom’s hair was at the respective crime scenes.

But DNA testing this year on the hair and on other old evidence virtually eliminates Tribble as a suspect and completely clears Odom. Both men have completed their sentences and are on lifelong parole. They are now seeking exoneration in the courts in the hopes of getting on with their lives.

Neither case was part of the Justice Department task force’s review.

A third D.C. case shows how the lack of Justice Department notification has forced people to stay in prison longer than they should have.

Donald E. Gates, 60, served 28 years for the rape and murder of a Georgetown University student based on Malone’s testimony that his hair was found on the victim’s body. He was exonerated by DNA testing in 2009. But for 12 years before that, prosecutors never told him about the inspector general’s report about Malone, that Malone’s work was key to his conviction or that Malone’s findings were flawed, leaving him in prison the entire time.

After The Post contacted him about the forensic issues, U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. of the District said his office would try to review all convictions that used hair analysis.

Seeking to learn whether others shared Gates’s fate, The Post worked with the nonprofit National Whistleblowers Center, which had obtained dozens of boxes of task force documents through a years-long Freedom of Information Act fight.

Task force documents identifying the scientific reviews of problem cases generally did not contain the names of the defendants. Piecing together case numbers and other bits of information from more than 10,000 pages of documents, The Post found more than 250 cases in which a scientific review was completed. Available records did not allow the identification of defendants in roughly 100 of those cases. Records of an unknown number of other questioned cases handled by federal prosecutors have yet to be released by the government.

The Post found that while many prosecutors made swift and full disclosures, many others did so incompletely, years late or not at all. The effort was stymied at times by lack of cooperation from some prosecutors and declining interest and resources as time went on.

Overall, calls to defense lawyers indicate and records documented that prosecutors disclosed the reviews’ results to defendants in fewer than half of the 250-plus questioned cases.

Michael R. Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and the inspector general who investigated the FBI lab, said in a statement that even if more defense lawyers were notified of the initial review, “that doesn’t absolve the task force from ensuring that every single defense lawyer in one of these cases was notified.”

He added: “It is deeply troubling that after going to so much time and trouble to identify problematic conduct by FBI forensic analysts the DOJ Task Force apparently failed to follow through and ensure that defense counsel were notified in every single case.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said the federal review was an “exhaustive effort” and met legal requirements, and she referred questions about hair analysis to the FBI. The FBI said it would evaluate whether a nationwide review is needed.

“In cases where microscopic hair exams conducted by the FBI resulted in a conviction, the FBI is evaluating whether additional review is warranted,” spokeswoman Ann Todd said in a statement. “The FBI has undertaken comprehensive reviews in the past, and will not hesitate to do so again if necessary.”

Santae Tribble and Kirk Odom

John McCormick had just finished the night shift driving a taxi for Diamond Cab on July 26, 1978. McCormick, 63, reached the doorstep of his home in Southeast Washington about 3 a.m., when he was robbed and fatally shot by a man in a stocking mask, according to his widow, who caught a glimpse of the attack from inside the house.

Police soon focused on Santae Tribble as a suspect. A police informant said Tribble told her he was with his childhood friend, Cleveland Wright, when Wright shot McCormick.

After a three-day trial, jurors deliberated two hours before asking about a stocking found a block away at the end of an alley on 28th Street SE. It had been recovered by a police dog, and it contained a single hair that the FBI traced to Tribble. Forty minutes later, the jury found Tribble guilty of murder. He was sentenced in January 1980 to 20 years to life in prison.

Tribble, 17 at the time, his brother, his girlfriend and a houseguest all testified that they were together preparing to celebrate the guest’s birthday the night McCormick was killed. All four said Tribble and his girlfriend were asleep between 2 and 4:30 a.m. in Seat Pleasant.

Tribble took the stand in his own defense, saying what he had said all along — that he had nothing to do with McCormick’s killing.

The prosecution began its closing argument by citing the FBI’s testimony about the hair from the stocking.

This January, after a year-long effort to have DNA evidence retested, Tribble’s public defender succeeded and turned over the results from a private lab to prosecutors. None of the 13 hairs recovered from the stocking — including the one that the FBI said matched Tribble’s — shared Tribble’s or Wright’s genetic profile, conclusively ruling them out as sources, according to mitochondrial DNA analyst Terry Melton of the private lab.

“The government’s entire theory of prosecution — that Mr. Tribble and Mr. Wright acted together to kill Mr. McCormick — is demolished,” wrote Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C. Public Defender Service and the lawyer who represents Gates, Tribble and Odom. In a motion to D.C. Superior Court Judge Laura Cordero seeking Tribble’s exoneration, Levick wrote: “He has waited thirty-three years for the truth to set him free. He should have to wait no longer.”

In an interview, Tribble, who served 28 years in prison, said that whether the court grants his request or not, he sees it as a final chance to assert his innocence.

“Ms. Levick has been like an angel,” Tribble added, “. . . and I thank God for DNA.”

Details of the new round of hair testing illustrate how hair analysis is highly subjective. The FBI scientist who originally testified at Tribble’s trial, Special Agent James A. Hilverda, said all the hairs he retrieved from the stocking were human head hairs, including the one suitable for comparison that he declared in court matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.”

In August, Harold Deadman, a senior hair analyst with the D.C. police who spent 15 years with the FBI lab, forwarded the evidence to the private lab and reported that the 13 hairs he found included head and limb hairs. One exhibited Caucasian characteristics, Deadman added. Tribble is black.

But the private lab’s DNA tests irrefutably showed that the 13 hairs came from three human sources, each of African origin, except for one — which came from a dog.

“Such is the true state of hair microscopy,” Levick wrote. “Two FBI-trained analysts, James Hilverda and Harold Deadman, could not even distinguish human hairs from canine hairs.”

Hilverda declined to comment. Deadman said his role was limited to describing characteristics of hairs he found.

Kirk Odom’s case shares similarities with Tribble’s. Odom was convicted of raping, sodomizing and robbing a 27-year-old woman before dawn in her Capitol Hill apartment in 1981.

The victim said she spoke with her assailant and observed him for up to two minutes in the “dim light” of street lamps through her windows before she was gagged, bound and blindfolded in an hour-long assault.

Police put together a composite sketch of the attacker, based on the victim’s description. About five weeks after the assault, a police officer was talking to Odom about an unrelated matter. He thought Odom looked like the sketch. So he retrieved a two-year-old photograph of Odom, from when he was 16, and put it in a photo array for the victim. The victim picked the image out of the array that April and identified Odom at a lineup in May. She identified Odom again at his trial, telling jurors her assailant “had left her with an image of his face etched in her mind.”

At trial, FBI Special Agent Myron T. Scholberg testified that a hair found on the victim’s nightgown was “microscopically like” Odom’s, meaning the samples were indistinguishable. Prosecutors explained that Scholberg had not been able to distinguish between hair samples only “eight or 10 times in the past 10 years, while performing thousands of analyses.”

But on Jan. 18 of this year, Melton, of the same lab used in the Tribble case, Mitotyping Technologies of State College, Pa., reported its court-ordered DNA test results: The hair in the case could not have come from Odom.

On Feb. 27, a second laboratory selected by prosecutors, Bode Technology of Lorton, turned over the results of court-ordered nuclear DNA testing of stains left by the perpetrator on a pillowcase and robe.

Only one man left all four partial DNA profiles developed by the lab, and that man could not have been Odom.

The victim “was tragically mistaken in her identification of Mr. Odom as her assailant,” Levick wrote in a motion filed March 14 seeking his exoneration. “One man committed these heinous crimes; that man was not Kirk L. Odom.”

Scholberg, who retired in 1985 as head of hair and fiber analysis after 18 years at the FBI lab, said side-by-side hair comparison “was the best method we had at the time.”

Odom, who was imprisoned for 20 years, had to register as a sex offender and remains on lifelong parole. He says court-ordered therapists still berate him for saying he is not guilty. Over the years, his conviction has kept him from possible jobs, he said.

“There was always the thought in the back of my mind . . . ‘One day will my name be cleared?’ ” Odom said at his home in Southeast Washington, where he lives with his wife, Harriet, a medical counselor.

Federal prosecutors declined to comment on Tribble’s and Odom’s specific claims, citing pending litigation.

One government official noted that Odom served an additional 16 months after his release for an unrelated simple assault that violated his parole.

However, in a statement released after being contacted by The Post, Machen, the U.S. attorney in the District, acknowledged that DNA results “raise serious questions in my mind about these convictions.”

“If our comprehensive review shows that either man was wrongfully convicted, we will promptly join him in a motion to vacate his conviction, as we did with Donald Gates in 2009,” Machen said.

The trouble with hair analysis

Popularized in fiction by Sherlock Holmes, hair comparison became an established forensic science by the 1950s. Before modern-day DNA testing, hair analysis could, at its best, accurately narrow the pool of criminal suspects to a class or group or definitively rule out a person as a possible source.

But in practice, even before the “ ‘CSI’ effect” led jurors to expect scientific evidence at every trial, a claim of a hair match packed a powerful, dramatic punch in court. The testimony, usually by a respected scientist working at a respected federal agency, allowed prosecutors to boil down ambiguous cases for jurors to a single, incriminating piece of human evidence left at the scene.

Forensic experts typically assessed the varying characteristics of a hair to determine whether the defendant might be a source. Some factors were visible to the naked eye, such as the length of the hair, its color and whether it was straight, kinky or curly. Others were visible under a microscope, such as the size, type and distribution of pigmentation, the alignment of scales or the thickness of layers in a given hair, or its diameter at various points.

Other judgments could be made. Was the hair animal or human? From the scalp, limbs or pubic area? Of a discernible race? Dyed, bleached or otherwise treated? Cut, forcibly removed or shed naturally?

But there is no consensus among hair examiners about how many of these characteristics were needed to declare a match. So some agents relied on six or seven traits, while others needed 20 or 30. Hilverda, the FBI scientist in Tribble’s case, told jurors that he had performed “probably tens of thousands of examinations” and relied on “about 15 characteristics.”

Despite his testimony, Hilverda recorded in his lab notes that he had measured only three characteristics of the hair from the stocking — it was black, it was a human head hair, and it was from an African American. Similarly, Scholberg’s notes describe the nightgown hair in Odom’s case in the barest terms, as a black, human head hair fragment, like a sample taken from Odom.

Hilverda acknowledged that results could rule out a person or be inconclusive. However, he told jurors that a “match” reflected a high likelihood that two hairs came from the same person. Hilverda added, “Only on very rare occasions have I seen hairs of two individuals that show the same characteristics.”

In Tribble’s case, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further as he summed up the evidence. “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair,” he said in his closing arguments, sounding the final word for the government.

Stanley declined to comment.

Flaws known for decades

The Tribble and Odom cases demonstrate problems in hair analysis that have been known for nearly 40 years.

In 1974, researchers acknowledged that visual comparisons are so subjective that different analysts can reach different conclusions about the same hair. The FBI acknowledged in 1984 that such analysis cannot positively determine that a hair found at a crime scene belongs to one particular person.

In 1996, the Justice Department studied the nation’s first 28 DNA exonerations and found that 20 percent of the cases involved hair comparison. That same year, the FBI lab stopped declaring matches based on visual comparisons alone and began requiring DNA testing as well.

Yet examples of FBI experts violating scientific standards and making exaggerated or erroneous claims emerged in 1997 at the heart of the FBI lab’s worst modern scandal, when Bromwich’s investigation found systematic problems involving 13 agents. The lab’s lack of written protocols and examiners’ weak scientific qualifications allowed bias to influence some of the nation’s highest-profile criminal investigations, the inspector general said.

From 1996 through 2004, a Justice Department task force set out to review about 6,000 cases handled by the 13 discredited agents for any potential exculpatory information that should be disclosed to defendants. The task force identified more than 250 convictions in which the agents’ work was determined to be either critical to the conviction or so problematic — for example, because a prosecutor refused to cooperate or records had been lost — that it completed a fresh scientific assessment of the agent’s work. The task force was directed to notify prosecutors of the results.

The only real notice of what the task force found came in a 2003 Associated Press account in which unnamed government officials said they had turned over results to prosecutors and were aware that defendants had been notified in 100 to 150 cases. The officials left the impression that anybody whose case had been affected had been notified and that, in any case, no convictions had been overturned, the officials said.

But since 2003, in the District alone, two of six convictions identified by The Post in which forensic work was reassessed by the task force have been vacated. That includes Gates’s case, but not those of Tribble and Odom, who are awaiting court action and were not part of the task force review.

The Gates exoneration also shows that prosecutors failed to turn over information uncovered by the task force.

In addition to Gates, the murder cases in Texas and Maryland and a third in Alaska reveal examples of shortcomings.

All three cases, in addition to the District cases, were handled by FBI agent Malone, whose cases made up more than 90 percent of scientific reviews found by The Post.

In Texas, the review of Benjamin Herbert Boyle’s case got underway only after the defendant was executed, 16 months after the task force was formed, despite pledges to prioritize death penalty cases.

Boyle was executed six days after the Bromwich investigation publicly criticized Malone, the FBI agent who worked on his case, but the FBI had acknowledged two months earlier that it was investigating complaints about him.

The task force asked the Justice Department’s capital-case review unit to look over its work, but the fact that it failed to prevent the execution was never publicized.

In Maryland, John Norman Huffington’s attorneys say they were never notified of the findings of the review in his case, leaving them in a battle over the law’s unsettled requirements for prosecutors to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence and over whether lawyers and courts can properly interpret scientific findings.

In Alaska, Newton P. Lambert’s defenders have been left to seek DNA testing of remaining biological evidence, if any exists, while he serves a life sentence for a 1982 murder. Prosecutors for both Huffington and Lambert claim they disclosed findings at some point to other lawyers but failed to document doing so. In Lambert’s case, The Post found that the purported notification went to a lawyer who had died.

Senior public defenders in both states say they received no such word, which they say would be highly unlikely if it in fact came.

Malone, 66, said he was simply using the best science available at the time. “We did the best we could with what we had,” he said.

Even the harshest critics acknowledge that the Justice Department worked hard to identify potentially tainted convictions. Many of the cases identified by the task force involved serious crimes, and several defendants confessed or were guilty of related charges. Courts also have upheld several convictions even after agents’ roles were discovered.

Flawed agents or a flawed system?

Because of the focus on Malone, many questionable cases were never reviewed.

But as in the Tribble and Odom cases, thousands of defendants nationwide have been implicated by other FBI agents, as well as state and local hair examiners, who relied on the same flawed techniques.

In 2002, the FBI found after it analyzed DNA in 80 selected hair cases that its agents had reported false matches more than 11 percent of the time. “I don’t believe forensic science truly understood the significance of microscopic hair comparison, and it wasn’t until [DNA] that we learned that 11 percent of the time, two hairs can be microscopically similar yet come from different people,” said Dwight E. Adams, who directed the FBI lab from 2002 to 2006.

Yet a Post review of the small fraction of cases in which an appeals court opinion describes FBI hair testimony shows that several FBI agents gave improper testimony, asserting the remote odds of a false match or invoking bogus statistics in the absence of data.

For example, in testimony in a Minnesota bank robbery case, also in 1978, Hilverda, the agent who worked on Tribble’s case, reiterated that he had been unable to distinguish among different people’s hair “only on a couple of occasions” out of more than 2,000 cases he had analyzed.

In a 1980 Indiana robbery case, an agent told jurors that he had failed to tell different people’s hair apart just once in 1,500 cases. After a slaying in Tennessee that year, another agent testified in a capital case that there was only one chance out of 4,500 or 5,000 that a hair came from someone other than the suspect.

“Those statements are chilling to read,” Bromwich said of the exaggerated FBI claims at trial.

Todd, the FBI spokeswoman, said bureau lab reports for more than 30 years have qualified their findings by saying that hair comparisons are not a means of absolute positive identification. She requested a list of cases in which agents departed from guidelines in court.

The Post provided nine cases.

Todd declined to say whether the bureau considered taking steps to determine whether other agents intentionally or unintentionally misled jurors. “Only Michael Malone’s conduct was questioned in the area of hair comparisons,” Todd said. “The [inspector general] did not question the merits of microscopic hair comparisons as a scientific discipline.”

Experts say the difference between laboratory standards and examiners’ testimony in court can be important, especially if no one is reading or watching what agents say.

“It seemingly has never been routine for crime labs to do supervision based on trial testimony,” said University of Virginia School of Law professor Brandon L. Garrett. “You can have cautious standards, but if no one is supervising their implementation, it’s predictable that analysts may cross the line.”

‘Veil of secrecy’

A review of the task force documents, as well as Post interviews, found that the Justice Department struggled to balance its roles as a law enforcer defending convictions, a minister of justice protecting the innocent, and a patron and practitioner of forensic science.

By excluding defense lawyers from the process and leaving it to prosecutors to decide case by case what to disclose, authorities waded into a legal and ethical morass that left some prisoners locked away for years longer than necessary. By adopting a secret process that limited accountability, documents show, the task force left the scope and nature of scientific problems unreported, obscuring issues from further study and permitting similar breakdowns.

“The government has hidden behind the veil of secrecy to shield these abuses despite official assurances that justice would be done,” said David Colapinto, general counsel of the National Whistleblowers Center.

The American Bar Association and others have proposed stronger ethics rules for prosecutors to act on information that casts doubt on convictions; opening laboratory and other files to the defense; clearer reporting and evidence retention; greater involvement by scientists in setting rules for testimony at criminal trials; and more scientific training for lawyers and judges.

Other experts propose more oversight by standing state forensic-science commissions and funding for research into forensic techniques and experts for indigent defendants.

A common theme among reform-minded lawyers and experts is taking the oversight of the forensic labs away from police and prosecutors.

“It’s human to make mistakes,” said Steven D. Benjamin, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It’s wrong not to learn from them.”

More specifically, the D.C. Public Defender Service, Benjamin’s group and others said justice would be served by retesting hair evidence in convictions nationwide from 1996 and earlier. “If microscopic hair analysis was a key piece of evidence in a conviction, and it was one of only a limited amount of evidence in a case, would it be worthwhile to retest that using mitochondrial DNA? I would say absolutely,” said Adams, the former FBI lab director.

The promised review by federal prosecutors of hair convictions in the District would not include cases before 1985, when FBI records were computerized, and would not disclose any defendant’s name. That approach would have missed Gates, Odom and Tribble, who were convicted earlier.

Representatives for Machen, the FBI and the Justice Department also declined to say why the review should be limited to D.C. cases. The Post found that 95 percent of the troubled cases identified by the task force were outside the District.

Avis E. Buchanan, director of the D.C. Public Defender Service, said her agency must be “a full participant” in the review, which it has sought for two years, and that it should extend nationwide. “Surely the District of Columbia is not the only place where such flawed evidence was used to convict the innocent,” she said.

Staff researcher Jennifer Jenkins and database editor Ted Mellnik contributed to this report.

CIA wants to murder suspected terrorists in Yemen!

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CIA seeks new authority to expand Yemen drone campaign

By Greg Miller, Published: April 18

The CIA is seeking authority to expand its covert drone campaign in Yemen by launching strikes against terrorism suspects even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed, U.S. officials said.

Securing permission to use these “signature strikes” would allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior, such as imagery showing militants gathering at known al-Qaeda compounds or unloading explosives.

Violence in Yemen has repeatedly erupted between government and opposition forces, as well as between the government and al-Qaeda.

The practice has been a core element of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan for several years. CIA Director David H. Petraeus has requested permission to use the tactic against the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, which has emerged as the most pressing terrorism threat to the United States, officials said.

If approved, the change would probably accelerate a campaign of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen that is already on a record pace, with at least eight attacks in the past four months.

For President Obama, an endorsement of signature strikes would mean a significant, and potentially risky, policy shift. The administration has placed tight limits on drone operations in Yemen to avoid being drawn into an often murky regional conflict and risk turning militants with local agendas into al-Qaeda recruits.

A senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, declined to talk about what he described as U.S. “tactics” in Yemen, but he said that “there is still a very firm emphasis on being surgical and targeting only those who have a direct interest in attacking the United States.”

U.S. officials acknowledge that the standard has not always been upheld. Last year, a U.S. drone strike inadvertently killed the American son of al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki. The teenager had never been accused of terrorist activity and was killed in a strike aimed at other militants.

Some U.S. officials have voiced concern that such incidents could become more frequent if the CIA is given the authority to use signature strikes.

“How discriminating can they be?” asked a senior U.S. official familiar with the proposal. Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen “is joined at the hip” with a local insurgency whose main goal is to oust the country’s government, the official said. “I think there is the potential that we would be perceived as taking sides in a civil war.”

U.S. officials said that the CIA proposal has been presented to the National Security Council and that no decision has been reached. Officials from the White House and the CIA declined to comment.

Proponents of the plan said improvements in U.S. intelligence collection in Yemen have made it possible to expand the drone campaign — and use signature strikes — while minimizing the risk of civilian casualties.

They also pointed to the CIA’s experience in Pakistan. U.S. officials said the agency killed more senior al-Qaeda operatives there with signature strikes than with those in which it had identified and located someone on its kill list.

In Pakistan, the CIA “killed most of their ‘list people’ when they didn’t know they were there,” said a former senior U.S. military official familiar with drone operations.

The agency has cited the Pakistan experience to administration officials in arguing, perhaps counterintuitively, that it can be more effective against al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate if it doesn’t have to identify its targets before an attack. Obama, however, ruled out a similar push for such authority more than a year ago.

Increasing focus on Yemen

The CIA, the National Security Agency and other spy services have deployed more officers and resources to Yemen over the past several years to augment counterterrorism operations that were previously handled almost exclusively by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command.

The CIA began flying armed drones over Yemen last year after opening a secret base on the Arabian Peninsula. The agency also has worked with the Saudi and Yemeni intelligence services to build networks of informants — much the way it did in Pakistan before ramping up drone strikes there.

The agency’s strategy in Pakistan was centered on mounting a drone campaign so relentless that it allowed no time between attacks for al-Qaeda operatives to regroup. The use of signature strikes came to be seen as critical to achieving that pace.

The approach involved assembling threads of intelligence from multiple sources to develop telltale “signatures” of al-Qaeda activity based on operatives’ vehicles, facilities, communications equipment and patterns of behavior.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said the CIA became so adept at this that it could tell what was happening inside an al-Qaeda compound — whether a leader was visiting or explosives were being assembled, for example — based on the location and number of security operatives surrounding the site.

The agency might be able to replicate that success in Yemen, the former intelligence official said. But he expressed skepticism that White House officials, including counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan, will approve the CIA’s request.

The situation in Pakistan’s tribal territory “is far less ambiguous than in Yemen,” the former official said. “Brennan has been deliberate in making sure targets we hit in Yemen are terrorist targets and not insurgents.”

As a result, the CIA has been limited to “personality” strikes in Yemen, meaning it can fire only in cases where it has clear evidence that someone on its target list is in a drone’s crosshairs.

Often, that requires information from multiple sources, including imagery, cellphone intercepts and informants on the ground.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, as the Yemen-based group is known, has not been linked to a major terrorist plot since its failed attempt to mail parcels packed with explosives to addresses in Chicago in 2010. The death of Awlaki in a CIA drone strike last year is thought to have diminished the group’s ability to mount follow-on attacks.

But U.S. counterterrorism officials said that Awlaki’s death did not extinguish the group’s determination to attack the United States and noted that other key operatives — including Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who designed the bombs used in the parcel plot — remain at large.

A quickening pace

The pace of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen is still far from the peak levels in Pakistan, but it is on a distinctly upward trend, with about as many strikes so far this year as in all of 2011.

Which U.S. entity is responsible for each strike remains unclear. In Pakistan, the CIA carries out every drone strike. But in Yemen, the United States has relied on a mix of capabilities, including drones flown by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command, as well as conventional military aircraft and warships parked off the coast.

The JSOC has broader authority than the CIA to pursue militants in Yemen and is not seeking permission to use signature strikes, U.S. officials said.

Obama administration officials have refused to provide details of how militants are targeted or to disclose the identities of those killed.

Asked to explain the surge in strikes this year, U.S. officials denied that there has been any change in authorities. Instead, they attributed the pace to intelligence-gathering efforts that were expanded several years ago but are only beginning to pay off.

“There has never been a decision to step up or down” the number of strikes, said a senior U.S. official involved in overseeing the Yemen campaign. “It’s all intelligence-driven.”

The Long War Journal, a Web site that tracks drone operations, estimates that there have been 27 strikes in Yemen since 2009 and that 198 militants and 48 civilians have been killed.

Awlaki was killed last September, six weeks after the CIA began flying armed drones over Yemen. This year, one senior AQAP operative has been killed: Abdul Mun’im Salim al Fatahani, who was suspected of involvement in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, was killed in January by a drone strike in Abyan province, according to the Long War Journal.

Staff writers Karen DeYoung and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Oregon man says FBI was behind his torture in Abu Dhabi

Oregon man says FBI was behind his torture in Abu Dhabi

April 18, 2012 | 4:33 pm

An Oregon man is seeking asylum in Sweden, saying he was tortured while in the United Arab Emirates by interrogators cooperating with the FBI as it tried to investigate a Portland mosque.

Yonas Fikre says he was arrested in June and taken to an Abu Dhabi prison, where he was beaten, threatened and isolated during three months of detention. Fikre told reporters he was asked about the Masjid as-Sabr, spurring him to ask his interrogators whether they worked for the FBI.

The Associated Press quoted Fikre as saying that they first denied working with Americans, but later “when I was getting beaten, they did admit that the FBI knew exactly what was happening and they were working with the FBI."

The Portland mosque, which Fikre had attended, has been linked to suspects in two cases in the last decade: a 19-year-old who allegedly plotted to set off a bomb in Portland, and a group of seven people indicted for conspiring to wage war against the United States.

Fikre's case, originally reported by Mother Jones magazine, has been spotlighted by a Washington-based Islamic advocacy group, which argues that it reflects a broader threat to the rights of American Muslims.

"This disturbing case fits a pattern of proxy detention in which American Muslims are detained in other nations or prevented from returning home in a manner that is clearly designed to circumvent their constitutional rights," the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote to the Department of Justice.

A Portland FBI spokeswoman told the Associated Press that she could not discuss specifics of the case, but said agents were thoroughly trained about what was acceptable under U.S. law. Human rights activists say that such "proxy detention" echoes the practice of "extraordinary rendition," which involves transferring suspects for interrogation in countries that cooperate with the United States, and that it opens the door to torture.

In a videotaped interview released by his lawyers and shared online by Mother Jones, Fikre says that years earlier, while he was in Sudan, he was questioned about the mosque by men who identified themselves as FBI agents and told him he was on the federal no-fly list.

Fikre said they asked him to be an informant and he turned them down.

US soldiers in Afghanistan investigated for drug use

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In Afghanistan, dozens of US soldiers have been investigated for drug use in last 2 years

By Lolita C. Baldor

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army has investigated 56 soldiers in Afghanistan on suspicion of using or distributing heroin, morphine or other opiates during 2010 and 2011, newly obtained data shows. Eight soldiers died of drug overdoses during that time.

While the cases represent just a slice of possible drug use by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, they provide a sombre snapshot of the illicit trade in the war zone, including young Afghans peddling heroin, soldiers dying after mixing cocktails of opiates, troops stealing from medical bags and Afghan soldiers and police dealing drugs to their U.S. comrades.

In a country awash with poppy fields that provide up to 90 per cent of the world's opium, the U.S. military struggles to keep an eye on its far-flung troops and monitor for substance abuse.

But U.S. Army officials say that while the presence of such readily available opium — the raw ingredient for heroin — is a concern, opiate abuse has not been a pervasive problem for troops in Afghanistan.

"We have seen sporadic cases of it, but we do not see it as a widespread problem, and we have the means to check," said Col. Tom Collins, an Army spokesman.

The data represents only the criminal investigations done by Army Criminal Investigation Command involving soldiers in Afghanistan during those two years. The cases, therefore, are just a piece of the broader drug use statistics released by the Army earlier this year reporting nearly 70,000 drug offences by roughly 36,000 soldiers between 2006-2011. The number of offences increased from about 9,400 in 2010 to about 11,200 in 2011.

The overdose totals for the two years, however, are double the number that the Defence Department has reported as drug-related deaths in Afghanistan for the last decade. Defence officials suggested that additional deaths may have been categorized as "other" or were still under investigation when the statistics were submitted.

The data was requested by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and obtained by The Associated Press. The Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps have not yet responded to the request for similar information. The Army reports blacked out the names of the soldiers who were under investigation as well any resolution of their cases or punishments they may have received.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the numbers signal the need for the military leadership to be more vigilant about watching and warning troops in Afghanistan about drug abuse. He said the worry is that "the danger, including the danger of dying, hasn't been fully acknowledged by the military and it needs to be."

Army officials say they do random drug testing through the service and the goal is that every soldier is tested at least once a year. Top Army leaders have said they have not met that goal, but have been working steadily to substantially increase the number of those tested each year.

The officials also say the Army's Criminal Investigative Division has quarterly drug statistics that show that drug use by troops in Afghanistan is not greater than that of troops in installations back in the United States and there is less of a variance in drugs used by troops in Afghanistan.

According to Army data, an average of 1.38 million urine samples have been tested annually over the past five years, while an annual average of 106,000 soldiers were not tested at all. Officials said that regular testing is even more difficult in the war zone because the testing facilities are often far away.

The cases reflect a broad range of incidents, describing accidental overdoses as well as soldiers buying drugs from Afghan troops, stealing morphine from medical aid bags or, in some cases, taking steroids, using drugs prescribed to someone else or taking medications long after their prescriptions had expired.

In one overdose case, a member of the Kentucky National Guard was found dead of "acute heroin toxicity" at his Afghanistan base after a soldier, also in the Kentucky Guard, bought heroin from a civilian contractor and used it with him. The report found that he also had morphine and codeine in his system.

Others more often involved soldiers who were found dead and were later determined to have taken a mix of prescription and other opiate drugs.

The nonlethal cases range from a soldier failing a random drug test to more organized abuse.

In one case, seven members of the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division were found to have smoked hashish and/or ingested heroin numerous times, including some bought from members of the Afghan Army and police. The investigation found that one other brigade soldier acted as a lookout while others used the drugs.

Opium is a key revenue source in Afghanistan, both for the farmers and the insurgency, which can make money selling, transporting or processing the drugs. According to a U.N. report, revenue from opium production in Afghanistan soared by 133 per cent in 2011, to about $1.4 billion, or about one-tenth of the country's GDP.

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Associated Press writer Pauline Jelinek contributed to this report.

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Follow Lolita C. Baldor on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lbaldor

We won't be out of Afghanistan for at least 10 years!!!

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With Pact, U.S. Agrees to Help Afghans for Years to Come

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

Published: April 22, 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan — After months of negotiations, the United States and Afghanistan completed drafts of a strategic partnership agreement on Sunday that pledges American support for Afghanistan for 10 years after the withdrawal of combat troops at the end of 2014.

The agreement, whose text was not released, builds on hard-won new understandings the two countries reached in recent weeks on the thorny issues of detainees and special operations raids to broadly redefine the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States.

“The document finalized today provides a strong foundation for the security of Afghanistan, the region and the world, and is a document for the development of the region,” said Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the Afghan national security adviser, in a statement released by President Hamid Karzai’s office.

The United States ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, speaking on Sunday to Afghanistan’s national security council, said the agreement meant that the United States was committed to helping Afghanistan as “a unified, democratic, stable and secure state,” the statement said.

The talks to reach the deal were intense, and at times talks broke down when they became a stage for the geopolitics of the region around Afghanistan, where two powerful neighbors, Iran and Pakistan, are opposed to long-term American ties. But many Afghans, including some who are ambivalent about the American presence, believe that the country’s survival is tied to having such an agreement with Washington. They believe it will make clear to the Taliban and to regional powers that the Americans will not abandon Afghanistan now, as Washington did in the 1990s after the Soviets were pushed out. A loya jirga, or traditional council, convened by Mr. Karzai last fall strongly urged the government to sign a long-term agreement with the United States.

Mr. Spanta and Mr. Crocker initialed the draft agreement on Sunday at a meeting of the Afghan national security council. The draft will now be sent to Mr. Karzai and to the Afghan Parliament for review and approval, and also to President Obama and the White House. It will become final when signed by the two presidents, according to American and Afghan officials.

Western diplomats in Kabul said the agreement was an important marker and a positive one, both because it would help persuade other Western countries to continue to support Afghanistan and because it will signal all sides, including the Taliban, that they will not have a free hand to manipulate the country after 2014.

“The Iranians don’t like it because it shows the U.S. is going to be here for a long time,” said a European diplomat here, who noted that the Taliban would not like it for the same reason. “This is important because they cannot tell their soldiers now just to sit it out and wait for 2014,” the diplomat said.

The Taliban responded to the draft agreement within minutes, issuing a detailed statement condemning it as a giveaway to the Americans.

The goals of the agreement for the Americans, the Taliban statement said, are: “First goal: securing routes to the Central Asian and Caspian oil fields. Second goal: prevention of a movement in favor of a true Islamic government. Third goal: bringing secularism and liberalism to Afghanistan. Fourth goal: establishing an army hostile to Islam that protects Western interests. Fifth goal: continuous threats to Islamic countries in the region and the prevention of political and military ties between them and Afghanistan.” The new agreement covers four main areas: social and economic development, institution building, regional cooperation and security. It does not detail specific dollar amounts for American aid for the future because it is up to Congress to authorize and appropriate such aid annually.

Even so, the United States expects to make substantial contributions toward the cost of Afghanistan’s security forces beyond 2014, and is seeking contributions from its NATO allies as well. A total figure of $2.7 billion a year has been discussed, and it could easily be more; there would likely be aid for civilian programs as well. That would be a steep reduction from the amount the United States now spends here, which has been running close to $120 billion a year lately, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The question of where, how and in what circumstances American troops would operate in Afghanistan after 2014 would be left to the later detailed security agreement, according to American officials. Officials declined on Sunday to release the draft strategic partnership deal. “Until the agreement is finalized, we’re not in a position to discuss the elements it contains,” said Gavin Sundwall, the American Embassy spokesman in Kabul.

“Our goal is an enduring partnership with Afghanistan that strengthens Afghan sovereignty, stability and prosperity and that contributes to the shared goal of defeating Al Qaeda and its extremist allies,” he said. “We believe the agreement supports that goal.”

In many respects, the deal is more symbolic than substantive. It does not lay out specific dollar amounts of aid or name programs that the Americans will support, nor does it lay out what the American security presence will be or what role it will play. A more detailed security agreement is to come later, perhaps in the next year, Western diplomats said, after it becomes clear how much support European nations will give to the Afghan security forces.

The talks on the agreement were delayed repeatedly over the sensitive issues of night raids by American troops and the American operation of detention facilities. Ultimately, negotiators agreed to prepare detailed side agreements on those two issues. In March the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding shifting responsibility for all detention facilities in the country to the Afghans, and earlier this month they handed final authority for night raids to Afghan security forces, who are now carrying out all raids unless American assistance is requested.

With those two issues resolved, the strategic partnership was quickly completed.

Graham Bowley contributed reporting from Kabul, and Helene Cooper and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

Iran says it recovered data from captured US drone

Iran says it recovered data from captured US drone

Associated PressBy ALI AKBAR DAREINI

Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran claimed Sunday that it had recovered data from an American spy drone that went down in Iran last year, including information that the aircraft was used to spy on Osama bin Laden weeks before he was killed. Iran also said it was building a copy of the drone.

Similar unmanned surveillance planes have been used in Afghanistan for years and kept watch on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. But U.S. officials have said little about the history of the particular aircraft now in Iran's possession.

Tehran, which has also been known to exaggerate its military and technological prowess, says it brought down the RQ-170 Sentinel, a top-secret drone equipped with stealth technology, and has flaunted the capture as a victory for Iran and a defeat for the United States.

The U.S. says the drone malfunctioned and downplayed any suggestion that Iran could mine the aircraft for sensitive information because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.

The drone went down in December in eastern Iran and was recovered by Iran almost completely intact. After initially saying only that a drone had been lost near the Afghan-Iran border, American officials eventually confirmed the plane was monitoring Iran's military and nuclear facilities.

Washington has asked for it back, a request Iran rejected.

The chief of the aerospace division of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, told state television that the captured drone is a "national asset" for Iran and that he could not reveal full technical details.

But he did provide some samples of the data that he claimed Iranian experts had recovered from the aircraft, state television reported.

"There is almost no part hidden to us in this aircraft. We recovered part of the data that had been erased. There were many codes and characters. But we deciphered them by the grace of God," Hajizadeh said.

Among the drone's past missions, he said, was surveillance of the compound in northwest Pakistan where bin Laden lived. Hajizadeh claimed the drone flew over bin Laden's compound two weeks before the al-Qaida leader was killed there in May 2011 by U.S. Navy SEALs.

He also listed tests and maintenance that the drone had undergone, all of which, he said, had been recorded in the aircraft's memory. According to Hajizadeh, the drone was taken to California on Oct. 16, 2010, for "technical work" and then to Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Nov. 18, 2010.

He said it carried out flights from Afghanistan but ran into some problems that U.S. experts were unable to fix. Then the drone was taken in December 2010 to Los Angeles, where the aircraft's sensors underwent testing, Hajizadeh said.

"If we had not achieved access to software and hardware of this aircraft, we would be unable to get these details. Our experts are fully dominant over sections and programs of this plane," he said.

Hajizadeh said he provided the details to prove to the Americans "how far we've penetrated into this aircraft."

The U.S. Defense Department said it does not discuss intelligence matters and would not comment on the Iranian claims.

The semiofficial Mehr news agency said Iran had reverse-engineered the aircraft and has begun using that knowledge to build a copy of the drone.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday" that he views the reports with skepticism.

"There is a history here of Iranian bluster, particularly, now when they are on the defensive because of the economic sanctions against them."

He acknowledged that it was "not good for the U.S. when the drone went down in Iran and not good when the Iranians grabbed it." But the senator said he did not "have confidence at this point that they are really able to make a copy of it."

Iran has gone a long way in reverse-engineering some key technologies in the past three decades, particularly in the areas of nuclear and missile technology.

Iran's famous Shahab-3 missile, first displayed in 1998, is believed to be based on North Korea's Nodong-1 design. Iran obtained its first centrifuge from Pakistan in 1986 and later reverse-engineered it to develop its now advanced uranium-enrichment program.

Centrifuges, which purify uranium gas, are the central component of a process that can make fuel for power plants or — at higher levels of processing — weapons.

However, unlike the situation with the drone, the Iranian government usually touts these achievements as the result of an indigenous, home-grown research.

One area where there is concern is whether Iran or other states could reverse-engineer the chemical composition of the drone's radar-deflecting paint or the aircraft's sophisticated optics technology that allows operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air.

How much data there is on the drone is another question. Some surveillance technologies allow video to stream through to operators on the ground but do not store much collected data. If they do, it is encrypted.

Media reports claimed this week that Russia and China have asked Tehran to provide them with information on the drone, but Iran's Defense Ministry denied that.

Feds want to lock up accused criminals indefinitely

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Justice Dept. says predator law covers non-violent offenders

By Brad Heath, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department is asking federal courts to let it cast a wider net in its effort to indefinitely lock up accused sexual predators, urging judges to detain men who have never been convicted of sexual assaults.

By law, the government can detain sex offenders after their prison sentences end if it can prove that they have a serious mental illness and have molested children or committed other "sexually violent" crimes. In court filings, government lawyers have argued that the law also applies to men who have been convicted of crimes that did not result in physical harm, including threatening phone calls and exhibitionism. If courts agree, those men could remain in federal prison until psychologists say they are safe to set free.

Critics fear the government's interpretation would give Justice Department lawyers and prison psychologists too much power to decide who should be kept in custody. "This is the government exercising its most awesome power based on very, very vaguely worded standards," said Eric Janus, a law professor who has studied civil commitment laws.

That system is already under scrutiny. A USA TODAY investigation in March found that the department's effort to lock up accused predators has been beset by long delays and questionable medical determinations that kept dozens of men incarcerated for as long as five years even though they did not meet the requirements for detention.

Next month, Justice Department lawyers will ask an appeals court in Richmond, Va., to find that a man who made obscene telephone calls in which he threatened to rape and murder random women fits the definition of someone who committed "sexually violent" conduct.

Government lawyers have also asked a federal judge in North Carolina to find that a man who exposed himself to children in a supermarket met the law's definition of "child molestation."

In another case last month, the department convinced a federal judge that alcohol dependence and drug abuse are illnesses serious enough to justify civil commitment.

Few of the 20 states that have their own civil commitment systems expressly allow detention for such "hands-off" crimes.

The Justice Department declined to comment. The department's prison psychologists objected to such a broad interpretation, in part because of fears that "it would result in reviewing people who didn't need to be certified," said Anthony Jimenez, the former head of the civil commitment system.

Sexual predators rarely committed under Justice program

Sexual predators rarely committed under Justice program

By Brad Heath, USA TODAY

Updated 3/19/2012 11:34 AM

BUTNER, N.C. – Inside the sprawling federal prison here is a place the government reserves for the worst of the worst — sexual predators too dangerous to be set free.

Six years ago, the federal government set out to indefinitely detain some of the nation's most dangerous sex offenders, keeping them locked up even after their prison sentences had ended.

But despite years of effort, the government has so far won court approval for detaining just 15 men.

Far more often, men the U.S.Justice Department branded as "sexually dangerous" predators remained imprisoned here for years without a mandatory court hearing before the government was forced to let them go, a USA TODAY investigation has found. The Justice Department has either lost or dropped its cases against 61 of the 136 men it sought to detain. Some were imprisoned for more than four years without a trial before they were freed.

Dozens of others are still waiting for their day in court. They remain in a prison unit where authorities and former detainees said explicit drawings of children are commonplace, but where few of the men have received any treatment for the disorders that put them there.

Despite that, neither the Justice Department nor other watchdog agencies have offered any public assessment of how well the federal civil commitment law works.

For this investigation, USA TODAY reviewed all 136 cases that have been brought to court, drawing on thousands of pages of legal filings and dozens of interviews with attorneys, psychologists and former detainees.

The outcomes documented by that review have raised questions about a system meant to control men too seriously ill to control themselves. A federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., has already called delays in bringing the men to trial "troubling," and suggested that they could raise concerns about the detainees' constitutional right to due process. And Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., one of the law's key supporters, said "there will be somebody who will have to answer" for them.

"We need to be very, very careful in a free society about a system in which a group of people can make statements that result in someone being deprived of their liberty for a future crime," said Fred Berlin, the director of the Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. "If it's going to be done, it has to be done in a just and fair manner."

Many of the men the government sought to detain have been found guilty of molesting children or brutal sexual assaults. One killed a woman . U.S. Bureau of Prisons psychologists certified that the men also suffer from mental abnormalities making them "sexually dangerous," a determination that keeps them locked up while their cases are reviewed. By law, a federal judge must ultimately decide whether the government can prove the inmate is too dangerous to be released.

But in case after case, those determinations have come into question. In at least two cases, the government could not prove the men had committed crimes serious enough to justify committing them. Others had not been found guilty of a "hands-on" sex offense in decades. Some psychological assessments failed to fully account for men's ages, a key factor when assessing risk.

A spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, Chris Burke, said officials certify inmates as dangerous after "careful assessments by mental health professionals."

Anthony Jimenez, a psychologist who ran the commitment system for the Bureau of Prisons in 2007 and 2008, said officials had little time to prepare when Congress instructed them to start sifting out the most dangerous offenders as part of a broader crackdown on sex crimes. Some prison psychologists they turned to had no experience doing those types of reviews, he said.

"It was rushed, and initially, I believe, quality probably suffered," he said. About the documents

To investigate the 136 civil commitment cases the U.S. Justice Department has filed so far, USA TODAY reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and other public records. About 290 of the documents are published online with this story. Those documents offer important information about the government’s reasons for declaring that people are “sexually dangerous” and the reasons many of the men were ultimately released.

Wherever possible, USA TODAY redacted from those documents the names and other identifying details of victims of sex crimes. It did so because the newspaper has a long-standing practice of not naming the victims of sex crimes. Some of the documents also include graphic language describing sexual conduct.

'Totally haphazard and inconsistent'

Sean Francis was in prison for a series of graphic phone calls in 2008 when psychologists first considered committing him as sexually dangerous. On the phone, Francis had threatened to rape and murder female college students in three states, sometimes offering chilling details about whom they lived with or the car one woman drove , according to court records. He also had been accused of raping a college student years earlier, though he was not arrested and has never been charged with a sexual assault.

The prison officials who reviewed his case decided he didn't meet the legal criteria for detention as a sexual predator, and he was released from prison. In 2009, Francis was arrested and sent back to prison for violating the terms of his probation , which prohibited him from viewing pornography.

His probation officer told prison officials , "I don't see how your office could draw any conclusion other than civil commitment," according to court records. Worst of the worst

The number of people certified as “sexually dangerous” by federal prison officials, subject to review by a federal judge:

Psychologists looked at his case again and certified him as sexually dangerous .

Francis' attorneys said they never understood what had changed. "It was totally haphazard and inconsistent," one of Francis' attorneys, Woody Webb, said. Whatever it was, it was enough that Francis was moved to Butner's sex offender unit, where he said he passed the days sleeping late, crocheting and listening to an AM/FM radio.

"I don't look in the mirror and say I'm proud of who I see," Francis, now 33, said last month. "But I didn't belong in there."

In late January, two years after he arrived at Butner, a federal court agreed.

U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle questioned in a written order whether the government could prove Francis had ever committed the "sexually violent conduct" the law requires as a prerequisite to detaining someone, and said the Justice Department hadn't proved he was dangerous. The Justice Department has appealed.

Two weeks later, guards summoned Francis and another inmate over a loudspeaker, told them to collect their belongings and gave them bus tickets home. Francis took the bus to the New York City suburbs, where he moved in with his father and stepmother and found a job.

Francis said he's trying to keep a low profile. He's required to wear a GPS ankle bracelet, which he hides under his sock. Despite the federal government's effort to detain him indefinitely as a "sexually dangerous person," under New York law, he isn't required to register as a sex offender.

Never making it to trial

About 2,000 people a year end up in federal prison for sex crimes, but only the most dangerous qualify for commitment.

To successfully commit a person, government attorneys have to prove three things: First, that he molested a child or committed a violent sex crime; second, that he has a mental disorder; and third, that his illness means he will have "serious difficulty" refraining from new sex crimes if freed.

The last step is the hardest, in part because studies have repeatedly found that most sex offenders are never convicted of another sex crime.

In the 1980s, a devastating series of studies suggested that psychologists' predictions about who was dangerous were no more reliable than a coin toss. So in the years that followed, researchers analyzed records on thousands of sex offenders, looking for the telltale markers that could identify groups of people most likely to re-offend. What they came up with is a lot like the system insurers use to figure out which types of people are most likely to have an accident.

Early on, Bureau of Prisons reviewers "just didn't have the same expertise" as outside psychologists in making those assessments, said Amy Phenix, a California psychologist who helped train them. In some cases, outside experts — brought in to review the cases years later — concluded the inmates didn't belong in Butner, she said. "There were differences of opinion, and in some cases it was left up to the U.S. attorney to make decisions about what to do."

Still, even fellow detainees said they were surprised the day Andrew Galo walked out Butner's front gate.

Galo had been in prison for taking sexually explicit photographs of his girlfriend's 13-year-old daughter when the Justice Department declared him too dangerous to release; before that, he had spent time in prison in Pennsylvania for sexually abusing two nephews, according to court records . "Everybody was shocked. It was like, why are they letting him out?" said Philip Katon, who spent three years at Butner before the government dropped his case, too.

At least 40 of the 136 commitment cases the government has brought so far — nearly one in three — ended when the Justice Department simply dismissed them. Frequently, it did so years after the men's criminal sentences had ended. In at least eight of those cases, court records show the government found other ways to keep the men locked up, but many of those convicted — including men with long track records of abusing children — simply went free.

The Justice Department would not comment on its reasons for dismissing particular cases. Spokesman Charles Miller said attorneys consider "the totality of the circumstances," including the person's "age, health status, change of circumstances, supervised release terms, family support and the opinions of all of the forensic experts."

In at least some of the cases, however, Justice Department attorneys conceded in court they simply didn't have enough evidence. Last year, for example, the department acknowledged that "a more detailed review" of its case against Wayne Hicks — who had then been detained since 2007 — showed that the government "will not be able to meet its burden." The Justice Department dismissed the case; Hicks went to live at a Raleigh, N.C., homeless shelter.

In another case last year, the Justice Department dropped its effort to commit Joseph Edwards, who had been convicted of hitting a girl over the head with a rock, dragging her down an embankment by her hair and raping her. Three years after he was detained at Butner, a prison psychologist told prosecutors she didn't think Edwards could be committed.

Six months later, the Justice Department dropped the case and let Edwards go.

Jimenez, the former head of the bureau's certification review process, said officials consulted with lawyers before declaring someone dangerous, but ultimately based decisions on their own clinical judgments — even when they weren't convinced the evaluations would hold up in court.

"It's not a willy-nilly, 'this guy looks like a bad guy' process," he said. "If we thought someone was really dangerous but there wasn't a strong legal case, we might very well still push it for the public interest.

"Hopefully justice is served in the end," he said.

On paper, Katon, too, seemed like a good candidate to be committed. Before he went to federal prison for lying about his criminal record on an application to buy a rifle, he had been found guilty of molesting a 26-year-old disabled woman in Vermont. Before that, he had been convicted of molesting his then-girlfriend's three children, and was accused of assaulting her cousin, according to court records . Past offenses alone cannot show whether someone is mentally ill or likely to commit new crimes but are often among the key considerations.

Katon arrived at Butner in 2008, months before he was supposed to be released; he said prison officials told him he was being moved there from a South Carolina prison as a steppingstone on his way back to Vermont. Two months later, he was certified as sexually dangerous. "It was actually scary to be there because you didn't know if you were going to stay or if they were going to release you. It's like everybody's thrown into a hat and they pick some people out. It's scary not knowing what they're going to do with you," he said.

His time at Butner ended as abruptly as it began. In August — after being detained for more than three years — the Justice Department dismissed its case against him and put him on a bus to Vermont, where he lives with his mother outside Burlington. He registered as a sex offender, but said he isn't required to wear a GPS monitoring device or avoid contact with children, something other men released from Butner have been required to do. His probation officer has given him permission to go to Upstate New York sometimes to play bingo.

The Justice Department has never explained publicly why it dropped the case.

"I've changed a lot," Katon said. His crimes "were just something that happened out of the blue, and will never happen again."

Cases fall apart in court

The government's determinations have fared little better before federal judges. Records show the Justice Department has lost more trials than it has won.

Its cases have crumbled because of weak evidence, faulty psychological evaluations and an inability to convince judges the detainees have mental conditions so serious they will find it difficult to not re-offend.

In December, for example, a judge in Raleigh rejected the government's attempts to commit Markis Revland. By law, the government can only commit someone who has molested a child or committed another violent sex crime. Revland's criminal record, though extensive, didn't seem to include either — he had been convicted on child pornography charges, and of public urination and indecent exposure. The government based its case instead in part on a staggering string of confessions Revland made during a prison-run treatment program: 149 victims .

Such confessions are often suspect. Some sex offenders volunteer for treatment programs in part to escape danger from fellow inmates. Courts have said those who don't admit to past crimes face the risk of being thrown out of the program.

Revland's confessions were especially problematic. According to the latest census, only about 114 children live in Revland's small Iowa town. Despite the shocking number of children he told psychologists he had abused, he had never been charged with sexual abuse. And many of the crimes he said he committed would have occurred when he was in state prison. Revland declined to be interviewed but testified he invented all 149 victims to satisfy his therapists because he feared he would be kicked out of the program and sent back to Leavenworth, Kan., where he said he had been violently attacked by other inmates .

Revland "would be the Charles Manson of child molesters if even a small portion of the 149 incidents had actually happened," U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman wrote in a December order freeing him. "And yet the government offered no evidence to independently verify that any of these incidents occurred or that any of them — even one — ever resulted in investigation or prosecution."

Even when the government can prove someone committed sex crimes, it has struggled to show he remains dangerous.

Andrew Swarm was first diagnosed as a pedophile more than a decade ago. He collected child pornography on the Internet, and molested at least three young girls, according to court records . But Swarm also seemed to go out of his way to get caught. He gave one 10-year-old girl he fantasized about what appeared to be an explicit drawing of himself, knowing she would give it to her parents . After he inappropriately touched an 11-year-old, he gave her a note warning that "I want to kiss and touch you in ways that I shouldn't. I need you to make sure I get help and don't have the chance to do this," according to court records.

Swarm said he agonized over his impulses. He tried to get treatment. He tried to get caught. He tried to castrate himself with rubber bands . "I don't go out and molest children. I've never done that," he said. "It was such a misery in the first place to have these feelings. It was a nightmare."

The government certified him as sexually dangerous in 2007. At the time, he was serving a four-month sentence in prison for violating his probation by not telling his probation officer quickly enough that a friend had briefly left him alone with a young child, and that another girl had climbed onto his lap while he was visiting relatives before he shooed her off.

"There was no harm, no foul," said the girl's father, whom USA TODAY agreed not to name to protect his daughter's privacy. He said he and his wife plan to ask Swarm's probation officer whether they can resume visiting him. "I honestly don't think he's dangerous," he said.

The judge who ultimately heard Swarm's commitment case — nearly four years after he was detained — agreed and released him .

Delays that span years

More than 40 other men have been waiting a year or longer to find out what a federal court will do with them.

The cases have dragged on in part because the Bureau of Prisons typically waited until the final weeks of their sentences to certify most of the men as dangerous, effectively guaranteeing they would remain incarcerated months or years longer. Burke, the prison system spokesman, said the agency "intends for the process to be completed well in advance of an inmate's scheduled release date." Jimenez said the Bureau of Prisons' policy was to make those decisions more than a year in advance so prisoners would know whether or not they are going home when their prison sentences end.

So far, the government has met that mark only once, though the three men it certified so far this year were closer to that goal. Since the law began, half of the men were certified within a week of when they were scheduled to be released, court records show. Fourteen were certified on the same day they were supposed to go home.

The hearings were delayed longer when a federal court in Raleigh ordered most of the cases be put on hold — sometimes before the men had been appointed lawyers — while legal challenges to the civil commitment law worked their way through courts. Lawyers for most of the detainees never challenged that decision. "It seemed like it had a low likelihood of success," said Eric Brignac, an attorney with the Federal Public Defender's office in Raleigh.

One of those challenges, brought on behalf of a man named Graydon Comstock and four others, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010. The justices upheld the law, finding that Congress "has the constitutional power to act in order to protect nearby (and other) communities from the danger federal prisoners may pose." Their decision came 3½ years after Comstock — who had been convicted of possessing child pornography, and who had confessed to patronizing child prostitutes while working overseas — was first locked up as sexually dangerous in November 2006. It wasn't until then that the Justice Department and lawyers appointed to represent the five men started hiring experts to scrutinize the cases in anticipation of trials. That process took another year.

"Things take time," said former U.S. attorney George Holding. "These men are accused of being a threat to society, and the system has to play itself out."

It was November 2011 before a judge reviewed Comstock's case. By then, Comstock was 69 and had already suffered from prostate cancer, a heart attack and a stroke . His hearing in a federal courtroom in Raleigh lasted two days; when it was over, Judge Friedman concluded the government couldn't show he was dangerous and released him. Comstock moved in with his sister, a college English instructor, in Arkansas. Now, mainly, he tries not to be noticed.

"When I heard about this law, I assumed it was for the most dangerous people, and I assumed it wasn't me," Comstock said. "I said I wouldn't be convicted, and I wasn't. But it took six years to get there."

Courts, too, have expressed growing frustration at the delays.

"They're in it for four years and change," Judge Boyle complained last year during one court hearing . "There's no horizon. It's just darkness."

The federal court in Raleigh sped up the process this year, scheduling more cases for hearings. But there are still at least 26 men waiting for their cases to be decided who have now been locked up an additional three years by the civil commitment program. One man, Thomas Matherly, has awaited a trial since 2006; it's now scheduled for later this month. The delays have been so significant, at least two of the 15 men the government successfully committed have already gone home.

Miller said the Justice Department is "satisfied with the way these cases are now being expedited."

Though ostensibly locked up because they are mentally ill and in need of treatment, only a handful have enrolled in Butner's treatment program for sex offenders. Their lawyers urged them not to, because anything they tell their psychologists is likely to be used against them at trial .

That means those who are being released are going home with little help preparing for life outside prison. A few of the detainees found jobs within the prison: cooking, cleaning or working at a factory that makes eyeglasses for inmates, said another former detainee, Jeffrey Neuhauser. One detainee briefly taught a GED program.

'I don't think he can change'

At least nine of the men who were let go without being committed have been convicted of new crimes or have violated probation. Two were found guilty of felonies; another has agreed to plead guilty to a felony later this month.

Among them, Jay Abregana stands out. His record was already sordid when the government certified him as sexually dangerous — he had been convicted of mailing pictures of himself having oral sex with a teenage boy and of exposing himself to a 12-year-old in a movie theater. In prison, he was kicked out of a sex offender treatment program after he performed oral sex on five inmates. When he got out, he violated his probation by having "sexual contact " with a 17-year-old in a shopping mall bathroom, and using the Internet to reach out to three other boys , one just 10.

Psychologists certified that Abregana was sexually dangerous in 2007. In 2008, a federal judge ordered the government to release him , concluding the Justice Department couldn't prove his attraction to boys who had reached puberty was a sufficiently serious mental disorder, or that he would have "serious difficulty" not re-offending.

Abregana had been free for less than two years when he introduced himself to a 12-year-old boy he met at a video game store. Abregana bought the boy gifts in exchange for sex, according to court records and the boy's mother, whom USA TODAY agreed not to name to protect her son's privacy. He also recorded the abuse.

The boy's mother said she suspected something was wrong. One afternoon, she said, she found her son with a cellphone, something the single mother of five couldn't afford to buy him. Then she said she intercepted a text message from "Jay," asking her son to call before coming over.

"Why?" she wrote back.

Abregana wrote that his brother had just gotten out of jail, she said. Abregana's identical twin brother, Jed, has a sordid record of his own; he was convicted of sexual assault and spent time in federal prison for viewing child pornography . But the government had not certified him as sexually dangerous.

At first, the boy denied anything had happened. But the next morning, he came to her in tears and told her the truth, his mother said. She called the police. Abregana pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to 20 years in state prison.

"I'm a firm believer that people can change," the mother said. "But I don't think he can change."

Now, she worries about her son, who's 13, in therapy and still gets teased about what happened by classmates and siblings. And she worries about Abregana, and whether 20 years in prison will be long enough to stop him from hurting someone else.

Contributing: Amanda Muscavage

Woman will soon be allowed to murder for the American Empire???

Marines Moving Women Toward the Front Lines

By JAMES DAO

Published: April 24, 2012

The Marine Corps, the most male of the armed services, is taking its first steps toward integrating women into war-fighting units, starting with its infantry officer school at Quantico, Va., and ground combat battalions that had once been closed to women.

The moves — announced by Gen. James F. Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, in a message sent to all Marines on Monday night — are intended largely to study how women perform in formerly male-only units, and reflect new Pentagon rules released in February allowing women to serve closer to the front line.

The new Pentagon policy continues the ban on women serving as infantrymen, Special Operations commandos and in other direct-combat positions. But it has opened the door to thousands of new jobs for women, who represent about 15 percent of the force.

The Army, which like the Marine Corps has excluded women from many jobs because of the physical demands or proximity to combat, is also studying ways to integrate women into ground combat units.

In the coming months, General Amos said in an interview, the Marine Corps plans to assign about 40 women to 19 battalions of six different types: artillery, tank, assault amphibian, combat engineer, combat assault and low-altitude air defense. Infantry battalions, however, will remain closed to women.

General Amos said he would limit the initial group to more mature Marines: gunnery sergeants, staff sergeants and company-grade officers, meaning lieutenants or captains. Navy medical officers, chaplains and corpsmen could also be assigned to those battalions.

The women will serve in specialties they already have been trained in — administration, logistics, communications, supply or motor transport, but not intelligence — and will be assigned to staff billets as they come open. The jobs will be at the battalion level, one step closer to the front line than had been previously allowed, though not quite at the very tip of the spear.

“I’ve tried to approach this exactly the way the secretary wants me to: responsibly, honestly,” General Amos said in the interview, referring to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta. “This has to be measured, responsible.”

Starting this summer, the corps will also start allowing women to attend its infantry officer course, a demanding three-month school at Quantico, where Marines are taught how to make command decisions while fatigued and under extreme duress.

The women who graduate from the course, however, will not become infantry officers; instead, they will move on to training programs in other occupations open to them, like intelligence, supply or administration.

The Marine Corps also plans to collect data from female and male volunteers who will be asked to do three physically demanding tasks: carry a heavy machine gun, evacuate a casualty and do a 20-kilometer march carrying about 70 pounds. Marine officers said the data would not necessarily be used to formulate a new kind of physical fitness test, but to help senior commanders evaluate the relative strength thresholds of male and female Marines.

General Amos also said he planned to ask all Marines to fill out an anonymous online survey on issues relating to women in the Marine Corps. “I’m not one bit afraid of the results of this,” he said. “I’m very bullish on women.”

The corps’ plans were first reported by Marine Corps Times.

Though women are technically barred from combat roles, they have fought and died alongside men in Iraq and Afghanistan, where American forces could come under attack almost anywhere. More than 140 women have been killed in the two conflicts.

The Marine Corps is the most male-dominated of the armed services, with 13,800 women making up about 7 percent of its total force of 197,800. Some critics say that with its infantry-centric culture — “Every Marine a rifleman” is a mantra — the corps has been more resistant to gender integration than the other services.

Greg Jacob, a former Marine infantry officer who is policy director for Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group, said he was concerned that the corps might try to use data from the physical tests to prove that women are not strong enough to be infantrymen.

But he also praised some of the new measures, saying that putting women into more front-line jobs would help advance their careers. “It puts women in a position where they are more likely to be in an expeditionary or combat role, which in the future will be looked at when it comes time for assignments and promotions,” he said.

TSA screeners allegedly let drug-filled luggage through LAX for cash

The TSA and the so called "war on terror" is just a lame excuse to flush the 4th Amendment down the toilet and expand the "war on drugs"

Source

TSA screeners allegedly let drug-filled luggage through LAX for cash

April 25, 2012 | 1:08 pm

Four current and former Transportation Security Administration screeners have been arrested and face charges of taking bribes and looking the other way while suitcases filled with cocaine, methamphetamine or marijuana passed through X-ray machines at Los Angeles International Airport, federal authorities announced Wednesday.

The TSA screeners, who were arrested Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, allegedly received up to $2,400 in cash bribes in exchange for allowing large drug shipments to pass through checkpoints in what the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles called a “significant breakdown” of security.

In addition to the two current and two former screeners, prosecutors also indicted two alleged drug couriers and a third who allegedly tried to smuggle 11 pounds of cocaine but was nabbed when he went through the wrong security checkpoint.

The TSA employees “placed greed above the nation’s security needs,” Andre Birotte Jr., U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement.

The 40-page indictment outlines five alleged smuggling incidents over a six-month period last year. In one incident, screeners schemed to allow for about eight pounds of methamphetamine to pass through security, then went to an airport restroom where he was handed $600, the second half of the payment for that delivery, according to prosecutors.

Briane Grey, acting special agent in charge of the DEA in Los Angeles, said the scheme was particularly reprehensible because it took place at LAX.

“The defendants traded on their positions at one the world’s most crucial airport security checkpoints, used their special access for criminal ends, and compromised the safety and security of their fellow citizens for their own profit,” he said in a statement.

The indicted screeners are Naral Richardson, 30, and Joy White, 27, who were both fired by TSA last year; and John Whitfield, 23, and Capeline McKinney, 25, both currently employed as screeners. All four have been taken into custody, and face up to life in prison if convicted.

The accused drug couriers are Duane Eleby, 28, who is expected to surrender, and Terry Cunningham and Stephen Bayliss, both 28, who are both at large.

The TSA’s security director at LAX said the agency was assisting with the investigation. “While these arrests are a disappointment, TSA is committed to holding our employees to the highest standards,” Randy Parsons said in a statement.

TSA defends pat-down of 4-year-old

I am just joking, but the idiots at the TSA and Homeland Security weren't!

Source

TSA defends pat-down of 4-year-old

Apr. 25, 2012 09:56 PM

Associated Press

WICHITA, Kan. -- The grandmother of a 4-year-old girl who became hysterical during a security screening at a Kansas airport said Wednesday that the child was forced to undergo a pat-down after hugging her, with security agents yelling and calling the crying girl an uncooperative suspect.

The incident has been garnering increasing media and online attention since the child's mother, Michelle Brademeyer of Montana, detailed the ordeal in a public Facebook post last week. The Transportation Security Administration is defending its agents, despite new procedures aimed at reducing pat-downs of children.

The child's grandmother, Lori Croft, told The Associated Press that Brademeyer and her daughter, Isabella, initially passed through security at the Wichita airport without incident. The girl then ran over to briefly hug Croft, who was awaiting a pat-down after tripping the alarm, and that's when TSA agents insisted the girl undergo a physical pat-down.

Isabella had just learned about "stranger danger" at school, her grandmother said, adding that the girl was afraid and unsure about what was going on.

"She started to cry, saying 'No I don't want to,' and when we tried talking to her she ran," Croft said. "They yelled, 'We are going to shut down the airport if you don't grab her.'"

But she said the family's main concern was the lack of understanding from TSA agents that they were dealing with a 4-year-old child, not a terror suspect.

"There was no common sense and there was no compassion," Croft said. "That was our biggest fault with the whole thing -- not that they are following security procedures, because I understand that they have to do that."

Brademeyer, of Missoula, Mont., wrote a public Facebook post last week about the April 15 incident, claiming TSA treated her daughter "no better than if she had been a terrorist." The posting was taken down Wednesday. Another post said the family had filed formal complaints with the TSA and the airport.

The TSA released a statement Tuesday saying it explained to the family why additional security procedures were necessary and that agents didn't suspect or suggest the child was carrying a firearm.

"TSA has reviewed the incident and determined that our officers followed proper screening procedures in conducting a modified pat-down on the child," the agency said.

The statement noted that the agency recently implemented modified screening procedures for children age 12 and younger to further reduce the need for pat-downs of children, such as multiple passes through a metal detector and advanced imaging technology.

"These changes in protocol will ultimately reduce -- though not eliminate -- pat-downs of children," the statement said. "In this case, however, the child had completed screening but had contact with another member of her family who had not completed the screening process."

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, pressed the TSA for more information Wednesday. Tester, a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said he was concerned the TSA went too far.

"I am a staunch advocate for effective transportation security, but I'm also a strong advocate for common sense and the freedoms we enjoy as Americans," Tester wrote to TSA Administrator John Pistole. "Any report of abuse of the power entrusted to officers of the TSA is especially concerning -- especially if it involves children."

In a phone interview from her home in Fountain Valley, Calif., Croft said Brademeyer tried to no avail to get TSA agents to use a wand on the frightened girl or allow her to walk through the metal detector again. She also said TSA agents wanted to screen her granddaughter alone in a separate room.

"She was kicking and screaming and fighting and in hysterics," Croft said. "At that point my daughter ran up to her against TSA's orders because she said, 'My daughter is terrified, I can't leave her.'"

The incident went on for maybe 10 minutes, until a manager came in and allowed agents to pat the girl down while she was screaming but being held by her mother. The family was then allowed to go to their next gate with a TSA agent following them.

Croft said that for the first few nights after coming home, Isabelle had nightmares and talked about kidnappers. She said TSA agents had shouted at the girl, telling her to calm down and saying the suspect wasn't cooperating.

"To a 4-year-old's perspective that's what it was to her because they didn't explain anything and she did not know what was going on," Croft said. "She saw people grabbing at her and raising their voices. To her, someone was trying to kidnap her or harm her in some way."

Don't blame us for bombing Iran

Source

Israel army chief: Other nations could strike Iran

By DIAA HADID | Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's military chief said Thursday that other countries have readied their armed forces for a potential strike against Iran's nuclear sites to keep Tehran from acquiring atomic weapons.

Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz did not specify which nations might be willing to support or take direct action against Iran. Still, his comments were one of the strongest hints yet that Israel may have the backing of other countries to strike the Islamic Republic to prevent it from developing nuclear arms.

"The military force is ready," Gantz said. "Not only our forces, but other forces as well."

"We all hope that there will be no necessity to use this force, but we are absolutely sure of its existence," he told The Associated Press, adding that he was not speaking on behalf of any other nation.

Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, and that it does not aim to develop atomic weapons.

Israel, which views a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, has said it will not allow Tehran to acquire a nuclear bomb. It cites Iranian calls for Israel's destruction, Tehran's support for militant groups and its development of missiles capable of striking the Jewish state.

Israel's key ally, the United States, favors diplomacy and economic sanctions and has said military action on Iran's nuclear facilities should only be a last resort if all else fails. U.S. logistical and diplomatic support would likely be crucial to any potential Israeli strike.

Washington and other major powers have imposed a series of crippling economic sanctions while opening a dialogue with Iran.

Gantz said that in his assessment Iran is seeking to develop its "military nuclear capability," but that the Islamic Republic would ultimately bow to international pressure and decide against building a weapon.

The key to that pressure, he said, were sanctions and the threat of a military strike.

Gantz's stance on Iran's intentions appeared to put him at odds with Israel's political leaders, who have staked out a more hardline position. Gantz denied that was the case Thursday, saying there was no internal disagreement over Iran's aims.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN on Tuesday that international sanctions have not changed Iran's behavior, and that the country continues to enrich uranium — a key step toward developing a weapon.

The sanctions "haven't rolled back the Iranian program or even stopped it by one iota," Netanyahu said.

The C.I.A.’s Misuse of Secrecy

The C.I.A.’s Misuse of Secrecy

By JAMEEL JAFFER and NATHAN FREED WESSLER

Published: April 29, 2012

IN Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere the C.I.A. has used drones to kill thousands of people — including several Americans. Officials have aggressively defended the controversial program, telling journalists that it is effective, lawful and closely supervised.

But in court, the Central Intelligence Agency refuses even to acknowledge that the targeted killing program exists. The agency’s argument is based on a 35-year-old judicial doctrine called Glomar, which allows government agencies to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of the records that have been requested.

The doctrine sometimes serves a legitimate purpose, but the C.I.A. has grossly abused it, in cases relating to the targeted killing program and other counterterrorism operations. It is invoking the doctrine not to protect legitimately classified information from disclosure, but to shield controversial decisions from public scrutiny and to spare officials from having to defend their policies in court.

The doctrine owes its name to a ship called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which the C.I.A. used in the early 1970s to salvage a sunken Soviet submarine. When The Los Angeles Times exposed the effort in 1975, the agency tried to suppress coverage, asking news organizations not to publish follow-up stories. Harriet A. Phillippi, a journalist for Rolling Stone, filed a FOIA request to learn more about the C.I.A.’s effort. The C.I.A. refused to confirm or deny the existence of the records Ms. Phillippi had requested.

The C.I.A.’s response was unusual. Ordinarily, an agency served with a FOIA request is required to produce a list of relevant records. The agency must then release the listed records or cite specific legal justifications for keeping them secret. In the Glomar case, the C.I.A. argued that there were circumstances in which it was impossible for an agency to acknowledge even the existence of relevant records without also revealing some fact that the government had a right to withhold.

There are indeed cases in which merely confirming or denying the existence of certain records would reveal a classified fact, such as whether a particular person is a covert intelligence agent or the current target of lawful surveillance.

Those cases, however, are far less common than the C.I.A.’s increasingly frequent reliance on the Glomar doctrine would suggest. A study by the National Security Archive shows that federal court opinions cited the doctrine three times as often in the decade after 9/11 as in the quarter-century preceding it.

There has been a qualitative shift, too. Most of the cases before 2001, including the 1976 Glomar case, involved relatively narrow intelligence-gathering programs that were plainly within the C.I.A.’s mandate. More recently, the agency has used the Glomar doctrine to shield exceptionally controversial programs, and even unlawful conduct, including the torture and rendition of terrorism suspects.

The doctrine has also been invoked since 9/11 to shape public debate. A slew of administration officials have already spoken about the targeted killing program to reporters, both anonymously and on the record, and President Obama himself answered questions about the program during an online town hall. Thus the Glomar doctrine is not serving to keep the targeted killing program a secret, but rather to control which facts about the program are made public, and when. Not coincidentally, the C.I.A.’s reliance on the Glomar doctrine also makes it more difficult for individuals injured by the agency’s counterterrorism policies to challenge those policies in court.

Without pressure from outside, the C.I.A. is unlikely to end its manipulation of the classification system. But the Justice Department, which represents the C.I.A. in court, could decline to defend questionable invocations of the doctrine. President Obama, who at some important junctures has been receptive to arguments for transparency, could direct the C.I.A. to answer FOIA requests that it would prefer to evade.

In one of the American Civil Liberties Union’s cases relating to the targeted killing program (a case in which The New York Times is also involved), the government recently told the court that officials “at the highest level” are re-evaluating the government’s stance on the secrecy of the targeted killing program. This is a noncommittal statement, but perhaps a promising one. The administration should direct the C.I.A. to abandon its pretense that the very existence of the targeted killing program is a secret. It should also direct the C.I.A. to release the legal memos that authorized the program and the evidence it relied on to carry out the drone strikes that killed three Americans in Yemen last year.

If the administration fails to change course, the courts should intervene. The Glomar case itself supplies a useful map. While the appeals court in that case accepted the legitimacy of the Glomar doctrine, it found that the C.I.A. had not sufficiently justified its reliance on it. It ruled that Ms. Phillippi, the reporter, could submit written questions to the agency and depose agency personnel in order to “clarify the Agency’s position or to identify the procedures by which that position was established.” Faced with the prospect of actually having to defend its Glomar invocation, the C.I.A. opted for limited disclosure instead.

The C.I.A.’s manifest abuse of the Glomar doctrine undermines public confidence in the classification system, distorts public debate about issues of extraordinary importance, and enables an agency with sweeping authority — including the authority to kill — to operate with insufficient public oversight. The president, the attorney general and the federal courts have the power to end this abuse, and they should.

Jameel Jaffer is a deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, where Nathan Freed Wessler is a fellow in the National Security Project.

CIA Interrogator say Obama is more brutal then Bush????

Source

Ex-CIA Interrogator: Obama's War on Terror Is Less Ethical Than Bush's

By John Hudson

The Atlantic Wire

Ex-CIA Interrogator: Obama's War on Terror Is Less Ethical Than Bush's

The former head of the CIA's Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez says President Obama is waging the nation's war against radical Islam in a far more brutal manner than his predecessor President George W. Bush.

"We don't capture anybody any more," Rodriguez told 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl on Sunday. "Their default option of this Administration has been to ... take no prisoners ... How could it be more ethical to kill people rather than capture them? I never understood that one."

Those remarks by Rodriguez have been largely overshadowed by his more controversial defense of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which is laid out in his new book out today called Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives. But what was interesting to observe last night was the overlap in views by advocates of enhanced interrogation (a.k.a. torture) such as Rodriguez and opponents of such tactics, like your Glenn Greenwalds and Ron Pauls, who essentially agree on one important point: It's better to capture suspected terrorists and draw out information from them than assassinate them without due process.

The latest high-profile case to raise this issue was the assassination of American-born YouTube preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by Hellfire missiles fired from a drone in September. There wasn't a move to attempt to interview al-Awlaki, he was just blown to smithereens. And to many civil libertarians, that exercise of power against an American citizen is far more threatening than what we saw from the Bush administration. "How can anyone who vocally decried Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detention powers without judicial review possibly justify Obama’s executions without judicial review?" Greenwald wrote at the time. "How can the former (far more mild powers) have been such an assault on Everything We Stand For while the latter is a tolerable and acceptable assertion of war powers?"

It's a valid point and will likely continue to gain traction as Rodriguez launches his book tour. Clearly, however, it's not the focus of Rodriguez's spiel, which is a larger defense of enhanced interrogation. On that front, he's got more of an uphill battle. As Reuters reported Friday, Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats are about to end their almost three-year-long investigation of "enhanced interrogation" and will report that it had little success in eliciting intelligence. "One official said investigators found 'no evidence' such enhanced interrogations played 'any significant role' in the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs," reported Mark Hosenball. While that report doesn't bode well for Rodriguez's case, neither did his vague pronouncement that the enhanced interrogation "saved lives." With the lack of specifics in his 60 Minutes interview, supporters of torture had probably better hope there's more in his book to make the case. See the interview that aired last night below:

FBI agents stop crime plot they created!!!!

Source

FBI: 5 men wanted to blow up Ohio bridge

May. 1, 2012 07:42 AM

Associated Press

CLEVELAND -- Federal authorities say five men have been arrested in an alleged plot to blow up a bridge near Cleveland.

The FBI said Tuesday there was no danger to the public because the explosive devices were inoperable and were controlled by an undercover FBI employee.

The men were arrested Monday on charges of conspiracy and trying to use explosive to damage property affecting interstate commerce. They range in age from 20 and 35. Authorities say at least three of the men are self-described anarchists and are not tied to international terrorism.

The FBI says the target of the plot was a bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in the Brecksville area, roughly 15 miles south of downtown Cleveland.

Only terrorists chew khat

When I lived in Los Angeles before khat was made illegal you could go to Little India and buy khat there.

Source

Britain arrests 7 on suspicion of funding terror

May. 1, 2012 07:18 AM

Associated Press

LONDON -- Seven people have been arrested in Britain on suspicion of financing terrorism in Somalia by smuggling a leaf that can produce a mild high into the United States, officials said Tuesday.

Scotland Yard said the group was arrested as part of an operation that involved Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative branch of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The operation was investigating a network suspected of illegally exporting a leaf known as khat from the U.K., where it is legal, to the U.S. and Canada, where it is a controlled substance, Scotland Yard said.

"Law enforcement had developed leads, in the U.K. and U.S., that khat was being transshipped through the U.K., then illegally smuggled into the United States," said Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "The proceeds generated by this illegal activity (were) then transferred back to Somalia."

He added that U.S. law enforcement is continuing to work closely with its counterparts overseas on the investigation.

British police said one woman and six men were arrested early Tuesday at four separate residences in London, Coventry and Cardiff, Wales.

Those four homes are being searched along with seven other residential addresses and a business address in Coventry, police added.

Police said the seven people arrested in the early morning raids are suspected of involvement in funding a terrorist organization and laundering the proceeds of crime for that purpose.

All of the suspects have been brought to a London police station for questioning.

Not all Afghanistan attacks being reported

Source

Not all Afghanistan attacks being reported

U.S. mum on non-fatal 'insider' assaults on GIs

by Robert Burns - Apr. 30, 2012 10:58 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The military is underreporting the number of times that Afghan soldiers and police open fire on American and other foreign troops.

The U.S.-led coalition routinely reports each time an American or other foreign soldier is killed by an Afghan in uniform. But the Associated Press has learned it does not report insider attacks in which the Afghan wounds or misses his U.S. or allied target. It also does not report the wounding of troops who were attacked alongside those who were killed.

Such attacks reveal a level of mistrust and ill will between the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan counterparts in an increasingly unpopular war. The U.S. and its military partners are working more closely with Afghan troops in preparation for handing off security responsibility to them by the end of 2014.

In recent weeks, an Afghan soldier opened fire on a group of American soldiers but missed the group entirely. The Americans quickly shot him to death.

Not a word about this was reported by the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, as the coalition is formally known. It was disclosed to the AP by a U.S. official who was granted anonymity in order to give a fuller picture of the "insider" problem.

The ISAF also said nothing about last week's attack in which two Afghan policemen in Kandahar province fired on U.S. soldiers, wounding two. Reporters learned of it from Afghan officials and from U.S. officials in Washington.

The two Afghan policemen were shot to death by the Americans present.

Just last Wednesday, an attack that killed a U.S. Army special-forces soldier, Staff Sgt. Andrew Brittonmihalo, 25, of Simi Valley, Calif., also wounded three other American soldiers. The death was reported by ISAF as an insider attack, but it made no mention of the wounded -- or that an Afghan civilian also was killed.

The attacker was an Afghan special-forces soldier who opened fire with a machine gun at a base in Kandahar province. He was killed by return fire.

That attack apparently was the first by a member of the Afghan special forces, who are more closely vetted than conventional Afghan forces and are often described by American officials as the most effective and reliable in the Afghan military.

Coalition officials do not dispute that such non-fatal attacks happen, but they have not provided a full accounting.

The insider threat has existed for years but has grown more deadly. Last year, there were 21 fatal attacks that killed 35 coalition service members, according to ISAF figures. That compares with 11 fatal attacks and 20 deaths the previous year. In 2007 and 2008, there were a combined total of four attacks and four deaths.

The ISAF has released brief descriptions of each of the fatal attacks for 2012 but says similar information for fatal attacks in 2011 is considered classified and cannot be released.

Jamie Graybeal, an ISAF spokesman in Kabul, Afghanistan, disclosed Monday in response to repeated requests that in addition to 10 fatal insider attacks so far this year, there have been two others that resulted in no deaths or injuries, plus one attack that resulted in injuries, for a total of 13 attacks. The three non-fatal attacks had not previously been reported.

Graybeal also disclosed that in most of the 10 fatal attacks, a number of other ISAF troops were wounded. By policy, the fact that the attacks resulted in wounded as well as a fatality is not reported, he said.

Asked to explain why non-fatal insider attacks are not reported, Graybeal said the coalition does not disclose them because it does not have consent from all coalition governments to do so. "All releases must be consistent with the national policies of troop-contributing nations," Graybeal said.

Graybeal said a new review of this year's data showed that the 10 fatal attacks resulted in the deaths of 19 ISAF service members. His office had previously said the death total was 18. Most of those killed this year have been Americans, but France, Britain and other coalition-member countries also have suffered fatalities.

Graybeal said each attack in 2012 and 2011 was "an isolated incident and has its own underlying circumstances and motives." Just last May, however, an unclassified internal ISAF study concluded, "Such fratricide-murder incidents are no longer isolated; they reflect a growing systemic threat."

Pilots refuse to fly F-22 Raptor amid jet's oxygen problems

Either way each one is a $412 million waste of money!!!!

Source

Some pilots refuse to fly F-22 Raptor amid jet's oxygen problems

By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times

May 1, 2012, 6:51 p.m.

Some of the nation's top aviators are refusing to fly the radar-evading F-22 Raptor, a fighter jet with ongoing problems with the oxygen systems that have plagued the fleet for four years.

At the risk of significant reprimand — or even discharge from the Air Force — fighter pilots are turning down the opportunity to climb into the cockpit of the F-22, the world's most expensive fighter jet.

The Air Force did not reveal how many of its 200 F-22 pilots, who are stationed at seven military bases across the country, declined their assignment orders. But current and former Air Force officials say it's an extremely rare occurrence.

"It's shocking to me as a fighter pilot and former commander of Air Combat Command that a pilot would decline to get into that airplane," said retired four-star Gen. Richard E. Hawley, a former F-15 fighter pilot and air combat commander at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va.

He said he couldn't remember one specific incident in his 35-year career in which a fighter pilot had declined his assignment.

Concern about the safety of the F-22 has grown in recent months as reports about problems with its oxygen systems have offered no clear explanations why pilots are reporting hypoxia-like symptoms in the air. Hypoxia is a condition that can bring on nausea, headaches, fatigue or blackouts when the body is deprived of oxygen.

The Air Force's handling of the investigation is being closely watched throughout the military and in Congress.

The F-22, designed and built byLockheed Martin Corp., is considered the most advanced fighter jet in the world. It entered service in 2005, and the Air Force is set to receive the last of its order of 188 planes later this month.

The plane can reach supersonic speeds without using afterburners, enabling it to fly faster and farther. It's also packed with cutting-edge radar and sensors, enabling a pilot to identify, track and shoot an enemy aircraft before that craft can detect the F-22. The Air Force says the aircraft is essential to maintain air dominance around the world.

According to the Air Force, each of the sleek, diamond-winged aircraft costs $143 million. Counting upgrades and research and development costs, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that each F-22 cost U.S. taxpayers $412 million.

While other warplanes in the U.S. arsenal have been used to pummel targets in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the Air Force's F-22s have sat largely idle — used only in test missions. Even so, throughout the jet's development, F-22 pilots have experienced seven serious crashes, including two fatalities.

Over the years, F-22 pilots have reported dozens of incidents in which the jet's systems weren't feeding them enough oxygen, causing wooziness. This issue led to the grounding of the entire fleet last year for nearly five months, but even after the grounding was lifted the Air Force said investigators could not find a "smoking gun."

Since the F-22 returned to service in September, the Air Force said, there have been 11 incidents in which F-22 pilots reported hypoxia-like symptoms.

"Obviously it's a very sensitive thing because we are trying to ensure that the community fully understands all that we're doing to try to get to a solution," said Gen. Mike Hostage, commander of Air Combat Command, who told reporters in Washington on Monday about the pilots declining to fly.

The Air Force doesn't have specific details on numbers and locations of pilots who have refused to fly the F-22, said Maj. Brandon Lingle, an Air Force spokesman. "We are generally aware of a small number of pilots who have expressed reservations about flying the F-22, and each of those cases will be handled individually through established processes," he said.

There are Air Force rules that say a fear of flying, "whether expressed in general terms or limited to a particular aircraft, is a professional dereliction that carries significant consequences," Lingle said.

Air Force officials maintain that F-22s are safe to fly. New precautions for pilots have been put into place, such as: wearing a device that measures the amount of oxygen in the blood, taking blood samples and watching over pulmonary functions.

Currently, there are hundreds of people in the Air Force, other governmental agencies such as NASA and in the defense industry working to pinpoint causes of the problem, Lingle said.

Lockheed, for instance, has about 20 people working "to bring this physiological issue to resolution to alleviate any concerns," company spokeswoman Alison Orne said.

Neither Lockheed nor the Air Force has an estimated date when the problem will be resolved. The Air Force is looking into whether pilots are not getting enough oxygen or whether toxins are not being adequately filtered out of the oxygen supply, Lingle said.

"We are deliberately stepping through a thorough analysis of both hypotheses and we're confident we're getting closer to identifying a root cause or root causes," Lingle said.

The F-22's issues have also popped up on Congress' radar, said John Noonan, aide to Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-Santa Clarita), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

"The Air Force is rigorously examining the issues with the F-22, and Chairman McKeon is closely monitoring that investigation," Noonan said.

william.hennigan@latimes.com

Obama playing the hawk and the dove to get reelected in 2012!!

Source

A Delicate New Balance on National Security

By PETER BAKER

Published: May 2, 2012

WASHINGTON — One moment he boasts about taking out America’s No. 1 enemy, and the next he vows to bring home troops from an unpopular war. For President Obama, the days leading up to his re-election kickoff have been spent straddling the precarious line between hawk and dove, and possibly redefining his party for years to come.

For four decades, Democrats have been confounded by a deeply ingrained soft-on-security image that has hurt them at the ballot box. But in a country now tired of war yet still seeking to project strength, Mr. Obama is trying to reposition his party on national security, much as Bill Clinton did on economic and domestic policy in the 1990s, triangulating between two poles.

The blend, captured by an unannounced trip to Afghanistan on Tuesday that ended in a nationally televised address, has frustrated critics on both left and right. Many in his party’s liberal base have grown disenchanted with Mr. Obama for tripling troop levels in Afghanistan, carrying over many of President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies and in some ways even expanding them. Many conservatives, on the other hand, argue that behind the raid that killed Osama bin Laden lies a fundamentally weak approach to rivals and rogue states like Iran, North Korea and Russia.

If it seems to some like the doctrine of having it both ways, it has scored well with a broad cross-section of the country, as measured by polls and focus groups. And Mr. Obama’s advisers have made clear in recent days that they believe he can play offense on national security as no other Democratic presidential candidate has since the Vietnam War.

“The post-9/11 paradigm that existed for several years, where you were either all in with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or you were not sufficiently hawkish, I think no longer applies,” said Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to the president. “He’s demonstrated that you can end those wars while actually more effectively targeting our enemy.”

Republicans see it as more calculation than conviction, more about winning an election than making America safe. “He’s in an odd position, sort of betwixt and between, and he can’t really figure out which way he wants to go,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican member of the Armed Services Committee and chairman of his party’s Senate campaign committee.

Of course, the innovations of drone warfare make it easier for a president to be tough at little cost to Americans, or to his political standing. Mr. Cornyn said that Mr. Obama denounced harsh interrogation techniques but evinced no hesitation about killing suspected terrorists — even an American citizen — from the skies. “It looks kind of superficial to me,” he said, “and looks expedient.”

Mr. Obama has long expressed a complicated view of national security that did not neatly fit into old boxes, but it was initially obscured by his strong opposition to the Iraq war. As a candidate in 2007 and 2008, he cited that stance as his central argument against his rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Less widely noticed was his attempt to balance that with vows to send more troops to Afghanistan and unilaterally strike inside Pakistan if necessary to capture or kill Bin Laden. At the time, many analysts thought those positions were more about avoiding the historical trap that past antiwar Democrats had fallen into. But four years later, Mr. Obama has presided over a national security policy that has married elements of both parties.

“What you’re seeing is carrying out a very well thought-out and very effective foreign policy — more than anything it’s pragmatic and practical,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “He has done exactly what he said he was going to do.”

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last month showed that Mr. Obama had neutralized the traditional Republican advantage on national security. Fifty-nine percent expressed confidence in Mr. Obama’s ability to be an effective commander in chief, slightly more than the 56 percent who had confidence in that area in Mitt Romney, the putative Republican nominee.

“I think it has worked politically, but it is the type of thing that stops working the day after the election,” said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who worked on Mr. Bush’s national security staff. “If the policies are unwise, and I think they are at least fraught if not unwise, then those chickens come home to roost eventually.”

Politically, at least, Republicans in recent days struggled to come up with an effective counterpunch. They complained that Mr. Obama was politicizing national security when his campaign released a video last week hailing the Bin Laden raid. But if the video struck some as unseemly, including some in the White House who worried it was undignified, it kept the conversation focused for days on what the Obama team wanted to focus on.

As late as Tuesday night, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told Fox News that Mr. Obama’s order launching the raid was not “a tough decision,” and that it “would just be dumbfounding” to decide otherwise. Democrats on Wednesday gleefully circulated a newspaper article reporting that Mr. Rumsfeld once pulled the plug on a raid to capture top Qaeda figures because it was too risky.

After initially saying that Mr. Obama was exploiting the raid, Mr. Romney and other Republicans pivoted by Wednesday to a more measured reaction to the president’s trip to Afghanistan. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told a home-state radio station that “the only qualms I have about anything the president said is emphasizing to our enemies exactly what our next military move is, or the lack of a military move.” Mr. Obama, he said, is “misleading the American people” if he leaves the impression that the war on terrorism is over.

Mr. Obama, who campaigned on Sunday with Mr. Clinton, seems to be following his Democratic predecessor’s playbook. After a generation of Democrats alienating voters with liberal domestic positions, Mr. Clinton moved the party toward the center on issues like trade, welfare and deficit spending.

Recent focus groups conducted by Third Way, a Democratic-leaning group dedicated to that shift, found some success for Mr. Obama in doing the same for national security. “His brand on security has been very, very strong, and there’s no doubt that has been a radical shift in the way people think about Democratic presidents,” said Matt Bennett, the group’s senior vice president.

But it was limited to Mr. Obama. When it came to Democrats generally, Mr. Bennett said: “We heard the same thing we heard in ‘08: they’re weak, indecisive, afraid to use force. It just isn’t enough to completely change the brand. I think he’s done everything he can possibly do. It’s not his fault. It’s just it can’t be fixed in one term.”

US drone strike murders suspected criminals in Yemen

Source

Suspected U.S. drone kills two Yemeni al Qaeda men

By Mohammed Mukhashaf

ADEN, Yemen | Sun May 6, 2012 4:37pm EDT

(Reuters) - Two Yemeni members of al Qaeda were killed by a missile strike on their car on Sunday, in what residents and the al Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia group described as a U.S. drone attack.

The Yemeni government called the attack an air strike. Washington and Yemen do not acknowledge U.S. drone attacks on militants in the country, which have taken place regularly for years.

Yemen's branch of al Qaeda has plotted abortive overseas attacks and is a major concern for Washington, which is waging an assassination campaign against suspected members using drone and missile strikes.

The car was struck in the Wadi Rafad valley in Shabwa province in east Yemen, residents there said.

Yemen's government and the al Qaeda-linked group both identified one of the men as Fahd al-Qasaa, who escaped from prison in 2005 after being convicted of a role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole warship in Yemen's port of Aden. That attack killed 17 U.S. sailors.

Residents gave the name of the other man as Fahed Salem al-Akdam.

Residents said the aircraft that fired the missile had been sighted in the sky. No one else was travelling in the vehicle or killed in the incident, they said.

The Yemeni government said Qasaa had been on its most-wanted list of militants.

"Fahd was a leading figure in the terrorist organization al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. (He) was one of Yemen's most wanted terrorists," a statement from the Yemeni embassy in Washington said, adding Qasaa was also known as Abu Hudhayfa.

The authorities have claimed to have killed Qasaa before, but an al Qaeda statement appeared to confirm the death.

"Al Qaeda affirms the martyrdom of the Fahd al-Qasaa in an American attack this afternoon in Rafad," said a statement sent to Reuters by Ansar al-Sharia, a militant group operating in lawless areas of south and east Yemen.

Yemen's Defence Ministry said on its website that a third al Qaeda operative was arrested in Aden along with another man.

Yemen descended into disorder last year when an uprising against long-serving leader Ali Abdullah Saleh split the armed force into warring factions.

Militants seized chunks of territory in south Yemen during the uprising against Saleh, a staunch U.S. ally. They killed about 100 Yemeni troops in a single attack near one of those areas in March.

Saleh resigned this year, and the United States wants his successor to unify the armed forces and use them to fight al Qaeda more robustly.

But the covert use of drones has angered the public in Yemen as it has in other countries such as Pakistan, where Washington uses unmanned aircraft to kill its enemies in secret.

The tactic is seen by many residents as a form of extra-judicial execution that also endangers people not directly targeted and risks boosting support for militants.

A Yemeni official said earlier on Sunday that two Belgian nationals of Arab descent could be deported after being detained last month on suspicion of involvement in militant activities.

Ebrahim Bali and Ezzeddine Tuhairi were detained on April 13 at Sanaa's airport as they tried to enter the country, he said. A Belgian Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed the arrest and said Brussels was seeking consular access to them.

"They were arrested on suspicion of planned terrorist activities in Yemen. We are in a process of negotiation with the Belgian government. We expect them to be deported...within days," the Yemeni official said.

Stealth underwear bombs from al-Qaida

New al-Qaida underwear bomb studied

by Adam Goldman - May. 8, 2012 07:09 AM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- U.S. bomb experts are picking apart a sophisticated new al-Qaida improvised explosive device, a top Obama administration counterterrorism official said Tuesday, to determine if it could have slipped past airport security and taken down a commercial airplane.

Officials told The Associated Press a day earlier that discovery of the unexploded bomb represented an intelligence prize resulting from a covert CIA operation in Yemen, saying that the intercept thwarted a suicide mission around the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it. The device is an upgrade of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. Officials said this new bomb was also designed to be used in a passenger's underwear, but this time al-Qaida developed a more refined detonation system.

John Brennan, President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser, said Tuesday the discovery shows al-Qaida remains a threat to U.S. security a year after bin Laden's assassination. And he attributed the breakthrough to "very close cooperation with our international partners."

"We're continuing to investigate who might have been associated with the construction of it as well as plans to carry out an attack," Brennan said. "And so we're confident that this device and any individual that might have been designed to use it are no longer a threat to the American people."

On the question of whether the device could have been gone undetected through airport security, Brennan said, "It was a threat from a standpoint of the design." He also said there was no intelligence indicating it was going to be used in an attack to coincide with the May 2 anniversary of bin Laden's death.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Tuesday that "a number of countries" provided information and cooperation that helped foil the plot. He said he had no information on the would-be bomber, but that White House officials had told him "He is no longer of concern," meaning no longer any threat to the U.S.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters Monday night that she had been briefed Monday about an "undetectable" device that was "going to be on a U.S.-bound airliner."

There were no immediate plans to change security procedures at U.S. airports.

U.S. officials declined to say where the CIA seized the bomb. The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or purchased plane tickets when the CIA seized the bomb, officials said. It was not immediately clear what happened to the would-be bomber.

President Barack Obama had been monitoring the operation since last month, the White House said Monday evening. White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the president was assured the device posed no threat to the public.

"The president thanks all intelligence and counterterrorism professionals involved for their outstanding work and for serving with the extraordinary skill and commitment that their enormous responsibilities demand," Hayden said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said: "The device did not appear to pose a threat to the public air service, but the plot itself indicates that these terrorist keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people. And it a reminder of how we have to keep vigilant." Clinton spoke during a news conference Tuesday in New Delhi with Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna.

The operation unfolded even as the White House and Homeland Security Department assured the public that they knew of no al-Qaida plots against the U.S. around the anniversary of bin Laden's death.

On May 1, the Homeland Security Department said, "We have no indication of any specific, credible threats or plots against the U.S. tied to the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death."

The AP learned about the thwarted plot last week but agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish a story immediately because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way. Once officials said those concerns were allayed, the AP decided to disclose the plot Monday despite requests from the Obama administration to wait for an official announcement Tuesday.

The FBI and Homeland Security acknowledged the existence of the bomb late Monday. Other officials, who were briefed on the operation, insisted on anonymity to discuss details of the plot, many of which the U.S. has not officially acknowledged.

It's not clear who built the bomb, but because of its sophistication and its similarity to the Christmas Day bomb, authorities suspected it was the work of master bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri. Al-Asiri constructed the first underwear bomb and two others that al-Qaida built into printer cartridges and shipped to the U.S. on cargo planes in 2010.

Both of those bombs used a powerful industrial explosive. Both were nearly successful.

The new underwear bomb operation is a reminder of al-Qaida's ambitions, despite the death of bin Laden and other senior leaders. Because of instability in the Yemeni government, the terrorist group's branch there has gained territory and strength. It has set up terrorist camps and, in some areas, even operates as a de facto government.

On Monday, al-Qaida militants staged a surprise attack on a Yemeni army base in the south, killing 22 soldiers and capturing at least 25. The militants managed to reach the base both from the sea and by land, gunning down troops and making away with weapons and other military hardware after the blitz, Yemeni military officials said.

But the group has also suffered significant setbacks as the CIA and the U.S. military focus more on Yemen. On Sunday, Fahd al-Quso, a senior al-Qaida leader, was hit by a missile as he stepped out of his vehicle along with another operative in the southern Shabwa province of Yemen.

Al-Quso, 37, was on the FBI's most wanted list, with a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture. He was indicted in the U.S. for his role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, in which 17 American sailors were killed and 39 injured.

Al-Quso was believed to have replaced Anwar al-Awlaki as the group's head of external operations. Al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. airstrike last year.

The new Yemeni president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, has promised improved cooperation with the U.S. to combat the militants. On Saturday, he said the fight against al-Qaida was in its early stages. Hadi took over in February from longtime authoritarian leader Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Brennan appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America," the "CBS This Morning" show and NBC's "Today" show. King was interviewed on CNN.

Cops have access to your voter registration information

Of of course the voter information on cops and judges is secret and nobody can see it - Certain voters' information -- law-enforcement officers, code-enforcement officers, judges ... is sealed.

The political parties Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens also have access to all this information.

Source

Political parties mining Arizona voters' personal data

by Michelle Ye Hee Lee - May. 7, 2012 11:29 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

Arizonans filling out voter-registration forms this election season will hand over personal information that, under state law, will be distributed to political parties and ultimately sold to candidates' campaigns.

Unknown to most would-be voters: They have the option of not providing many of the requested details, including the last four digits of the voter's Social Security number, the father's name or mother's maiden name, e-mail address and occupation.

Even marking a party preference is optional, Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne said. People who select independent or leave the space empty will be categorized as "party not designated."

Though they can't require the additional information, election officials benefit from having more detail on voters because it makes it easier to verify voters' identities.

Political parties, meanwhile, want the information to help their candidates target voters and win at the ballot box.

As indicated on the registration form, voter-registration requirements in Arizona are basic: Voters must have U.S. citizenship, be a resident of Arizona and the county on the form, and be 18 or older "on or before the day of the next regular General Election."

That means county election departments need only the registrant's name, birth date, address, proof of citizenship and signature, Osborne said.

The Maricopa County Elections Department finds it more helpful for voters to fill out the entire registration form so that election officials can accurately distinguish among the 2.1 million voters in the database, said Jasper Altaha, county voter-registration manager.

"We try to let everybody know that we want them -- if they can -- to complete the whole form," Altaha said.

Election officials must ensure that voter information is not duplicated, a tricky task when it involves twins and others with similar names and personal information, he said.

The information maintained by the county is protected from commercial use. Voters can view their own information.

Law enforcement can also access it. Certain voters' information -- law-enforcement officers, code-enforcement officers, judges and domestic-violence victims who have a court order -- is sealed.

"This (database) is not for process servers. It is not for businesses to get a way to sell magazines. It's the only semi-closed piece of information that government has," Osborne said.

Yet Arizona statutes require that county recorders hand over certain voter information to recognized state and county political party chairmen: full name and title, party preference, date of registration, residence or mailing address, ZIP code, voting history for the past four years, and, if given, phone number, birth year and occupation.

The statute also requires counties to give "any other" public information about the voter that is electronically maintained by the county, city or town clerk, as well as "all data" relating to permanent and non-permanent early voters, including their ballot requests and ballot returns.

The Arizona Secretary of State's Office maintains the same voter information but does not disseminate it.

In the hands of savvy political operatives, such information can be useful.

Political parties often enhance the data they receive and create mailing, phone or walking lists.

Candidates and political campaigns purchase the data from the parties and sign an agreement that prohibits them from using the information for commercial ends. Information supplied by the parties tends to be more detailed and costs less than the raw data that can be purchased for election purposes from county recorders for a penny per voter name.

The Arizona Republican Party has three official databases. Once the party receives voter information from counties, it sends the data to the Republican National Committee. The RNC then feeds it into a database of every jurisdiction in the country called Voter Vault. The Arizona party has access to that database and can add other information mainly from surveys, said Shane Wikfors, an Arizona Republican Party spokesman.

Candidates, precinct committeemen, county party chairmen and legislative district chairmen can create lists for calling or visiting voters based on the information.

Using a system called First Tuesday in November, or FTIN, party officials collecting petition signatures or doing polling can add issues and candidate affiliations using laptops or smart devices to create a more complete profile of a voter. People with access to the database can see the information in real time as it is entered.

Using Voter Vault and another system, Victory 2012, which manipulates demographic data from counties, the party is able to identify certain characteristics about every voter, said Teresa Martinez, southern Arizona director of the Arizona Republican Party who oversees the system. For example, they can track sisters living in the same house and distinguish between them by age and political affiliation.

Candidates access information on the candidates whom voters supported in the past and use that to tailor campaign materials to those voters.

Precinct committeemen sign a disclaimer saying they will not use the data for personal reasons and only for election or party purposes, said Anthony Miller, Republican precinct committeeman and former district chairman in Legislative District 20.

The Arizona Democratic Party also works with the Democratic National Committee to create a database through the Voter Activation Network, or VAN, a contracted company. The party uses social, demographic and consumer data to enhance the voter-registration information provided by the counties, said Luis Heredia, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party.

The party uses a combination of information, including magazine subscriptions, to enhance its database, Heredia said. The party uses the information to make its best guess at a voter's race, income and other demographic characteristics based on that information, he said.

The party also maintains voter histories going back several election cycles, a key indicator of voter turnout. If a voter lives in an affluent area or a precinct with high turnout, that also could affect turnout probability, he said.

"As more and more information is uploaded, we get a better picture of our electorate," Heredia said.

Not all political parties are eager to compile additional information on voters. The Arizona Libertarian Party does not maintain a database beyond that provided by the counties, said Barry Hess, spokesman for the party. And the party does not enhance the county's raw data with surveys or polls, he said.

"There's not a lot of enthusiasm ... to even worry about those lists. We simply use them to pull out the Libertarians and communicate with them," Hess said. "We're all about the privacy of the individual."

On airplanes the Bill of Rights is null and void????

Source

Threat prompts rescreening of 2 Phoenix Southwest flights

by John Genovese - May. 8, 2012 11:08 PM

The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team

A threat Tuesday night prompted authorities to rescreen passengers and luggage aboard two Southwest Airlines flights destined for Phoenix, airline officials said.

Flight 1184 arrived at Sky Harbor International Airport from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, Calif., but did not dock at the terminal, according to Ashley Dillon, a Southwest Airlines spokeswoman. Due to a non-specific threat, Dillon said, all passengers and bags aboard the Boeing 737 aircraft were rescreened.

Flight 811 was also scheduled to depart Orange County for Phoenix but was halted in Califonia for similar reasons, Dillon said. A third plane, flight 372, arrived to Phoenix on Tuesday night from John Wayne Airport without incident or further investigation, she said.

The reported 126 passengers stalled at Sky Harbor were transported by bus back to Terminal 4. Most were ending their trips in Phoenix, but others who were scheduled to continue to Tulsa, Okla., the plane's final destination, were reboarded, Dillon said.

Flight 811 was sent back to the gate in Orange County and would not be ready for a new flight before the airport's 11 p.m. curfew, she said, forcing passengers to continue to Phoenix on Wednesday morning. According to the Orange County Sheriff's Office, a bomb threat was made against the flight.

Teddy Rodriguez, a passenger aboard flight 1184, told 12 News the captain intentionally parked the plane at the far southeast corner of the Sky Harbor tarmac because there "was a threat to the plane."

He said after waiting 45 minutes, passengers were individually questioned and released.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was not immediately available for comm

CIA was involved in bomb plot it just busted up!!!!

Source

CIA unraveled bomb plot from within

By Greg Miller, Published: May 8

The latest al-Qaeda bomb plot targeting U.S. aircraft was unraveled from inside the terrorist group by operatives — including an agent who posed as a willing suicide bomber — working on behalf of the CIA and its counterparts in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, said U.S. and Middle Eastern officials.

The Saudi intelligence service played a particularly important role in penetrating al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and recovering the explosive device, according to officials, who described an elaborate espionage operation in which the CIA tracked the bomb’s movements for weeks and then killed suspected plotters in a drone strike after the device was seized.

The foiled underwear bomb plot in Yemen serves as a stark reminder of al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP's, primary mission - bring down an American plane, reports John Miller.

The foiled underwear bomb plot in Yemen serves as a stark reminder of al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP's, primary mission - bring down an American plane, reports John Miller.

Senior U.S. officials continued to withhold certain details, including the location and status of the individual — described by officials as a Saudi informant — who penetrated the terrorist group posing as a bomber and then turned over the device to authorities after leaving Yemen.

But comments by White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan and others made it clear that the involvement of the CIA and its partners went well beyond simply watching the plot unfold.

“We’re confident that neither the device nor the intended user of this device posed a threat to us,” Brennan said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “We had the device in our control, and we were confident that it was not going to pose a threat to the American public.”

The bomb arrived at an FBI laboratory in Quantico about a week ago and is being examined by explosives technicians, law enforcement officials said. One said the explosive was made from a chemical compound that was “built to get around U.S. security and had the potential to do that.”

The emerging details help to illuminate the evolving tactics being employed by both sides in what U.S. officials have come to regard as the most critical counterterrorism front.

The plot shows that al-Qaeda’s franchise in Yemen remains ­committed to mounting attacks against Western targets even after its most prominent advocate of such strikes, the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in a drone strike last year.

The disruption of the threat also indicates that the CIA and other agencies have gained significant traction on their target two years after President Obama began deploying more spies, eavesdropping equipment and armed drones to the Arabian Peninsula.

CIA officials declined to comment on the mission. Other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of intelligence operations.

A senior U.S. intelligence official said spy agencies were able to keep tabs on the location of the bomb, as well as those involved in plotting how it would be used, before it was intercepted in another country in the Middle East, thought to be Saudi Arabia.

“We know the route this thing took in terms of its movement,” the official said.

The device was described as an updated version of a design that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, has used in a series of plots, including an attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009.

The U.S. intelligence official declined to discuss what he described as “the disposition of the individual involved” in transporting the bomb before it was seized. Other officials indicated that the bomb handler was cooperating with the CIA and the Saudi spy service and is in protective custody.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with recent operations against AQAP said the Saudi spy service has furnished a steady stream of intelligence to the CIA.

“They’ve had someone on the inside of [AQAP] for some time,” the former official said. The Saudi source has provided intelligence on previous plots, including the tip that enabled authorities to disrupt al-Qaeda’s attempt to mail parcels packed with explosives to addresses in Chicago in 2010.

Efforts by the CIA and the Saudi intelligence service to protect that source and enable him to remain in place make it unlikely that he was used to deliver the bomb, according to former officials, who said it is more likely that a lower-ranking operative was used in that role.

As part of an expanding collaboration with the CIA, the Saudi spy service has taken advantage of long-standing informant networks and tribal relationships in Yemen, exploiting them for intelligence on an al-Qaeda franchise that has many Saudis in its ranks. Among them is Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, the bombmaker suspected of designing the latest device.

Of dozens of AQAP fighters with Saudi backgrounds, “at least five or eight of them are undercover” working for the Saudi service at any point, said a Middle Eastern official. “The Saudis have always had a network” of sources in Yemen, the official said. “Now they are expanding its objectives.”

The deepening cooperation reflects the extent to which Saudi Arabia regards AQAP as a security threat. The country’s chief counterterrorism official, Mohammed bin Nayef, narrowly survived a 2009 attempt on his life by an AQAP operative.

The CIA established a new drone base on the Arabian Peninsula last year, and the National Security Agency has deployed officers and equipment to monitor the cellphone and e-mail communications of AQAP.

Both agencies work alongside the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, an elite military force that operates its own fleet of armed drones and recently resumed providing trainers to Yemen’s counterterrorism units.

The pace of U.S. airstrikes has quickened dramatically this year, according to data compiled by the Web site Long War Journal. Of the 31 U.S. airstrikes in Yemen since 2002, 14 have come in the past five months.

The most recent strike killed an alleged operations planner wanted in connection with the attack on the USS Cole warship in Yemen in 2000. U.S. officials said that Fahd al-Quso was probably involved in directing the plot but that the drone strike was ordered because of his larger role in AQAP.

Staff writers Karen DeYoung and Sari Horwitz and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

TSA pulls dangerous 18-month-old baby from flight

Source

18-month-old baby pulled from flight, parents interviewed by TSA

By Eric Pfeiffer

Riyanna 18 month old terrorist She has an AK-47 in that bottle!!!!

After boarding a JetBlue flight in Ft. Lauderdale, the parents of young Riyanna, who asked to remain anonymous over fears of repercussions, were told the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) wanted to interview their toddler.

"And I said, 'For what?'" Riyanna's mother told ABC affiliate WPBF 25 News on Wednesday. "And he said, 'Well, it's not you or your husband. Your daughter was flagged as no fly.' I said, 'Excuse me?'"

Whoever is to blame, the parents say they believe the incident began because they are both of Middle Eastern descent and because the wife wears a hijab, a traditional headscarf. A 2011 poll from the Pew Research Center found that Muslim Americans say they believe they are disproportionately singled out by airport security officers.

Eventually, the couple were given their boarding passes back. Interesting, both JetBlue and the TSA tell WPBF they weren't responsible for the incident. The TSA says that because the couple and their child were eventually issued boarding passes, Riyanna could not have been on the no-fly list.

"TSA did not flag this child as being on the No Fly list," the group said in a statement to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. "TSA was called to the gate by the airline and after talking to the parents and confirming through our vetting system, TSA determined the airline had mistakenly indicated the child was on a government watch list."

JetBlue told WPBF that both the airline and the TSA are investigating the incident.

"We were humiliated. We were embarrassed. We were picked on," Riyanna's father told the station.

The family decided to leave the airport rather than return to the flight.

Pilot arrested for violating Emperor Obama's air space????

In a similar incident that occurred in Long Beach a plane that violated Emperor Obama's airspace was illegally searched and the pilot was arrested after marijuana was found Source

F-16s intercept plane that strays into Obama's L.A. airspace

By Michael Winter, USA TODAY

For the second time in three months, U.S. fighter jets have intercepted a small plane that strayed into President Obama's airspace during fundraising trips to Los Angeles.

Two F-16s swooped down on the single-engine Piper 28 northeast of Los Angeles about 9:45 a.m. PT (12:45 p.m. ET) and shadowed it to a landing five minutes later, the North American Aerospace Defense Command reports.

The plane landed at the small airport in El Monte, and the pilot was detained and questioned by the Secret Service, police Lt. Dan Burlingham told the Associated Press.

"It appears, as far as we know, that it was just a mistake," he said.

NBC News says the pilot was a student and was released after questioning. But the Los Angeles Times, citing a law enforcement source, said the pilot was arrested.

The intrusion occurred as Obama was about to leave Los Angeles International Airport aboard Air Force One after his record-breaking fundraiser at the Studio City home of actor George Clooney. The president departed at 9:53 a.m. for Reno, where he spoke about the economy.

On Feb. 16, two F-16s were scrambled from March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County after a Cessna 182 entered restricted airspace as the president's helicopter was ferrying him back to LAX. Authorities found 40 pounds of marijuana on the plane when it landed in Long Beach and arrested the pilot.

Pilot who violated Emperor Obama's airspace arrested, sources say

Pilot who violated Obama's airspace arrested, sources say

May 11, 2012 | 12:19 pm

President Barack Obama returns a salute as he steps off the Marine One helicopter prior to boarding Air Force One at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles.

Two F-16 military fighter jets intercepted a general aviation airplane that violated airspace restrictions as President Obama was leaving Los Angeles on Friday and guided the plane to El Monte Airport.

Law enforcement sources told The Times that Secret Service agents interviewed the pilot at El Monte Airport and that he has been arrested.

The sources said the incident appears to have been unintentional. The pilot's name was not released.

"The fighters responded to a temporary flight restriction violation by a Piper 28 aircraft," the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) said in a statement. "After intercepting the aircraft, the F-16s followed it until it landed without incident, at approximately [9:50 a.m. PST] where the plane was met by local law enforcement."

Obama arrived at LAX from Cheviot Hills by helicopter, then left LAX on Air Force One at 9:53 a.m. Large parts of L.A.'s airspace were under flight restrictions because of the president's trip.

In February, a small-plane pilot who strayed into Obama’s airspace was also intercepted.

Long Beach police officials said “a large amount of marijuana” was found on board that plane.

Two F-16 fighter jets intercepted the Cessna 182 after air traffic controllers tried to contact the pilot.

The pilot did not respond and eventually landed -– with escorts -- at Long Beach Airport.

Authorities have told The Times that as much as 10 kilograms of marijuana aboard the plane was seized.

Despite concerns about traffic nightmares and possible protests, Obama's fundraiser at the home of actor George Clooney in Studio City went off without a hitch.

People, some cheering, lined the route of Obama's motorcade near Clooney's home. Some noted the president's announcement this week that he supported gay marriage.

Inside, Obama addressed the issue in his remarks at the fundraiser.

"Obviously, yesterday we made some news," he said to applause. "But the truth is it was a logical extension of what America is supposed to be. It grew directly out of this difference in visions. Are we a country that includes everybody and gives everybody a shot and treats everybody fairly, and is that going to make us stronger? Are we welcoming to immigrants? Are we welcoming to people who aren't like us -- does that make us stronger? I believe it does. So that's what's at stake."

Even in the celebrity-laden neighborhood, a presidential motorcade rolling down the street was something special.

About 200 people gathered at the corner of Fryman Canyon Road and Iredell Street to cheer as Obama glided past in a long line of black SUVs, California Highway Patrol motorcycles and other vehicles. The problem was figuring out which one the president was in.

U.S. launches airstrike in Yemen

U.S. launches airstrike in Yemen as new details surface about bomb plot

By Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, Published: May 10

The United States launched airstrikes in Yemen on Thursday that killed as many as seven militants, the second American missile attack in the country since the CIA and other spy agencies disrupted an al-Qaeda airline bomb plot, U.S. officials said.

The strike came as new details surfaced about the foiling of the plot, including the disclosure that the operative who posed as a willing suicide bomber and later turned the device over to authorities was a British citizen, according to Western officials.

The operative’s background as a Saudi with a British passport helps to explain why he may have been selected by al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen to smuggle an advanced explosive onto a U.S.-bound flight. In reality, officials said, the operative was working as part of an elaborate espionage mission directed by the CIA and its Saudi counterpart.

The CIA declined to comment on any aspect of the mission or the airstrike. But officials confirmed details about the operative’s background, including that he held a British passport, and did not dispute accounts in the British press about his recruitment by MI5, that country’s equivalent of the FBI.

Officials said the operative had been in place for months and had gained the confidence of senior al-Qaeda figures, who sought to take advantage of his Western passport and other travel documents.

A Western intelligence official described the operation as a “joint venture” that relied on cooperation among multiple agencies to put the operative in position to penetrate al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.

After taking possession of the bomb, the operative turned it over to Saudi handlers in Yemen before leaving the country. The device is in FBI custody in the United States and is being examined to determine whether it would have been detected by airport security systems.

The operative was among a network of informants in Yemen working on behalf of the CIA as well as the Saudi and Yemeni spy services. The informants have provided intelligence used in targeting for an escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes.

The latest strikes, aimed at al-Qaeda operatives in southern Yemen, bring the total this year to at least 15, about as many as in the previous 10 years combined. U.S. officials said it was too early to determine whether any high-value targets had been killed in the Thursday attack and declined to say whether it had been carried out by the CIA or the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, which also patrols Yemen with armed drones and conventional aircraft.

A strike Sunday killed a senior operations leader in AQAP, Fahd al-Quso, who is thought to have been involved in the airline plot and was wanted for his role in the 2000 bombing of a U.S. warship on Yemen’s shore, U.S. officials said.

The bombmaker suspected of designing the latest device, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, has eluded U.S. and Yemeni authorities.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Thursday that disclosures about the bomb plot have hurt intelligence efforts and that he supports the decision by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. to open an investigation into the leaks.

To counter the al-Qaeda threat, “you have to protect” the agents who are used to penetrate such organizations, Panetta said, “and you have to protect the confidence” that foreign intelligence services have in their collaborations with the CIA.

Panetta also defended the administration’s assertions that it has weakened AQAP, despite the al-Qaeda affiliate’s expansion in southern Yemen over the past year and its ability to continue to plot attacks against the United States.

“We have been very successful at going after the leadership,” Panetta said. “But, you know, they are a threat.”

Staff writer Julie Tate contributed to this report.

NATO summit turns Chicago into a police state???

Source

Metra NATO plans: Stations closed, baggage checked, limits on what you can carry

By Richard Wronski Tribune reporter

2:39 p.m. CDT, May 11, 2012

Metra plans to close five stations around McCormick Place during the NATO summit May 19-21, and is advising passengers on all its lines they will be subject to screening and baggage checks and severe restrictions on what they can carry on trains those three days.

The stations are the the 47th Street, 27th Street, McCormick Place, 18th Street and 11th Street/Museum Campus stations.

In addition, on Monday May 21, the entire Blue Island branch of Metra Electric line on the Far South Side will be closed so the agency can focus its manpower on other lines.

Metra will close the five close-in Electric District stations during all three days of the NATO summit and a total of 26 stations on Monday alone, including the entire Blue Island branch.

The only Electric District stations that will be open Monday will be three Hyde Park area stations, five on the South Chicago branch, and all mainline suburban stations out to University Park.

Riders on all Metra lines will be subject to screening and baggage checks, with more extensive screening on Electric District trains, which run under McCormick Place where the summit is being held. Metra Electric riders should arrive at stations at least 15 minutes before departure to allow for the extra screening.

During the three days of the summit, all Metra riders will be allowed to carry only one bag and it cannot exceed 15 inches square and 4 inches deep.

Riders will not be able to carry boxes, parcels, luggage, backpacks and bicycles. And liquid and food will be prohibited on all trains.

Also prohibited will be tools, including pipes and stakes, as well as pocket knives and pepper spray.

All law enforcement personnel must identify themselves and present their credentials and any weapons to Metra. Security guards will not be allowed to carry weapons.

Metra said it believes the measures are reasonable, given the security concerns. "We've tried to be sensitive to our customers" Metra CEO Alex Clifford said at a board meeting today.

The Secret Service has given Amtrak, Metra and the South Shore Railroad the OK to run trains under McCormick Place during the summit but had cautioned that passengers will face delays due to "necessary security measures."

Amtrak runs six trains a day on tracks under McCormick Place. Metra's Electric District line has 172 inbound and outbound trains on weekdays and 40 trains on Sundays. The South Shore operates 37 inbound and outbound trains each weekday and 18 on Sundays.

Both Amtrak and Metra police departments have their own canine units. Metra's units have been increasingly visible at Union Station in recent weeks, riders have noted.

US Military hates Muslims????

U.S. military cuts class critical of Islam

May. 10, 2012 11:44 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A course for U.S. military officers has been teaching that America's enemy is Islam in general, not just terrorists, and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following World War II precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima or the allied firebombing of Dresden.

The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material. The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam.

The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by U.S. officials over the past decade that the U.S. is at war against Islamic extremists, not the religion itself.

"They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit," the instructor, Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, said in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. The college, for professional military members, teaches midlevel officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.

Dooley also presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva Conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are "no longer relevant."

A copy of the presentation was obtained and posted online by Wired.com's Danger Room blog. The college did not respond to the Associated Press' requests for copies of the documents, but a Pentagon spokesman authenticated the documents. Dooley still works for the college, but is no longer teaching, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said.

Dooley refused to comment.

This sounds more like genocide then warfare!!!!

U.S. military snipers are changing warfare

By Jim Michaels, USA TODAY

QUANTICO, Va. – When Marine Sgt. Jonathan Charles' unit arrived in Afghanistan, the American troops faced an entrenched enemy that picked a fight with the Marines almost every time they stepped off base.

"They couldn't get outside the wire more than 50 meters before it was a barrage of fire," said Charles, a scout sniper.

The Marine battalion quickly dispersed well-camouflaged scout sniper teams throughout the Musa Qala area in southern Afghanistan, the former Taliban heartland. The teams would hide for days, holed up in crevices, among boulders or in mud-walled homes, and wait for unsuspecting militants to walk into a trap.

The result: Dozens of militants were killed by an enemy they never saw. Word of unseen killers began to spread among the "few who got away," Charles said. Within weeks, the tide had begun to turn and by the end of the unit's seven-month deployment in March 2011, the battalion's 33-man sniper platoon had 185 enemy kills.

"They quit altogether," Charles, 26, said of the Taliban. More important, with the enemy largely neutralized, the battalion could focus on building local security and developing Afghan security forces. This approach is the bedrock of counterinsurgency warfare, which is designed to allow the United States to remove most combat troops by the end of 2014.

Snipers have quietly emerged as one of the most effective but least understood weapons in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Advancements in technology and training have made them deadlier than in any previous generation. Their ability to deliver accurate shots minimizes collateral damage — a key factor in counterinsurgency — and they are often more effective than much ballyhooed drones at secretly collecting intelligence.

The number of slots at the Army's sniper school at Fort Benning, Ga., increased to 570 last year, up from 163 in 2003, when the Iraq War started. The Marine Corps operates several sniper schools, too.

A precision weapon

U.S. commanders typically describe counterinsurgency as improving government and the economy and protecting the population. But killing hard-core elements of the insurgency helps persuade the population to join the winning side, military analysts say.

Snipers are ideally suited for that. "It's a lot easier to win hearts and minds when you're doing surgical operations (instead of) taking out entire villages," said LeRoy Brink, a civilian instructor at the Fort Benning school.

Snipers have another advantage. They wear on the enemy's psyche, producing an impact disproportionate to their size. "It takes the fight out of them," Marine Col. Tim Armstrong, commander of the Weapons Training Battalion at Quantico, said of the impact on the enemy.

Snipers will play a prominent role as the military reshapes itself into a more agile force after Iraq and Afghanistan. In a new strategy unveiled in January, the Pentagon said it planned on building a smaller, more expeditionary military force and would expand America's capabilities to train indigenous forces over the next several years.

Snipers fit well into that concept, said Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "They've proven to … have had substantial payoff in terms of military effectiveness. They will continue to be valued."

Refinements in training and advancements in technology have proved a deadly combination for snipers.

"It's much more of a science now," said Sgt. 1st Class Thomas Eggers, a leader at the Army's sniper course at Fort Benning. "Understanding the technology, better understanding of ballistics — that is what has really changed the game."

In recent years, snipers have been armed with handheld ballistic computers that calculate the effects of air pressure and other atmospherics on a bullet's trajectory. Optics and rifles have also improved accuracy. The Marine Corps assembles its own bolt-action sniper rifles to exacting standards here at Quantico.

Typically, a well-equipped sniper in World War II could be expected to hit a human target with a single shot at about 600 yards in favorable conditions and during daylight. Today, snipers can typically hit targets at twice that range — from more than half a mile away — and at night, said Bryan Litz, a ballistics expert at Berger Bullets who has done military contract work.

Psychological impact

In Iraq the value of snipers was clear from the beginning. When Marine officers were negotiating with insurgents holed up in Fallujah in 2004, the enemy's first request was that Marines withdraw snipers who ringed the city and were targeting insurgents.

Fallujah had become a symbol of insurgent resistance after four U.S. security contractors were killed in an ambush and the charred remains of two were strung from a bridge over the Euphrates.

"They weren't concerned with the tanks or the battalions in there," Armstrong said. "They wanted the snipers removed."

Marine officers refused. Within days, the insurgents met the Marines' initial conditions.

"They're a small niche that can really wreak havoc on the enemy," said Clarke Lethin, a retired Marine officer who was on the staff of the unit that conducted the negotiations in Fallujah. "Our snipers were very effective when we were trying to bring terrorists to the table."

There's a personal element to snipers that is hard to quantify but has an impact on the enemy.

When an insurgent is killed by an unseen drone strike, "the enemy sort of absorbs that," dismissing it as superior American technology, Armstrong said.

They have a different reaction to sniper kills. "When a sniper shoots them … it translates to, 'I just went to a fight man-on-man and I was bested by another man,' " Armstrong said. "That is the psychological impact of scout snipers on the battlefield."

The enemy also understood the psychological potency of an unseen enemy that can strike at any time. Starting in 2005, insurgents released a series of videos showing U.S. soldiers being shot, claiming it was the work of a single sniper who was stalking Baghdad. The video was an effort to strike fear into American troops by raising the specter of an unseen gunman preying on U.S. troops.

The U.S. military denied that any one insurgent marksman was responsible for the killings and dismissed the video as propaganda. Military analysts say insurgent marksmen lack advanced training and equipment that would allow them to take long-range shots at night.

"They're not able to engage in the ranges that we are and not at night," Litz said.

Glamorized by Hollywood

More recently, snipers have been lionized by Hollywood, video games and books. American Sniper, an autobiography of a Navy SEAL sniper, has dominated best-seller lists since its publication in January.

They capitalize on a fascination the public has with marksmen who match wits against an elusive enemy. In 2009, the public was captivated by news of Navy SEAL snipers killing three Somali pirates simultaneously, ending a five-day standoff after the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama was seized off the coast of Somalia. It was the latest in a rash of piracy in the region.

But sniper training is a far cry from the image of lone gunmen stalking human prey that is often portrayed by Hollywood. The training is daunting. Students often spend hours moving a couple of hundred yards without being detected. They learn to pay attention to every detail. Even if instructors can't see a sniper stalking through the underbrush, they might detect vegetation moving slightly as they crawl a few yards.

"It's not as sexy as the public would think," Eggers said, amid the deafening sounds of students at Fort Benning firing .50-caliber sniper rifles, larger weapons designed for use against vehicles. "It's actually a pretty boring job."

The image of the lone gunman is dated. During Vietnam, snipers were often sent on hunting missions far from friendly forces, Brink said. Today, however, the Army usually teams them up with conventional forces or places them in positions that can be supported by nearby friendly troops.

"Back in the day, they would just go out hunting," Brink said.

The Army's main sniper school at Fort Benning, nestled amid Georgia's gentle hills and pine forests, teaches students about marksmanship, stalking, observation and other skills.

The Marines put their scout snipers through an intense 11-week course where attrition is high and students learn marksmanship, ballistics and observation skills. Students are screened carefully for intelligence and psychological stability even before arriving at Quantico.

"We're looking for a different type of Marine: one with a higher (test score) … level of maturity and experience," said Marine Master Gunnery Sgt. Chad Ramsey, who helps oversee the Corps' reconnaissance career field. "The perception doesn't equal the reality when it comes to going through the school."

The Marines' scout sniper school at Quantico is "one of the top three or four toughest schools in our military, hands down," said Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Micheal Barrett.

Students in the Army's five-week course learn complex formulas designed to predict how a bullet's trajectory will be changed slightly by the atmosphere. When firing long distances, wind variations and barometric pressure can knock a bullet off course. Bullets travel faster at high altitudes where there is less resistance in the thin air.

Reading body language

Students learn how to create Ghillie suits, which are complemented with local vegetation so that snipers can blend into the background when stalking a target. They learn to shoot accurately under stress.

During one exercise at Fort Benning, students run several hundred yards wearing about 45 pounds of combat gear before entering a building to complete exercises before each of four separate firing positions.

At each position the snipers are given a short time to fire at targets hundreds of yards away. To get to each position, they run up ladders and stairs. They are graded on speed and accuracy.

The exercise is designed to "see how well they operate under stress," said Arturo Prieto, a 52-year-old instructor and retired Army non-commissioned officer, after a team of panting snipers finished the course and dashed out of the building.

In conventional wars, snipers were often dispatched on missions to kill high-ranking officers, who were identifiable by their uniforms and insignia. In 1777, an American marksman killed a British general at the second Battle of Saratoga, changing the course of the battle and proving the worth of a trained marksman.

Today, snipers face an enemy that wears no uniforms or insignia. It makes for a tougher environment that requires powers of observation and judgment.

They still go after "high-value targets" designated by commanders, but much of their time is used conducting surveillance.

For example, they might watch from a hidden location as conventional forces move toward an objective, or observe a marketplace, looking for things that seem out of place.

"You're going to need to read his body language," said Sgt. 1st Class Adam James, 29, an instructor.

That's something drones and other technology can't do.

"A UAV is going to be able to report … vehicles or whatever the case may be," said Sgt. Augusto Zapata, a 26-year-old Marine scout sniper instructor at Quantico, referring to the acronym for drones. "But that Marine on the ground observing through those optics is going to be able to make out somebody who seems nervous or seems out of place."

Staff Sgt. Ian Shepard, 30, an instructor, watched as two students at Fort Benning's sniper school settled into their firing positions.

"Shooting is the easiest part of the job," Shepard said. "It's more of a mental game than anything else."

Source

US snipers take aim at insurgents in Afghanistan

by Robert Tilford May 12, 2012

The USA Today published an interesting article about the effectiveness of US military snipers in Afghanistan (see: “US military snipers changing warfare” http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2012-04-23/snipers-warfare-technology-training/54845142/1?csp=34news ).

The article highlights the role and training of snipers and underscores their importance in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to the article:

“Snipers have quietly emerged as one of the most effective but least understood weapons in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Advancements in technology and training have made them deadlier than in any previous generation. Their ability to deliver accurate shots minimizes collateral damage — a key factor in counterinsurgency — and they are often more effective than much ballyhooed drones at secretly collecting intelligence.”

The article goes on to mention the fact that the US Army has increased their training of snipers at Ft. Benning, Ga famed Infantry School from 163 in 2003 to 570 last year.

See videos: Surviving the Cut S2 E2 - US Army Sniper School (Part 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czZbqT_FvK0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olu3mJPkEU0

Snipers also act in many ways as a “force multiplier”.

A fact that has not gone unnoticed by other Armed Forces around the world, particularly Russia which has been training snipers at an “unprecedented level” (see article: Russians deploy “sniper” companies to front line infantry units http://www.examiner.com/article/russian-deploy-sniper-companies-to-front-line-infantry-units ).

While the US is still years behind the Russians in appreciating the true combat role of snipers and incorporating them on the size and scale that the Russian military has it has been training more, especially in the US Marine Corp which operates a couple different sniper schools.

INSURGENT SNIPERS ON THE RISE

The USA Today article also notes the fact that the insurgents in Afghanistan have also taken notice of the role of snipers in combat. The enemy it seems also understands the psychological potency of an unseen enemy that can strike at any time.

Insurgents apparently released a series of videos, in December of 2005 showing U.S. soldiers being shot, claiming it was the work of a “single sniper” who was stalking Baghdad.

The video was not only a training tool for insurgent commanders but “an effort to strike fear into American troops by raising the specter of an unseen gunman preying on U.S. troops”, the article says.

The US military downplayed the videos as a propaganda ploy but evidence suggest it was much more than that, especially when you study the videos very carefully.

Drug war brings us 49 headless bodies!!!!!

Well unless it's about the jobs program the drug war has created for over paid police thugs, prosecutors, judges and prison guards, all who love the "drug war" and the high paying jobs it gives them.

Source

Drug war's latest toll: 49 headless bodies

May. 14, 2012 09:54 AM AP

MONTERREY, Mexico -- Authorities struggled Monday to identify the 49 people found mutilated and scattered in a pool of blood in a region near the U.S .border where Mexico's two dominant drug cartels are trying to outdo each other in bloodshed while warring over smuggling routes.

The bodies of 43 men and six women with their heads, hands and feet chopped off were dumped at the entrance to the town of San Juan, on a highway that connects the industrial city of Monterrey with Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas.

At the spot where authorities discovered the bodies before dawn Sunday, a white stone arch that normally welcomes visitors to the town was spray-painted with "100% Zeta" in black letters -- an apparent reference to the fearsome Zetas drug cartel that was founded by deserters from the Mexican army's special forces.

Only one couple looking for their missing daughter visited the morgue in Monterrey where autopsies were being performed Sunday, a state police investigator said. Authorities said at least a few of the latest victims had tattoos of the Santa Muerte cult popular among drug traffickers.

The bodies, some of them in plastic garbage bags, were most likely brought to the spot and dropped from the back of a dump truck, Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene said.

Domene said the dead would be hard to identify because of the lack of heads, hands and feet, which have not been found. The remains were taken to a Monterrey auditorium for DNA tests.

The victims could have been killed as long as two days ago at another location, then transported to San Juan, a town in the municipality of Cadereyta, about 105 miles (175 kilometers) west-southwest of McAllen, Texas, and 75 miles (125 kilometers) southwest of the Roma, Texas, border crossing, state Attorney General Adrian de la Garza said. San Juan is known as the cradle of baseball in Mexico.

The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case, said none of the six female bodies matched the missing daughter's description. He said some of the bodies were badly decomposed and some had their whole arms or lower legs missing.

De la Garza said he did not rule out the possibility that the victims were U.S.-bound migrants. Authorities said they also may have been brought from other states, because there had been no recent reports of mass disappearances in in Nuevo Leon state.

The killings appeared to be the latest salvo in a gruesome game of tit-for-tat in fighting between the Zetas and the powerful Sinaloa Cartel.

Mass body dumpings have increased around Mexico in the last six months of escalating fighting between the Zetas and Sinaloa, which is led by fugitive drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, and its allies, the federal Attorney General's Office said in statement late Sunday.

The two cartels have committed "irrational acts of inhumane and inadmissible violence in their dispute," the office said, reiterating it is offering $2 million rewards for information leading to the arrests of Guzman, Ismael Zambada, another Sinaloa cartel leader, and Zetas' leaders Heriberto Lazacano Lazcano and Miguel Trevino.

Under President Felipe Calderon's nearly six-year offensive against organized crime, the two cartels have emerged as Mexico's two most powerful gangs and are battling over strategic transport routes and territory, including along the northern border with the U.S. and in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz.

Cadereyta has been the scene of escalating drug violence, authorities said Monday. Killings in the municipality stood at 74 through April, compared to 27 over the same period in 2011, and 7 in 2010.

Across Mexico, in less than a month, the mutilated bodies of 14 men were left in a van in downtown Nuevo Laredo, 23 people were found hanged or decapitated in the same border city and 18 dismembered bodied were left near Mexico's second-largest city, Guadalajara. Nuevo Laredo, like Monterrey, is considered Zeta territory, while Guadalajara has long been controlled by gangs loyal to Sinaloa.

"This is the most definitive of all the cartel wars," said Raul Benitez Manaut, a security expert at Mexico's National Autonomous University.

The Zetas are a transient gang without real territory or a secure stream of income, unlike Sinaloa with its lucrative cocaine trade and control of smuggling routes and territory, Benitez said. But the Zetas are heavily armed while Sinaloa has a weak enforcement arm, he said.

The government's success in killing or arresting cartel leaders has fractured other once big cartels into weaker, quarreling bands that in many cases are lining up with either the Zetas or Sinaloa. At least one of those two cartels is present in nearly all of Mexico's 32 states.

A year ago this month, more than two dozen people -- most of them Zetas -- were killed when they tried to infiltrate the Sinaloa's territory in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit.

But their war started in earnest last fall in Veracruz, a strategic smuggling state with a giant Gulf port.

A drug gang allied with Sinaloa left 35 bodies on a main boulevard in the city of Veracruz in September, and police found 32 other bodies, apparently killed by the same gang, a few days after that. The goal apparently was to take over territory that had been dominated by the Zetas.

Twenty-six bodies were found in November in Guadalajara, another territory being disputed by the Zetas and Sinaloa.

Drug violence has killed more than 47,500 people since Calderon launched a stepped-up offensive when he took office in December 2006.

Mexico is now in the midst of presidential race to replace Calderon, who by law can't run for re-election. Drug violence seems to be escalating, but none of the major candidates has referred directly to mass killings. All say they will stop the violence and make Mexico a more secure place, but offer few details on how their plans would differ from Calderon's.

Benitez said the wave of violence has nothing to do with the presidential election.

"It has the dynamic of a war between cartels," he said.

15 chopped up bodies found in Lake Chapala

Source

15 bodies found in vans near Mexican tourist lake

May. 9, 2012 12:52 PM

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY -- At least 15 bodies have been found hacked up and stuffed into two vans near Lake Chapala, an area frequented by tourists just south of the city of Guadalajara in western Jalisco state, police in Mexico said Wednesday.

State Prosecutor said Tomas Coronado said the count is preliminary, because 15 severed human heads were found, meaning that at least that many people, but possibly more, had been cut up and put in the vans.

"The bodies are dismembered," Coronado said in an interview broadcast by the Notisistema radio station.

The two vehicles were found by the side of a highway early Wednesday; the vehicles were towed to government offices to unload the bodies.

The two vehicles were found just a few miles from Lake Chapala, an area popular with tourists and American retirees.

Mexican drug cartels frequently dismember the bodies of their victims or leave them stuffed into vehicles, but there was no immediate evidence of drug gang involvement at the crime scene Wednesday.

The area has been the scene of bloody turf battles between the Jalisco New Generation gang and the Zetas drug cartel.

NYPD sued over stop and frisk program

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NY judge gives class-action status to lawsuit challenging NYPD stop-and-frisk practices

By Associated Press, Updated: Wednesday, May 16, 10:26 AM

NEW YORK — Finding the city’s attitude “deeply troubling,” a judge granted class action status Wednesday to a 2008 lawsuit accusing the New York Police Department of discriminating against blacks and Hispanics with its stop-and-frisk policies aimed at reducing crime.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan said in a written ruling that there was “overwhelming evidence” that a centralized stop-and-frisk program has led to thousands of unlawful stops. She noted that the vast majority of New Yorkers who are unlawfully stopped will never file a lawsuit in response, and she said class-action status was created for just these kinds of court cases.

The lawsuit alleged that the police department purposefully engaged in a widespread practice of concentrating its stop-and-frisk activity on black and Hispanic neighborhoods based on their racial composition rather than legitimate non-racial factors. The lawsuit said officers are pressured to meet quotas as part of the program and they are punished if they do not.

Scheindlin said she found it “disturbing” that the city responded to the lawsuit by saying a court order to stop the practice would amount to “judicial intrusion,” and that no injunction could guarantee that suspicionless stops would never occur or would only occur in a certain percentage of encounters.

“First, suspicionless stops should never occur,” Scheindlin wrote. She said the police department’s “cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a ‘widespread practice of suspicionless stops’ displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.”

She called it “rather audacious” of the police department to argue that legislators already would have passed necessary laws if it were possible to protect people from unlawful searches and seizures.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly declined to comment.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he couldn’t comment directly on the ruling because he hadn’t seen it, but he did defend the stop and frisk program, saying it had helped the city prevent thousands of deaths — largely of black and Hispanic New Yorkers, who are far more likely to be murder victims than their white counterparts.

“Nobody should ask Ray Kelly to apologize — he’s not going to and neither am I — for saving 5,600 lives. And I think it’s fair to say that stop, question and frisk has been an essential part of the NYPD’s work; it’s taken more than 6,000 guns off the streets in the last eight years, and this year we are on pace to have the lowest number of murders in recorded history. ... We’re not going to do anything that undermines that trend and threatens public safety.”

The city law office said in a statement: “We respectfully disagree with the decision and are reviewing our legal options.”

Darius Charney, who argued the case on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit legal organization, said: “We’re very pleased. We think she clearly got everything right on the law.”

He said the ruling “reinforces that this is a citywide problem the NYPD needs to address.”

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said in a release that the ruling “is a wake-up call - and it is time for the city to face the damage done by this divisive policy.”

In 2002, there were 97,296 stops. Last year, there were 685,724 stops, while there were 601,055 in 2010 and 575,304 in 2009.

The Police Department has said it made 203,500 street stops during the first three months of 2012, up from 183,326 in the first three months of 2011.

The RAND Corp. research organization, in a study commissioned by the NYPD and released in 2007, concluded the raw data “distorts the magnitude and, at times, the existence of racially biased policing.”

The study acknowledged that “black pedestrians were stopped at a rate that is 50 percent greater than their representation in the residential census.” But it said using the census as a benchmark was unreliable because it failed to factor in variables such as a higher arrest rate and more crime-suspect descriptions involving minorities.

___

Associated Press writers Tom Hays and Samantha Gross contributed to this story.

U.S. escalates clandestine war in Yemen

U.S. escalates clandestine war in Yemen

May 16, 2012 | 5:15 pm

WASHINGTON -- In an escalation of America’s clandestine war in Yemen, a small contingent of U.S. troops is providing targeting data for Yemeni airstrikes as government forces battle to dislodge Al Qaeda militants and other insurgents in the country’s restive south, U.S. and Yemeni officials said.

Operating from a Yemeni base, at least 20 U.S. special operations troops have used satellite imagery, drone video, eavesdropping systems and other technical means to help pinpoint targets for an offensive that intensified this week, said U.S. and Yemeni officials who asked not to be identified talking about the sensitive operation.

The U.S. forces also advised Yemeni military commanders on where and when to deploy their troops, two senior Obama administration officials said. The U.S. contingent is expected to grow, a senior military official said.

The Obama administration’s direct military role in Yemen is more extensive than previously reported and represents a deepening involvement in the nation’s growing conflict.

The military and CIA are coordinating a separate but related campaign of airstrikes against members of the group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which U.S. intelligence officials say poses the greatest threat to America. The Yemen-based group was implicated this month in a failed effort to put a suicide bomber on a U.S.-bound airliner, the latest of several failed bombing attempts.

John Brennan, White House counter-terrorism advisor, flew to Yemen last weekend to meet its new president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The administration considers Hadi, who took office in February, an ally and is seeking to support a political transition toward democracy.

U.S. officials remain wary of being drawn into Yemen’s factional political struggles, but they expressed confidence in Hadi.

"There are ways of checking their homework," a senior defense official said of the Yemeni government. "They’ve been trusted partners."

In a show of support for Hadi’s government, President Obama issued an executive order Wednesday giving the Treasury Department authority to freeze U.S. assets of those who "threaten the peace, security and stability" of Yemen. The order, which does not name any individual, is meant to discourage political meddling by those still loyal to the nation’s former dictator, officials said.

U.S. special operations troops were withdrawn from Yemen last year amid the violent protests that toppled Hadi’s predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, but Pentagon officials disclosed last week that they had returned. The officials described the deployment as a limited training mission for Yemeni security units fighting Al Qaeda, similar to past efforts.

Once the U.S. forces arrived, however, Hadi was more willing than Saleh to let the Americans work directly with Yemeni military forces outside the capital, Sana, officials said.

The current military offensive coincides with an increase in U.S. military and CIA airstrikes against Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen. They have relied, in part, on intelligence gathered by CIA operatives and contractors in the contested tribal areas, according to a U.S. source with knowledge of the secret operation.

At least 18 U.S. military and drone strikes have been reported against targets inside Yemen since early March, including three in the last week, an upsurge from previous months. U.S. forces have conducted a total of 35 such airstrikes since 2009, according to Long War Journal, a website that tracks the attacks.

Although it has drawn far less attention, the U.S. counter- terrorism effort in Yemen has become broader than the decade-old pursuit of Al Qaeda in Pakistan. The CIA has launched hundreds of deadly drone strikes against militants there, but Pakistan’s government has not permitted the U.S. military to conduct or coordinate operations on its territory.

The White House insisted Wednesday that the U.S. military role in Yemen is limited in scope and will not drag the U.S. into a broader conflict.

"We’re pursuing a focused counter-terrorism campaign in Yemen designed to prevent and deter terrorist plots that directly threaten U.S. interests at home and abroad," said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. "We have not, and will not, get involved in a broader counterinsurgency effort. That would not serve our long-term interests and runs counter to the desires of the Yemeni government and its people."

About 20,000 Yemeni government troops supported by warplanes continued to attack Al Qaeda positions in southern Yemen on Wednesday, killing at least 29 militants, the Associated Press and other news agencies reported, citing Yemeni military officials.

The AP’s Yemen correspondent first reported Tuesday that U.S. special operations forces were assisting Yemeni military forces, citing Yemeni military officials.

Last month, the White House approved broader targeting guidelines for CIA and military airstrikes in Yemen. U.S. airstrikes may now target militants whose names are not known but who have been deemed a threat to U.S. interests.

Obama said in 2010 that he had "no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground" to Yemen. But Army Gen. David Petraeus, now head of the CIA, offered to secretly put U.S. special operations troops in the country, leaked State Department cables show. Then-President Saleh rebuffed his proposal, the cables show.

Obama later authorized a small team of special operations trainers to help Yemeni forces take on Al Qaeda. Based mainly in the capital, those trainers were withdrawn last year but apparently began to filter back early this year.

On March 1, Al Qaeda claimed to have assassinated a CIA officer in southern Yemen. The Pentagon disputed that, but it acknowledged that gunmen opened fire on a "U.S. security training team."

Teams of CIA officers and U.S. contractors have operated in Yemen for some time, hunting Al Qaeda militants and developing intelligence for drone strikes, according to a source with knowledge of the operation. They have recruited tribal militants to provide security, the source said.

U.S. officials declined to comment on that account.

"We do conduct operations with the Yemenis to get after terrorist targets," Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said this week. "We’re not going to go into the details of that."

More on those DEA thugs in Honduras

From this article it sounds like the American military, in Honduras along with in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the world is now part of the American governments "war on drugs".

And of course anybody who is paying attention knows that the "war on drugs" is really a war on the Bill of Rights and a war on the American people. Sadly that "war on drugs" has also is a war on the citizens of the world.

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D.E.A.’s Agents Join Counternarcotics Efforts in Honduras

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and THOM SHANKER

Published: May 16, 2012

WASHINGTON — A commando-style squad of Drug Enforcement Administration agents accompanied the Honduran counternarcotics police during two firefights with cocaine smugglers in the jungles of the Central American country this month, according to officials in both countries who were briefed on the matter. One of the fights, which occurred last week, left as many as four people dead and has set off a backlash against the American presence there.

It remains unclear whether the D.E.A. agents took part in the shooting during either episode, the first in the early hours of May 6 and the second early last Friday. In an initial account of the second episode, the Honduran government told local reporters that two drug traffickers had been killed and a large shipment of cocaine seized; he did not mention any American involvement. Several American officials said the D.E.A. agents did not return fire during the encounter.

But this week, a local mayor and a Honduran lawmaker said that four innocent bystanders had been killed and called for an investigation into what the Honduran news media are now portraying as a botched D.E.A. operation.

Lucio Baquedano, the mayor of Ahuas, a small town near the incident, told El Tiempo, a Honduran newspaper, that a helicopter-borne unit consisting of both Honduran police officers and D.E.A. agents was pursuing a boatload of drug smugglers when it mistakenly opened fire on another boat carrying villagers. Four people died — including two pregnant women — and four others were wounded, he said.

Honduras is a growing focus of American counternarcotics efforts aimed at the drug cartels that have increasingly sought to use its ungoverned spaces as a way point in shipping cocaine from South America to the United States.

But the murky circumstances surrounding the firefights underscore the potential successes and risks in the United States’ escalating efforts to help small Central American governments battle well-armed and financed transnational narcotics smugglers by adapting counterinsurgency techniques honed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The challenge has been to help bolster local security forces without raising a nationalist backlash fueled by memories of interventions by the United States during the cold war.

The American efforts include the use of D.E.A. commando squads — called FAST, or Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — to train and work along side specially vetted local forces in the Western Hemisphere. This year, the military built three “forward operating bases” in isolated areas of Honduras to prestage helicopter-borne units so they could more quickly respond.

Dawn Dearden, a D.E.A. spokeswoman, confirmed that American agents had been present alongside Honduran counterparts at both episodes. She said the D.E.A. worked “hand in hand with our Honduran counterparts” but were “involved in a supportive role only” during the two operations.

She declined to comment further, citing the delicacy of the matter. But other officials said that government forces in the two operations seized more than a ton of cocaine that had just been flown in on small planes from Venezuela and was probably bound for the United States. They also said door gunners for the helicopters were Honduran.

The episode last Friday began when an American intelligence task force detected a plane from Venezuela headed for a remote airstrip in Honduras. The military sent a Navy P-3 surveillance plane — developed for anti-submarine warfare in the cold war — high over the site, where it detected about 30 people unloading cargo from the plane into a vehicle, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The smugglers, they said, then drove to a nearby river and loaded the materials into a canoe. It is a standard technique for smugglers to ferry their contraband in canoes, which glide under triple-canopy rain forest to the coast, where the cargo is put into fast boats or submersibles for the trip north to the United States.

Meanwhile, helicopters were scrambling from one of several “forward operating bases” that the United States military has recently built, this one at Puerto Castilla on the coast. The helicopters carried a Honduran strike force along with members of a FAST unit.

The helicopters, officials said, landed and seized the boat along with its cargo, about 2,000 pounds of cocaine. American and Honduran officials have said a second boat arrived and opened fire on the government agents, and a brief but intense shootout ensued in which government forces on the ground killed two drug traffickers.

But Mr. Baquedano told El Tiempo that the helicopter was pursuing the drug traffickers when they mistook another boat, filled with villagers and traveling with a light on, for the traffickers, whose boat was unlighted. He said gunners on the helicopter fired on the villagers’ boat, while the smugglers abandoned their boat and escaped. Mr. Baquedan said the four slain villagers were innocent bystanders.

Just as in operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen, it is often difficult to distinguish insurgents from villagers when combating drugs in Central America. One official said it is a common practice for smugglers to pay thousands of dollars to a poor village if its people will help bring a shipment through the jungle to the coast.

The FAST teams were created in 2005 to help Afghan forces go after drug traffickers in the war zone who were helping to finance the Taliban. Most of them were military veterans and received Special Operations-style training from the military. The D.E.A. had a similar program during the 1980s and early 1990s in which agents worked alongside Latin American police and military officials to go after jungle labs and smuggling planes. That program was ended early in the Clinton administration after complaints that it was not having enough of an impact to justify its risks.

Because they are considered law enforcement agents, not soldiers, their presence on another country’s soil may raise fewer sensitivities about sovereignty. The American military personnel deployed in Honduras, for example, are barred from responding with force even if Honduran or D.E.A. agents are in danger. But if their Honduran counterparts come under fire, FAST teams may shoot back. For similar reasons, the helicopters are part of a State Department counternarcotics program — and not military.

A FAST team was involved in a firefight in Honduras in March 2011 in which a Honduran officer was wounded and two drug traffickers were killed. In that case, the presence of the team was fortuitous — it had been on a training exercise with Honduran counterparts nearby when a smuggling plane was detected coming into a remote airstrip. On the May 6 mission, an American intelligence task force identified a plane leaving Venezuela and heading toward Honduras. A surveillance plane spotted the single-engine airplane as it landed in the wilderness of Miskito Indian country of eastern Honduras, and watched as about 100 people unloaded bales of cargo into several vehicles, officials said.

The landing strip was less than 30 miles from one of the new outposts, called Forward Operating Base Mocoron. A joint Honduran-D.E.A. squad arrived on a State Department helicopter as two vehicles were leaving the landing zone. Drug smugglers on the ground, officials said, opened fire on the helicopter, and the government forces returned fire. In that episode, officials said, the drug smugglers fled into the rain forest, and there were no casualties.

American Empire ready to bomb Iran!!!!

US Envoy to Israel: US Ready to Strike Iran

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: May 17, 2012 at 11:28 AM ET

JERUSALEM (AP) — The U.S. has plans in place to attack Iran if necessary to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, Washington's envoy to Israel said, days ahead of a crucial round of nuclear talks with Tehran.

Dan Shapiro's message resonated Thursday far beyond the closed forum in which it was made: Iran should not test Washington's resolve to act on its promise to strike if diplomacy and sanctions fail to pressure Tehran to abandon its disputed nuclear program.

Shapiro told the Israel Bar Association the U.S. hopes it will not have to resort to military force.

"But that doesn't mean that option is not fully available. Not just available, but it's ready," he said. "The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it's ready."

Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, like energy production. The U.S. and Israel suspect Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, but differences have emerged in how to persuade Tehran to curb its program.

Washington says diplomacy and economic sanctions must be given a chance to run its course, and is taking the lead in the ongoing talks between six global powers and Iran.

Israel, while saying it would prefer a diplomatic solution, has expressed skepticism about these talks and says time is running out for military action to be effective.

President Barack Obama has assured Israel that the U.S. is prepared to take military action if necessary, and it is standard procedure for armies to draw up plans for a broad range of possible scenarios. But Shapiro's comments were the most explicit sign yet that preparations have been stepped up.

In his speech, Shapiro acknowledged the clock is ticking.

"We do believe there is time. Some time, not an unlimited amount of time," Shapiro said. "But at a certain point, we may have to make a judgment that the diplomacy will not work."

The U.S. envoy spoke on Tuesday. The Associated Press obtained a recording of his remarks on Thursday.

The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany are gearing up to for a May 23 meeting with Iran in Baghdad. Shortly after the meeting, the U.N. atomic agency is to release its latest report card on Iran's nuclear efforts.

In Tehran on Thursday, top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili warned against Western pressure at next week's talks, which are a follow-up to negotiations in Istanbul last month that all sides praised as positive.

"Cooperation is what we can talk about in Baghdad," Jalili said in comments broadcast on Iranian state TV.

"Some say time is running out for the talks," he added. "I say time for the (West's) pressure strategy is running out."

Four rounds of U.N. sanctions have failed to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment, a process that has civilian uses but is also key to bomb-making. But recent U.S. and European measures, including an oil embargo and financial and banking sanctions, have bludgeoned Iran's economy by curtailing its ability to carry on economic transactions with the international community.

Israel says a nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran would threaten the Jewish state's survival and has waged a fierce diplomatic campaign against the Iranian nuclear program for years. Israel cites Iranian calls for Israel's destruction, Iran's arsenal of missiles, and its support for anti-Israel militant groups.

Senior officials have expressed skepticism about the sanctions' effectiveness, and believe Tehran is using the talks to stall the international community as Iran moves ever closer to a nuclear bomb.

The United States has urged Israel to refrain from attacking, at least at this point. Tough new economic sanctions are to go into effect over the summer, and American officials fear an Israeli strike could set off a regional war without significantly setting back the Iranian program.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argues the negotiations will fail unless Iran agrees to halt all uranium enrichment, ship its current stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country and dismantle an underground enrichment facility near the city of Qom.

Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, who until a few days ago commanded Israel's air force, said in a Jerusalem Post interview Thursday that the air force is prepared for any scenario, including striking Iranian nuclear facilities.

Israel's military chief told the Associated Press last month that other countries as well as Israel have readied their armed forces for a potential strike against Iran's nuclear sites