Tuckahoe Creek

100 Years in Iraq and Afghanistan - Making It So

2008-06-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

AEY, Inc - awarded $48.7M from a $298M contract in 2007, U.S. Army - weaponry for Afghani forces.

They may still have contracts in Iraq.

On Friday, a federal grand jury indicted arms dealer AEY and four company officials on charges, among others, that they committed procurement fraud and lied to U.S. officials about the origin of Chinese manufactured ammunition supplied by the company to Afghan forces in Afghanistan pursuant to a U.S. Government contract. Section 126.1 of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations provides that it is the policy of the United States to deny approvals for exports and imports of defense articles originating in China.
Today, Henry Waxman, the Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released a letter detailing evidence the Chairman said suggested that John L. Withers, II, the U.S. ambassador to Albania, was involved in efforts to conceal the origin of the Chinese ammunition. The Chinese-made ammunition was being sold to AEY by the Albanian Ministry of Defense through the Military Export Import Company of Albania (MEICO). -- ExportLaw Blog

MEICO is the Albanian piece of the Albanian-Rwandan-Israeli-South-African-United-Kingdom weaponizing of Africa. This has fueled and enabled the genocides and rapes and systematic destruction of the civilian population of Africa.

Efraim Diveroli's AEY Inc., his father Michael Diveroli's Worldwide Tactical, and his uncle Bar-Kochba Botach's Botach Tactical -- are listed in federal contractor databases as "disadvantaged" or "minority owned." Their claim is that they are Hasidic Jews, but in fact, they merely converted for a brief time, and do not follow the proscriptions and practices of the Hasidic order.

The Bountiful, Utah, owner of Vector Arms, Ralph G. Merrill, was also arrested, having provided some management advice to AEY.

Note that the eastern European countries that AEY had obtained ammunition from for the Afghani forces, had offered to DONATE it to Afghanistan: in December 2007 the President of Albania traveled to Iraq and made a personal offer to David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker to provide the ammo free of charge.

See more of Matthew Blake's coverage of this at the Washington Independent -

The Pentagon found earlier this year that AEY had sent crates of rifle cartridges to Afghanistan that had "disintegrated from extensive termite damage." Some of the ammunition was more than 60 years old. Asked by the Pentagon what happened, an unidentified AEY official admitted that he had delivered "shit ammo" to Afghanistan security forces.

AEY was the principle weapons supplier for security forces fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. -- AEY Official Admitted Termite-Damaged Ammo Was No Good

Also note Lindsay Beyerstein's historical coverage of AEY, Botach, and Kley Zion.

Summing up: The Pentagon has awarded weapons contracts to a firm, which is, more than likely involved in the weaponizing of Africa, and has provided inferior weaponry and ammo to the native Afghani forces fighting the "former" CIA assets, al Qaeda, and in all likelihood, still have contracts in Iraq, probably supplying the native Iraqi forces, in their fight against those "former" CIA assets.

How better to ensure that your forces will be needed ... for the next 100 years ... than by providing the worst equipment and ammo to the native troops?

ed.: Two Americans killed 3 years ago in Iraq - Dale Stoffel/Wye Oak Technology and Joseph Wemple/CLI - weapons "refurbishment", repurposing, and .... "coal and mineral processing". Is there another "IranContra" effort going on between the DRC and Iraq? Coltan for weapons?

Note - Coltan was a major cargo for Viktor Bout. Bout flew thousands of flights of weapons supplies into Iraq.

How the Bush Administration Uses Intel and Justice Resources

2008-03-24T15:12:00.000-07:00

Martin Bright has a good post on his blog on the New Statesman (UK) on a bit of history in the runup to the Iraq War -- The woman who nearly stopped the war. Some interesting history on the use of intelligence to pursue a policy decided upon.

And ... guess who sent the FBI a letter about Spitzer and alleged escapades in Miami? The same Roger Stone responsible for shutting down the 2000 presidential election recount effort in Miami-Dade County. Amy Driscoll has the story on the Miami Herald (Mar 21, 2008, Beach man told FBI of alleged Spitzer sexscapades).

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime, How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers by Eliot Spitzer (February 14, 2008, Washington Post).

Interesting use of Justice Department resources to avenge themselves on Spitzer.

Germany's Role in the Iraq War Faulty Intelligence

2008-03-24T15:07:00.000-07:00

Spiegel (Germany) has 3 interesting articles from this weekend - How German Intelligence Helped Justify the US Invasion of Iraq - The Real Story of 'Curveball', 'The Germans Share in the Responsibility' - Spiegel interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, and German Intelligence Was 'Dishonest, Unprofessional and Irresponsible' - Spiegel interview with David Kay.

IranContra Redux

2008-03-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

IranContra - as was practiced in the 1980s - had an essential element, the drug trade, which was documented by Gary Webb.

IranContra 2.0 - as is practiced now - appears to have a toe in same said niche. See Bill Conroy's Special to The Narco News Bulletin (March 11, 2008, U.S. Cocaine-Plane Invasion Spooking Latin America, Trail of Evidence Points to Major Covert Operation Targeting Venezuela).

In IranContra 1.0, the US sold weaponry to Iran for the Iraq-Iran War (the US also sold weaponry to Saddam Hussein for that war), .... after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in which the US embassy staff were held hostage. Within months of Reagan taking office, the Iranians experienced a miraculous turnaround and began winning battles. The weapons shipments to them may have been payback for "October Surprise" (ceasing all communication with the Carter Administration and not releasing the hostages until after Reagan's inauguration). Adelino Amaro da Costa- defense minister of Portugal objected to the shipments of weaponry from and through Portugal, destined for Iran - was assassinated immediately after going public and threatening to elevate it to the UN. See Paul Mitchell's Portugal: inquiry concludes bomb killed Prime Minister Carneiro in 1980 (10 January 2005) on the World Socialist Website:

A new parliamentary inquiry into the deaths of the Portuguese prime minister and defence minister in 1980 has concluded they were the victims of a bomb blast on board their aircraft....

...In December 2004, Nuno Melo, president of the latest commission of inquiry, announced, “We have evidence of an explosive device placed under the floor of the pilot’s cabin, which had sufficient strength to damage control cables and injure the pilots.” Melo explained that chemical analysis of the plane wreckage demonstrated the presence of potassium and lead, which can be used to make a bomb. “It seems sufficiently clear to me that the Cessna 421A crashed at Camarate during the night of December 4, 1980 due to sabotage,” Melo stated.

Melo also suggested that a possible motive for the assassinations was illegal gun running from Portugal to Iran during the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis. The seizure of 52 hostages in the US Embassy in Teheran was the culmination of the Iranian Revolution of 1978/79. Following the overthrow of the last government appointed by the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini assumed power. The inability of President Carter to secure the hostages’ release contributed to his unpopularity and helped spell defeat for Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.

According to the commission, da Costa had cancelled a shipment of guns from Portugal to Iran which then resumed five days after his death. More guns were sent from Portugal to Iran on January 22, 1981—two days after President Reagan’s inaugural speech, during which he announced the release of the hostages.

Other evidence presented to the commission alleges that the guns, re-labelled as farm machinery, were shipped with the help of Army Marshall Costa Gomes, who was Portuguese president from 1974-1976, and Admiral Pinheiro de Azevedo, who was prime minister in 1975. Two former members of the right-wing terrorist group Commandos in Defence of Western Civilisation (Codeco) admitted they knew who had planted the bomb.

The theory that the ministers were assassinated to cover up a secret US arms deal with Iran involving shipments via Portugal has been pursued by Ricardo Sa Fernandez, the lawyer representing the relatives of the crash victims, who is also a former Portuguese finance minister.

In his book, The Crime of Camarate, Sa Fernandez claims the intended victim of the plane crash was actually da Costa. He says da Costa had discovered documents showing that Portuguese army officers secretly helped send arms to Iran in a deal between officials linked to 1980 presidential and vice-presidential candidates Reagan and George Bush Senior, and intended to raise the issue at the United Nations Security Council....

IranContra 1.0 involved selling weaponry to a nation who sanctioned the kidnapping of US personnel (in Tehran and Beirut) ... supposedly our enemies ... and laundering monies through the Savings & Loans ... and buying cocaine from Colombians and distributing it to gangs in major US cities ... in order to support the Contras in Nicaragua ... and negotiate the return of the Beirut hostages (CIA's station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, & others).

We've already identified the 'mortgage industry' as being a good candidate for providing the laundering end of IranContra 2.0. If the same said operation were being executed now, exactly what 'militias' are being trained and supported by the CIA? In the 1980s, it was the Contras, with the 'mujihadeen' in Afghanistan probably also benefitting from a drug-profits slush fund.

What militias seem to have a steady supply of weaponry nowadays? The scale of this operation may not be just for Palestinian civil war.

Perhaps the question will bring it all home when its phrased ... what INSURGENTS seem to have a steady supply of weaponry nowadays? ... Iraq, Afghanistan, and as of lately, Pakistan. Note that particular Baluchs (traditional opposition to the Pakistani government) have reported being trained by both US & UK military and intelligence officials.

What is the ostensible justification for continued US presence in those nations? The Insurgencies and the instability they have brought for Iraq and Afghanistan.

What if there were no insurgency? What if someone threw a war and nobody came to fight? Who was supplying personnel and funds to the insurgency in Iraq? Our old friends from the 'funding the mujihadeen' days ... the Saudis.

Cleanup has already begun ... Viktor Bout was arrested and extradiction is being pursued by the US (from Thailand, "suspicion of attempting to ship arms to American agents who were posing as Farc rebels in Colombia"), and this was supposedly engineered by DEA unbeknownst to the CIA. Uh-huh. Sounds like someone from the CIA dropped a dime on the merchant of death.

Ciara Durkin had seen / discovered something happening at the Bagram Air Base right about the time its airport was upgraded to accommodate C-5's, which enabled the bypassing of all CENTCOM refueling bases - something so out of the norm that she warned her family to investigate, in the event of her untimely death. Had she discovered the weapons and/or the heroin drugs end of IranContra 2.0? She was killed - execution-style - shot to the head - on the secure Bagram Base.

Heroin and/or poppies from Afghanistan, for eventual heroin distribution into the former Soviet Union, Europe and the UK via the CIA's creature in the Balkans - the Kosovars; cocaine runs to the U.S. from Colombia and Venezuela; laundering the cash through the mortgage industry; supplying weapons to insurgencies in at least 3 nations. Seymour Hersch identified one of the operations - The Redirection, (March 5, 2007).

What does this mean? We're funding and supplying folks to fight our troops?

I believe that's called treason in a time of war. Its not the first foray into that for the Bush family (see Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell's How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power on The Guardian (UK), and Webster Tarpley's work).

A Corporate State of Mind and Eco-Terrorism

2008-03-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

Reuters (March 11, 2008, Four indicted in 1999 U.S. eco-terrorism arson) and the Associated Press (March 11, 2008, 4 Charged in MSU 'Domestic Terrorism' Fire) and the London Times (March 11, 2008, Eco-terrorists top the FBI's threat list after wave of arson attacks) have stories today on the indictment of 4 individuals on arson charges (charges of arson, aggravated arson, and conspiracy to commit arson). Chris Ayres on the Times begins ominously ...

... the Earth Liberation Front - is described as a decentralised al-Qaeda-style network and America's No 1 domestic terrorism threat...

They're labeled domestic terrorists for burning buildings ... where no one was injured or died.

And the corporations who've endangered the health of nine million people in the Great Lakes region - who may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants (CARCINOGENS, ENDOCRINE DISRUPTORS) - are protected by the USG.

Researchers found low birth weights, elevated rates of infant mortality and premature births, and elevated death rates from breast cancer, colon cancer, and lung cancer.

People are dying from the pollution - infants and adults alike. And the corporations are NOT labeled domestic terrorists, nor even criminals, and the report documenting this crime against humanity isn't being released by the US government. Life in the nation of government of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation places little value on the lives of the human citizens.

More on the Mortgage Crisis Similarity to the Savings & Loan Scandal

2008-03-10T15:17:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Higuera has an interesting look at the history of the media coverage of the mortgage implosion on the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism (Feb 13, 2008, Subpar Subprime Coverage?)

...That’s how Mike Hudson, who broke a story in early 2005 on Ameriquest’s aggressive tactics in selling subprime loans, described the media’s performance.
“There’s been good reporting all along the way, but it’s been intermittent. There just wasn’t a sustained look at the subprime market and the sustained questionable lending practices.”

Had the issue earlier received one-fifth of the media attention it has garnered in the past year and a half, the meltdown could have been averted or lessened considerably, he maintains. The coverage didn’t hammer away at the connection to Wall Street and the capital markets until too late in the game....

...the borrowers often hurt the most were ones that didn’t make good sources for reporters. They were less sophisticated, often living close to the edge economically anyway....

...the financial services industry employed an army of lobbyists and publicists that often squelched the political and regulatory will to be more aggressive in putting a stop to questionable tactics....

.... In 2000, New York Times reporters Diana Henriques and Lowell Bergman wrote a story on the fleecing of subprime borrowers that led to a segment on CBS’ 60 Minutes. The story outlined why Wall Street investment firms had become interested in lending companies that served the subprime market. It also told stories of borrowers burned by the experience.

Perhaps it was too early.

S&L reduxThe parallel to the S&L scandal is alarming, says Stephen Pizzo, co-author of “Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans.” He began writing about suspicious deals by his local S&L bank as early as 1983.

He maintains the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in Congress in 1999 set the stage for the current crisis, which will dwarf the S&L scandal in total financial impact. Glass-Steagall served to separate commercial banking from investment banking, prohibiting commercial banks from making investments in the same manner as a Wall Street banking firm.

“It’s a flat learning curve,” said Pizzo. “They did it (deregulate) again. And only five years after the S&L scandal.”...

Dennis Bernstein writes on ConsortiumNews (Feb 28, 2008, Obama's Sub-Prime Conflict):

...My pop gave me a powerful push in the right direction, when it came to savings: A penny saved really was a penny earned.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for the 1,406 people who lost much of their life savings when Superior Bank of Chicago went belly up in 2001 with over $1 billion in insured and uninsured deposits. This collapse came amid harsh criticism of how Superior's owners promoted sub-prime home mortgages. As part of a settlement, the owners paid $100 million and agreed to pay another $335 million over 15 years at no interest.

The uninsured depositors were dealt another blow recently when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower court decision to put any recovered money toward the debt that the bank owners owe the federal government before the depositors get anything.

But this seven-year-old bank failure has relevance in another way today, since the chair of Superior’s board for five years was Penny Pritzker, a member of one of America’s richest families and the current Finance Chair for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the same candidate who has lashed out against predatory lending.

During a recent campaign stop in south Texas, Obama met with San Antonio-area residents who had been particularly hard hit by the sub-prime meltdown. He expressed dismay over how lobbyists for the sub-prime lending industry had spent more than $185 million in the last several years for their cause.

“To give you a sense of what that kind of lobbying gets you,” Obama said, a “CEO of the largest sub-prime lender was promised a $100-million severance package at a time when more than two million Americans were facing foreclosure, including nearly 14,000 right here in San Antonio.”

Though Superior Bank collapsed years before the current sub-prime turmoil that is rocking the world’s financial markets – and pushing those millions of homeowners toward foreclosure – some banking experts say the Pritzkers and Superior hold a special place in the history of the sub-prime fiasco.

“The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages,” Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial and bank fraud, told me in an interview.

“The sub-prime mortgages,” Anderson said, “were provided to Merrill Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk bonds.”
In other words, if you traced today’s sub-prime crisis back to its origins, you would come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior Bank of Chicago.

One Failure to the Next

Superior was founded at the tail end of 1988 in the wake of the failed Lyons Savings Bank. The Feds were trying to keep a lid on the magnitude of the S&L post-deregulation crisis and were selling failed or failing thrifts for a song, along with a lucrative package of special benefits.

Chicago’s billionaire Pritzker family and their partners bought Lyons Savings for a quite reasonable $42.5 million, but were also given $645 million in tax credits. The kicker was that the buyers only had to come up with $1 million in cash, and got access to the $645 million, and all the bank’s deposits insured by the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC).

The Pritzker family’s Superior Bank “started life with enormous tax benefits and a substantial amount of FSLIC-guaranteed assets under a FSLIC assistance agreement,” said financial consultant Bert Ely in a Oct. 16, 2001, statement before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

Ely stated, “Superior’s trick, or business plan” under Penny Pritzker’s leadership was apparently “to concentrate on sub-prime lending, principally on home mortgages, but for a while in sub-prime auto lending, too.” In December 1992, the Pritzkers acquired Alliance Funding, a wholesale mortgage organization.

In a 2002 article in In These Times about Superior Bank’s collapse, business writer David Moberg reported that the bank’s operations were “tainted with the hallmarks of a mini-Enron scandal…And yet the bank’s owners, members of one of America’s wealthiest families, ultimately could end up profiting from the bank’s collapse, while many of Superior’s borrowers and depositors suffer financial losses.”

Moberg wrote that “the Superior story has a familiar ring. … Using a variety of shell companies and complex financial gimmicks, Superior’s managers and owners exaggerated the profits and financial soundness of the bank. While the company actually lost money throughout most of the ’90s, publicly it appeared to be growing remarkably fast and making unusually large profits. Under that cover, the floundering enterprise paid its owners huge dividends and provided them favorable loans and other financial deals deemed illegal by federal investigators.

“Superior’s outside auditor, which doubled as a financial consultant, engaged in dubious accounting practices that kept feckless regulators at bay. Many individuals—disproportionately low-income and minority borrowers with spotty credit records—had apparently been exploited through predatory-lending techniques, including exorbitant fees, inadequate disclosure and high interest rates.”

When it collapsed in 2001, Superior Bank represented the largest failure of a U.S.-insured depository institution for a decade.

“The failure of Superior Bank was directly attributable to the Bank’s Board of Directors and executives ignoring sound risk management principles,” said FDIC Inspector General Gaston Gianni Jr. in a Feb. 7, 2002, report.

Banking whistleblower Anderson noted that “Superior failed at a time of historically low interest rates, high employment, a strong economy, and a growing housing market. … There was no reason for it to fail unless you consider gross negligence, a flawed business plan, and a conspiracy to deceive the regulators who were clearly asleep and were negligent themselves in their duties of protecting the class of underinsured depositors.”

Pioneering WorkAnderson said the bank owners and board members used Superior for their pioneering work in sub-prime lending, developing the financial instruments that helped set the stage for the current sub-prime meltdown.

“The Pritzkers like to say they did sub-prime lending to help the disadvantaged get into the home equity business, [but] it would be more accurate to state they ran a very large nation-wide predatory lending operation,” Anderson said, citing criticism of Superior’s lending practices in a letter written to the Office of Thrift Supervision on July 3, 2002, by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an association of more than 600 community-based organizations that promote access to basic banking services.

As an owner and board chair of Superior, Penny Pritzker also was named in a RICO class action suit on behalf of the more than 1,400 depositors at Superior, who initially lost over $50 million of their life savings.

"This is a story of two Americas with two sets of laws, one for the rich and powerful and another for the rest of us,” said Clint Krislov, the depositors’ attorney, in a recent interview. “My clients will all be dead, before they get back their money, given the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold the lower court, which put the predatory owners on the front of the line, if any money is recovered.”

The Pritzkers arrayed a powerful and well-connected legal team including former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyer Lanny Davis, two ex-comptrollers of the currency, and two former General Counsels to the FDIC, the American Banker Magazine reported.

Given the political sensitivity of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Anderson said he believes Penny Pritzker should resign her post as Obama’s Finance Chair, the person who oversees the campaign’s fundraising.

Otherwise, Anderson said, Pritzker’s presence could undercut Obama’s credibility on the issue of predatory lending and create a possible conflict of interest if Obama is elected President and tries to crack down on sub-prime abuses.

Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor had no comment about the controversy surrounding Pritzker, but added: "Barack Obama has already made it very clear that he's going to crack down on fraudulent brokers and lenders."

One might wonder why Hillary Clinton’s campaign hasn’t jumped on this issue. Maybe it’s because Penny’s little brother, J.B. Pritzker, is a mover and shaker in the Clinton campaign.

In May of 2007, Jay Robert, aka, (J.B.) Pritzker, threw his support behind Hillary Clinton, representing a coup for her campaign by wresting the billionaire out of Obama’s home town of Chicago, and better still, the brother of Obama’s Campaign Finance Chair.

J.B. Pritzker announced he would head a new grassroots organization called Citizens for Hillary Clinton. Pritzker told reporters at the time, the new organization would go into states "where we haven't fully organized" and seek out campaign supporters as well as raise funds.

Apparently the Pritzkers will be sitting at the head table at the Inaugural Ball if either Democrat wins.

Mike Colpitts on OpEdNews (Feb 26, 2008, Real Estate Foreclosures Forecast to Double) writes:

...Housing Predictor forecasts foreclosures will nearly double to top a total of 5.6-million through 2011. The forecast is based on a thorough analysis of all 251 housing markets Housing Predictor tracks on a daily basis.

Creative new adjustable rate mortgages and subprime loans have acted to artificially inflate housing markets in the majority of states throughout the country combined with an epidemic of mortgage fraud.

The crisis has gotten so out of hand that nearly 2-million home owners have already been forced from their homes, and millions more fear losing their properties in foreclosure....

...Congress will need to act soon to stem the tsunami of foreclosures and stop the national economy from falling into a depression. Should Congressional action not be taken in major ways, Housing Predictor analysts forecast that the crisis has a 60% chance of developing into a full scale depression with even a higher number of foreclosures....

...More than 175 lenders have already failed as a result of the crisis. Investment manias like the one we have experienced have historically ended in depressions. There have been six depressions since 1837 in the U.S. All have been started by major land buying booms and more people have purchased land either as investments or for speculation since 2000 than ever before.

Meanwhile, Howard Dean of the DNC is running on the fuel of hope that the electorate are stupid and don't read up on the Pritzkers and their double-teaming support of both Democrat leading candidates (see Rebecca Adelman's Dean Ties McCain To Republican 'Culture Of Corruption', National Journal, Feb 21, 2008).

Mike Whitney on The Market Oracle (Feb 26, 2008, Subprime Mortgage Scam Lands US Tax Payer $739 Billion Bailout Bill):

...The financial innovations of the last decade have primarily focused on transforming the liabilities of dubious mortgage applicants into complex debt-instruments which are enhanced with massive amounts of leverage and exotically-named derivatives. The investments banks and brokerage houses fought hard to establish the present system which they call “structured finance”.

They spent over $100,000 million lobbying congress to remove the legislative firewall which kept investment and commercial banks separate. Those laws, particularly Glass Steagall, made sure that the public was protected from the Ponzi-scams which proliferated just prior to the Great Depression. But, now, 30 years later, the same scams are back with a vengeance. The cult of free market orthodoxy and Reagan-era flim-flam has put us on track for another stock market crash ala 1929. That's why Bank of America and their buddies in the industry have turned to the administration for a way out. Their flagging balance sheets can't take
another year of rising foreclosures and dwindling assets. They need Big Brother to cover their debts and rebuild their capital-base. Otherwise its curtains.

Other versions of the so-called “Rescue Bill” have been floating around Washington for the last three weeks, but they all follow the same basic guidelines. Under one of the plans, 600,000 subprime mortgage-holders, many of whom are already delinquent on their payments or in some stage of foreclosure, would be able to
refinance their loans under the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) which would
federally guarantee the mortgage in the event of default.

Great idea, eh? So, now the taxpayer is going to have to pay for the people who lied on their applications (and who really can't afford the homes they're in) so the banks can recoup their losses. This plan doesn't make sense....

...Consider this: If the banks didn't know that the mortgages were bogus, than why are all the various types of mortgages; including Alt-As, piggybacks, home equity loans, ARMs, prime, and "interest only"---defaulting at the same time? It is not just subprime mortgages that are failing; it runs the gamut.

The reason is obvious; it's because the banks were making windfall profits and didn't want to rock the boat. They knew they were peddling garbage. How could they not know? The banker's primary task in life is to figure out who can pay him back "with interest". And they're pretty good at it, too. So why did they start handing out hundreds of billions of dollars to anyone who could fog a mirror? In fact, it got so out-of-hand that (according to The New York State Commission of Investigation) "a homeless woman earning $10 an hour was recently approved for a $470,000 adjustable rate mortgage". In a similar incident, two Hispanic migrant workers in Bakersfield, California, who made roughly $45,000 in combined income, were approved for a mortgage on a home valued at $725,000.

These aren't innocent mistakes. They're part of a broader pattern to fudge the paperwork so unqualified "high-risk" loan applicants would look like J. Paul Getty and secure a mortgage. That way, the banks could continue to rake in lavish origination fees and maximize their profits....

...In their present condition, many of the banks will be back for another handout in a matter of months. Next will be commercial real estate (CRE) which is already slumping and on its way down. Then it'll be the $160 billion in private equity deals and leveraged buyouts (LBOs) which need refinancing. Then it'll be the maxed-out credit cards, and delinquent student loans and defaulting car loans all of which are failing at a faster and faster pace. It is not just the “structured investment” market that's unraveling now; it's the whole speculative paradigm of hyper-inflated assets, toxic bonds, over-priced equities and bizarre-sounding derivatives which are crashing down in one great debt waterfall. The investment banks are at the very center of the problems....

Anyone remember in 2000, when the USG was going after the mob for muscling in on Wall St. brokerage firms? The mob was infiltrating and setting up "pump and dump" schemes? That's what the mortgage crisis is, at its very core - pump & dump. The investment banks appear to have adopted that racket.

Investigations into the Savings & Loan scandal (see my previous post) identified - at nearly every institution involved in that - someone with organized crime ties, who had connections to the intel community, and who had connections to another institution).

Meanwhile, the NSA is prying into every aspect of communication for Americans (NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data, SIOBHAN GORMAN, March 10, 2008, Wall St. Journal):

...According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions....

...NSA gets access to the flow of data from telecommunications switches through the FBI, according to current and former officials. It also has a partnership with FBI's Digital Collection system, providing access to Internet providers and other companies. The existence of a shadow hub to copy information about AT&T Corp. telecommunications in San Francisco is alleged in a lawsuit against AT&T filed by the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on documents provided by a former AT&T official. In that lawsuit, a former technology adviser to the Federal Communications Commission says in a sworn declaration that there could be 15 to 20 such operations around the country. Current and former intelligence officials confirmed a domestic network of hubs, but didn't know the number....

If this Treasury Department program is so longstanding, why is it they didn't identify any of the wire transfers to the 9/11 hijackers while they were in this country, for example, the ones from Pakistan to Atta?

What if all this surveillance isn't for what its claimed to be for? What if its for identifying those who would present problems should martial law be declared? Perhaps we should use the Department of Homeland Security's verbage ... when its declared, not should or if.

A century of looting the middle class of their wealth. A century of false-flag operations used to declare war in order to profit from war. In just this nation.

But this time, its different, right?

And this time when you attempt to contact anyone to gather up a little band of folks to stand up to tyranny, "My Space" on the supercomputers at the NSA have already IDENTIFIED your potential cohorts, everyone you've ever phoned/emailed/faxed, where everyone lives, where they bank, where they shop, what they buy, what they look like, what they drive, what they wear, etc.

Makes you wonder what their excuse is going to be come the next 9/11?

The Mortgage Crisis & Organized Crime & .... Oh, The Places We'll Go ...

2008-03-06T15:14:00.000-08:00

David Prosser reports on the Independent (UK) (March 6, Organised crime turning to mortgage fraud):

... The Acpo report says corrupt property professionals including surveyors, mortgage brokers and solicitors are facilitating frauds. Common crimes include surveyors deliberately over-valuing properties, applications made on the basis of forged documentation and the use of fraudulent lease contracts to inflate the value of commercial property artificially.

The police report follows a similar warning from the Financial Services Authority last month. The UK's chief City regulator, which has now established a joint intelligence operation with City of London police to investigate mortgage-related crime, said it was increasingly concerned about the problem.

The FSA said it had received more than 200 referrals from lenders suspicious about potentially fraudulent mortgage brokers over the past 18 months. It is currently investigating more than 70 firms and individuals. The regulator believes the average fraud is for £45,000.

See also Gilmore's article on the Times (UK) (March 5, Mortgage fraud is funding terrorism, say police).

Which brings back memories of that "premeditated conspiracy to move covert funds out of the country for use by the U.S. Intelligence Agency", the Savings & Loan scandal of the Reagan/Bush years. From Gary W. Potter, Eastern Kentucky University:

...summarizing the most blatant examples of collaboration between financial institutions, the mob, and the intelligence community.

First National Bank of Maryland: For two years, 1983-1985, the First National Bank of Maryland was used by Associated Traders, a CIA proprietary company, to make payments for covert operations. Associated traders used its accounts at First National to supply $23 million in arms for covert operations in Afghanistan, Angola, Chad, and Nicaragua (Bainerman, 1992; 276-277; Covert Action 35, 1990).

The links between the First National Bank of Maryland and the CIA were exposed in a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court by Robert Maxwell, a high-ranking bank officer. Maxwell charged in that suit that he had been asked to commit crimes on behalf of the CIA. Specifically, he charged that he was asked to conceal Associated Traders' business activities, which by law he was required to specify on all letters of credit. Maxwell alleged that he had been physically threatened and forced to leave his job after asking that his superiors supply him with a letter stating
that the activities he was being asked to engage in were legal. In responding to Maxwell's lawsuit, attorneys for the bank state that "a relationship between
First National and the CIA and Associated Traders was classified information
which could neither be confirmed nor denied (Bainerman, 1992: 276-277; Washington Business Journal, February 5, 1990).

Palmer National Bank: The Washington, D.C.-based Palmer National Bank was founded in 1983 on the basis of a $2.8 million loan from Herman K. Beebe to Harvey D. McLean, Jr. McLean was a Shreveport Louisiana businessman who owned Paris (Texas) Savings and Loan. Herman Beebe played a key role in the savings and loan scandal. Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton linked Beebe to a dozen failed S & L's, and Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo, in their investigation of the S & L fiasco, called Beebe's banks "potentially the most powerful and corrupt banking network ever seen in the U.S." Altogether, Herman Beebe controlled, directly or indirectly, at least 55 banks and 29 S & L's in eight states. What is particularly interesting about Beebe's participation in these banks and savings
and loans is his unique background. Herman Beebe had served nine months in federal prison for bank fraud and had impeccable credentials as a financier for New Orleans-based organized crime figures, including Vincent and Carlos Marcello (Bainerman, 1992: 277-278; Brewton, 1993: 170- 179).

Harvey McLean's partner in the Palmer National Bank was Stefan Halper. Halper had served as George Bush's foreign policy director during the 1980 presidential primaries. During the general election campaign, Halper was in charge of a highly secretive operations center, consisting of Halper and several ex- CIA operatives who kept close tabs on Jimmy Carter's foreign policy activities, particularly Carter's attempt to free U.S. hostages in Iran. Halper was later linked both to the "Debategate" scandal, in which it is alleged that Carter's briefing papers for his debates with Ronald Reagan were stolen, and with "The October Surprise," in which it is alleged that representatives of the Reagan campaign tried to thwart U.S. efforts to free the Iranian hostages until after the presidential election. Halper also set up a legal defense fund for Oliver North.

During the Iran-Contra Affair, Palmer National was the bank of record for the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, a front group run by Oliver North and Carl "Spitz" Channell, which was used to send money and weapons to the contras.

Indian Springs Bank: Another bank with clear connections to the CIA was the Indian Springs Bank of Kansas City, Kansas (Bainerman, 1992: 279-280; Brewton, 1993: 197-200). The fourth largest stockholder in Indian Springs was Iranian expatriate Farhad Azima, who was also the owner of an air charter company called Global International Air. The Indian Springs bank had made several unsecured loans to Global International Air, totaling $600,000 in violation of the bank's $349,00 borrower limit. In 1983 Global International filed for bankruptcy, and Indian Springs followed suit in 1984. The president of Indiana Springs was killed in 1983 in a car fire that started in the vehicle's back seat and was regarded by law enforcement officials as of suspicious origins.

Global International Air was part of Oliver North's logistical network which shipped arms for the U.S. government on several occasions, including a shipment of 23 tons of TOW missiles to Iran by Race Aviation, another company owned by Azima. Pete Brewton, in his investigation of the Indian Springs bank collapse was told that FBI had not followed up on Indian Springs because the CIA informed them that Azima was "off limits" (Houston Post, February 8, 1990). Similarly the assistant U.S. Attorney handling the Indian Springs investigation was told to "back off from a key
figure in the collapse because he had ties to the CIA."

Azima did indeed have ties to the CIA. His relationship with the agency goes back to the late 1970s when he supplied air and logistical support to EATSCO (Egyptian American Transport and Services Corporation), a company owned by former CIA agents Thomas Clines, Theodore Shackley, and Richard Secord. EATSCO was prominently involved in the activities of former CIA agent Edwin Wilson, who shipped arms illegally to Libya. Azima was also closely tied to the Republican party. He had contributed $81,000 to the Reagan campaign.

Global International also had other unsavory connections. In 1981, Global International made a payment to organized crime figure Anthony Russo, a convicted felon with a record that included conspiracy, bribery, and prostitution charges. Russo was the lawyer of Kansas City organized crime figures, an employee of Indian Springs, and a member of the board of Global International. Russo later explained that the money had been used to escort Liberian dictator Samuel Doe on a "goodwill trip" to the U.S.

Global International's planes based in Miami were maintained by Southern Air Transport, another CIA proprietary company. According to Franck Van Geyso, an employee of Global International, pilots for Global International ferried arms into South and Central America and returned to Florida with drugs. Indian Springs also made a loan of $400,000 to Morris Shenker, owner of the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas, former attorney for Jimmy Hoffa, and close associate of Nick Civella and other
Kansas City organized crime figures. At the time the loan to Shenker was made,
he, Civella, and other Kansas City mobsters were under indictment for skimming $280,000 from Las Vegas' Tropicana Casino.

Vision Banc Savings: In March, 1986, Robert L. Corson purchased the Kleberg County Savings and Loan of Kingsville, Texas, for $6 million, and changed its name to Vision Banc Savings (Bainerman, 1992: 280-281; Brewton, 1993: 333-351). Harris County, Texas, judge Jon Lindsey vouched for Corson's character in order to gain permission from state regulators for the bank purchase. Lindsey was the chairman of the Bush campaign in 1988 in Harris County and later received a $10,000 campaign contribution and a free trip to Las Vegas from Corson (Houston Post, February 11, 1990).

Corson was well-known to federal law enforcement agents as a "known money launderer" and a "mule for the agency," meaning that he moved large amounts of cash from country to country. When Corson purchased Vision Banc, it had assets in excess of $70 million. Within four months it was bankrupt. Vision Banc engaged in a number of questionable deals under Corson leadership, but none more so that its $20 million loan to Miami Lawyer Lawrence Freeman to finance a real estate deal (Houston Post, February 4, 1990). Freeman was a convicted money launderer who had cleaned dirty money for Jack Devoe's Bahamas-to-Florida cocaine smuggling syndicate and for Santo Trafficante's Florida- based organized crime syndicate. Freeman was a law partner of CIA-operative and Bay of Pigs paymaster Paul
Helliwell. Corson, in a separate Florida real estate venture costing $200 million, was indicted on a series of charges.

Hill Financial Savings: Vision Banc was not the only financial institution involved in Freeman's Florida land deals. Hill Financial Savings of Red Hill, Pennsylvania, put in an additional $80 million (Brewton, 1993: 346-348) . The Florida land deals were only one of a series of bad investments by Hill Financial which led to collapse. The failure of Hill Financial, alone, cost the U.S. treasury $1.9 billion.

Sunshine State Bank: The cast of characters surrounding the Sunshine State Bank of Miami also included spies, White House operatives, and organized criminals (Bainermann, 1992: 281; Brewton, 1993: 310- 312, 320-323). The owner of the Sunshine State Bank, Ray Corona, was convicted in 1987 of racketeering, conspiracy, and mail fraud. Corona purchased Sunshine in 1978 with $1.1 million in drug trafficking profits supplied by Jose Antonio "Tony" Fernandez, who was subsequently indicted on charges of smuggling 1.5 million pounds of marijuana into the U.S.

Among Corona's customers and business associates were Leonard Pelullo, Steve Samos, and Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya. Pelullo was a well-known associate of organized crime figures in Philadelphia, who had attempted to use S & L money to broker a major purchase of an Atlantic City Casino as a mob frontman. Pelullo was charged with fraud for his activities at American Savings in California. Steve Samos was a convicted drug trafficker who helped Corona to set up Sunshine State Bank as a drug money laundry. Samos also helped set up front companies that funneled money and weapons to the Contras. Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya was a veteran CIA operative who had played a key role in the Bay of Pigs of invasion. He also had a long career as a money launderer in the Caribbean and in Texas on behalf of both the CIA and major drug trafficking syndicates.

Mario Renda, Lender to the Mob: Mario Renda was a Long Island money broker who brokered deposits to various savings and loans in return for their agreement to loan money to phony companies (Brewton, 1993: 45-47; 188-190; Pizzo et al. 1989: 466-471). Renda and his associates received finders fees of 2 to 6 percent on the loans, most of which went to individuals with strong organized crime connections who subsequently defaulted on them. Renda brokered deals to 160 Savings and Loans throughout the country, 104 of which eventually failed. Renda was convicted of $16 million from an S & L and for tax fraud.

Renda also served CIA and National Security Council interests as a money broker helping arrange for the laundering of drug money through various savings and loans on behalf of the CIA. He then obtained loans from the same S & L's, which were funneled to the Contras. An organized crime-related stockbroker, a drug pilot, and Renda were all convicted in the drug money laundering case.

Full-Service Banking: All told at least twenty-two of the failed S & L's can be tied to joint money laundering ventures by the CIA and organized crime figures (Glassman, 1990: 16-21; Farnham, 1990: 90-108; Weinberg, 1990: 33; Pizzo, et al., 1989: 466-471). If the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s reveal anything, they demonstrate what has often been stated as a maxim in organized crime research: that corruption linking government, business, and syndicates is the reality of the
day-to-day organization of crime.

Looking at The Mortgage Graveyard, I can't help but wonder, if thorough investigations were done on these companies, as was done on the Savings & Loans, what nepharious players would emerge? What connections to organized crime and the intelligence community would emerge from company to company?

Given that IranContra is being run again (see David Rose's The Gaza Bombshell, Vanity Fair, April 2008 edition) .... what are the odds that Junior exhumed yet another one of daddy's schemes? My guess - better odds than the sun rising tomorrow morning.

....Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq....

Ask and find: Broderick Perkins on The Realty Times (December 20, 2005, Organized Crime In Mortgage Industry Worsens In 2005) reported:

The pandemic of mortgage fraud, which last year reached organized-crime levels of collusion and conspiracy, worsened in 2005 and, along with the easy-money lure of rising home prices, real estate and banking officials are getting some of the blame.

No matter who ultimately goes down for the crime, consumers are advised to be on the look out suspicious mortgage activity including pressure tactics, failed disclosures, unsubstantiated home values, homes recently purchased and sold again, and other red flags that fraud may be packaged with the deal.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced 21,994 reports of "suspicious" real estate activity, including mortgage fraud, in fiscal 2005, up from 17,127 the previous year. The 2004 number was nearly two a half times 2003's levels.

The FBI statistics also reveal 721 pending mortgage fraud investigations in numerous states, up from 534 in 2004 and more than three times the number in 2003. The 2003 numbers, at the time, was the agency's largest ever nationwide enforcement operation directed at financial institution fraud, including mortgage fraud.

As the effort has grown, more suspects are walking.

There were 170 related convictions in 2005, down from 172 in 2004 and 206 indictments in 2005, down from 241 in 2004.

Fewer convictions contribute to the growth in costs related to the crime -- $429 million in 2004 to $1.014 billion in 2005.

Along with the FBI and Department of Justice, the Secret Service, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Office of the Inspector General, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Housing and Urban Development, state attorneys general, and other law enforcement agencies are investigating the crime from street-beat level to task force efforts.

FBI investigators said lenders must be more diligent about checking Social Security numbers and signatures on loan applications to make sure they are legitimate. FBI investigators also continued to hammer banking officials about verifying appraisals. Some types of mortgage fraud would be impossible without over-inflated appraisals.

Chris Swecker, assistant director of the FBI, said while the hot real estate market is attracting legitimate buyers and investors, they are being duped by a growing number of "industry insiders" who comprise 80 percent of all reported fraud losses by using collaboration or collusion to siphon cash from rising home values.

Earlier this year Grant D. Ashley, assistant director of FBI law enforcement services, said the criminal actions can strip borrowers of their cash, homes and favorable credit standing. Lenders are victims too as bad loans end up in foreclosure. With real estate as a cornerstone of the national economy, the economy suffers too.

A first-cousin to predatory lending, mortgage fraud, according to the FBI, is defined as "a material misstatement, misrepresentation, or omission relied upon by an underwriter or lender to fund, purchase, or insure a loan."

"Typically, their M.O. (method of operation) is revolving equity, falsely inflating property values, or issuing loans based on fictitious properties," Ashley said.

Ashley also said property flipping is a hot mortgage fraud tactic. It's legal to buy a property and sell it soon after for a profit based on real market forces. Illegal flippers, however, buy properties and then conspire with appraisers to artificially
inflate their value before reselling. Ashley said flipped properties are repurchased for 50 percent to 100 percent of their original value.

Equity skimming is another trend -- insiders persuade unaware borrowers to repeatedly refinance their mortgages every few months. With each refinance, the rate may be slightly lower but the come-on includes a higher loan amount necessary to cover the origination fees and other costs of refinancing. After the perps repeatedly skim equity in the form of origination fees, the loans become too large for the borrower and he or she defaults.

"Many people want to believe their homes are worth more than they are, and the recent housing booms across the U.S. have attracted criminals who want to exploit the situation to make a quick profit," Ashley said.

On the MortgageFraudBlog (07/22/05, Two Charged with Violation of Colorado Organized Crime Control Act):

A grand jury in Denver, Colorado indicted Luis Vagle, former head First Financial Corp., and Lawrence M. Rosenberg, on charges they violated the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act in an alleged mortgage fraud scheme that resulted in foreclosures. Losses to home sellers and lenders are estimated at $1 million....

There's also this post (January 2, 2008, Mortgage Meltdown: Defending Your Property: Strategies) on the LivingLies Blog ... scroll down to read Stephen G. Bishop's analysis in the comments. And lots more ... just google "mortgage industry" "organized crime".

How many BILLIONS have now been lost? Where are our little FBI friends? Especially given the sheer numbers of perps that have been walking away from their crimes. Surely, it can't take the ENTIRE FBI to make excuses before Congress for having "improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies." Surely, it can't take the ENTIRE FBI to track my internet postings, especially, given that the NSA has had its supercomputers doing that for four years, with the help of AT&T.

Perhaps they're - again - covering for their BFFs in the White House and those a bit down the George Washington Parkway ... at Langley ... in the George H. W. Bush Center for Intelligence?

Reams of Forgeries

2008-03-05T16:17:00.000-08:00

See March 6 update below.

Gareth Porter's The 'laptop of mass destruction' at Asia Times Online (Mar 4, 2008) reviews the provenance of the supporting evidence for the US's charges against Iran on their nuclear activities. Turns out the 1,000 pages of technical documents may or may not have been sourced by an Iranian resistance group, may or may not have been actually sourced by Israel's Mossad, and the CIA is steering way clear of performing "forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created".

John Otis (Venezuela shuts border as accusations fly, Houston Chronicle, Mar 4, 2008) notes:

...In Bogota, the government continued to analyze documents recovered from laptop computers belonging to Raul Reyes, the slain guerrilla leader who served as a spokesman for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Rebels said Tuesday they would replace him with Milton de Jesus Toncel, alias "Joaquin Gomez," the Associated Press reported.

Citing one of the documents that purportedly shows that Venezuela sent $300 million to the rebels, known by their Spanish acronym FARC, Uribe said his government would denounce Chavez before the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands for sponsoring and financing what he called genocides by the guerrillas....

Tyler Bridge and Jenny Carolina Gonzalez report for the Miami Herald on McClatchy Newspapers (Colombia: Rebel documents talk of uranium offer, Mar 4, 2008):

A mysterious "Belisario'' offered to sell Colombian rebels uranium that could be used for a dirty bomb. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez feuded with Cuba. Chavez offered to move hostages held by the rebels to Venezuela — and hold them there.

That's just some of the content in 15 documents released Tuesday by Colombian police, who said they'd been found in the captured laptop of the rebel's No. 2 commander, Raul Reyes, who was killed Saturday when Colombian forces attacked his camp inside Ecuador.

Overall, the documents describe the Venezuelan and Ecuadorean governments as far more deeply enmeshed with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, than previously had been realized.

There was no independent verification of the documents, but Colombia has said it would allow experts from the Organization of American States to examine the computers involved.

The most stunning information in the documents involves uranium, which can be used by terrorists for so-called "dirty bombs'' in which conventional explosives disperse radioactive materials that people then inhale.

"Another of the themes is the one on uranium,'' says a Feb. 16 note from someone identified only as Edgar Tovar to Raul — most likely Reyes.

"There's a man who supplies me with material for the explosive we prepare, and his name is Belisario and he lives in Bogota," the note says. "He sent me the samples and the specifications and they are proposing to sell each kilo for two and a half million dollars, and that they supply and we look for someone to sell to, and that the deal should be with a government that can buy a huge amount. They have 50 kilos ready and can sell much more.''

Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos said in a statement Tuesday that the letter proves the FARC was "negotiating to get radioactive material, the principal base for making dirty weapons of destruction and terrorism.''

"This shows that these terrorist groups ... constitute a grave threat not just to our country but to the entire Andean region and Latin America,'' he added.

Some experts were skeptical, however.

"In a lot of cases involving uranium deals, somebody's usually getting snookered,'' said James Lewis, a former State Department expert on arms smuggling now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The $2.5 million per kilo price "sounds about right,'' he said, but "the quantity sounds really suspicious'' because accumulating 50 kilos would be very difficult under the very watchful eye of U.S. and other intelligence agencies....

So, we have the Dodgy Dossier and forged documents from a disgraced ex-policeman turned spy-for-hire providing the grist for the mill of the war machine lies in the US and the UK against Iraq, and now we see that same kind of grist and mill being used in South America against Venezuela and Ecuador, and the US running it against Iran.

Did we just enter the Twilight Zone?

March 6 Update: Pablo Bachelet reports for the McClatchy Newspapers (March 5, State Dept.: U.S. will examine captured rebel hard drives) that Thomas Shannon, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, told a House committee that "Colombia has promised soon to share the hard drives from the captured computers with the United States".

What will be interesting is to see what kinds of forensic analysis will be done on them and their contents, and the silence in the media over the lack of such analyses being done on the "Iranian" laptop.

Army's After-Action Review Locked in Safe - Mentions Too Many Bushies

2008-02-22T11:16:00.000-08:00

Joseph L. Galloway on the McClatchy Newspapers (Feb 21, 2008, Commentary: Some inconvenient truths, conveniently locked in a safe) writes:

One of the great strengths of the American Army that was reborn in the wake of the disastrous Vietnam War has been a rigorous After-Action Review and Lessons Learned process that’s conducted after field training exercises and battlefield combat.

Not even two- and three-star generals are exempt from standing up and acknowledging their failures in the Army’s Battle Command Training Program (BCTP), where brigade, division and corps command groups test their skills at planning and conducting major operations in computer war games. A wily opposition force (OpFor) staff does its best to make life miserable for those being tested, much as a real enemy would on the battlefield.

If a general overlooks one or two of his mistakes, an OpFor colonel follows him to the stage and points them out for him.

This program, which began in the late 1980’s, has expanded to help prepare Army National Guard commanders and their staffs for what awaits them in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Foreign military observers have been astounded by a process that requires someone wearing stars on his shoulders to criticize himself in front of an audience of lower-ranking officers and sergeants.

So it should come as no surprise that not long after Baghdad fell early in 2003, the Army’s top commanders commissioned an After-Action Review of the planning and conduct of the invasion of Iraq and the post-war occupation and reconstruction effort. The Army hired the RAND Corp., a California-based research organization that’s done this kind of work for the U.S. military and government for decades.

The study was envisioned as a seven-volume examination of the Army’s role in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

What is a surprise is that nearly three years later, RAND’s warts-and-all report on post-war reconstruction, which was completed after 18 months and presented to the Army in the summer of 2005, is still locked in Pentagon vaults.

RAND normally prepares a classified version of such reports for internal use by the Army’s commanders and a public version that covers the high points of what was found and what was recommended for the media and academic researchers.

Both versions of the volume of the report titled “Rebuilding Iraq” are locked
in the same vault, where they can do no good in educating officers or the American public to the realities that led to a near-catastrophic failure by both the military and civilians to plan for what would happen after we’d toppled Saddam Hussein’s government and assumed control of a fractured, feuding nation of 25 million people.

The trouble, it seems, was that RAND’s team of more than 50 civilian and military researchers followed the trail of the failure from the Army’s part of the Pentagon to former Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld’s offices and on to the White House and State Department and elsewhere in the Bush administration.

The New York Times got its hands on a draft copy of the report and says that the RAND Corp. researchers found problems with virtually every organization involved in planning the war _ not exactly a surprise to anyone who’s read the newspaper articles and books published on a war that’s about to enter its sixth year with no end in sight.

The study blamed President Bush and, by implication, his national security adviser at the time, Condoleezza Rice, for failing to resolve differences between rival agencies, i.e. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and Colin Powell’s State Department.

Rumsfeld demanded and got sole authority for the Defense Department to oversee post-war operations in Iraq, despite what the report called the military’s “lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution.”

Powell’s State Department produced a huge study on post-war governance and reconstruction that Rumsfeld’s people ignored even though they did no planning of their own. RAND found that State’s effort was of “uneven quality” and wasn’t “an actionable plan.”

RAND said that now-retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who as head of the Central Command was in charge of U.S. military operations in Iraq, had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of what was necessary to secure Iraq after Baghdad fell and assumed that U.S. civilian administrators would handle reconstruction.

At the heart of the costly failure to plan for a lengthy occupation of Iraq was
an assumption by Rumsfeld and the White House that we could begin withdrawing American troops by the early summer of 2003 and so there’d be no need to plan for securing the country or rebuilding an infrastructure that was ancient and crude before the war and much worse afterward.

RAND’s report with its unpleasant truths landed on top Army commander’s desks at a time when President Bush and his merry band were trying to ward off a rising tide of criticism of their conduct of the war and creating yet another fairy tale, which debuted in the fall of 2005 as the “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.”

The Army brass had no intention of dropping that volume on the desk of their volatile boss Rumsfeld, and simply locked it away in hopes that it would be forgotten.

The official explanation for why the study was hidden? “Some of the RAND findings and recommendations were determined to be outside the purview of the Army and therefore of limited value in informing Army policies, programs and priorities,” an Army spokesman told The Times.

What it really was when you think about it was an inconvenient and dangerous truth, much like the one a preceding Army Chief, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki told a Senate committee on the eve of the war. No one listened to him, either.

The outrageous assumptions being made all over the administration begs the question: what the hell were they doing? On what ball did they have their eyes on? Perhaps it was something that didn't have anything to do with the war ... perhaps the war was merely a means to achieve something else. Given the recent fire at Iraq's Central Bank destroyed its records, which were in the process of having differences reconciled with various international institutions, and given that the computer expert from Bearing Point responsible for "computerizing Iraq's financial records" was kidnapped last May, exactly what was happening at the Iraq Central Bank? And who did it involve on this side of the pond? Iraq's financial records would probably have the records of the transfers of funds for prohibited weaponry, sold to it by the UK and the US throughout the sanctions -- precisely the information the US deleted from Iraq's report to the UN prior to the war (see US Illegally Removes Pages from Iraq UN Report, from ProjectCensored, and Corporate Suppliers for Iraq's Weapons Programs, and Helping Iraq Kill with Chemical Weapons:The Relevance of Yesterday's US Hypocrisy Today, and A US Media Mystery: The Case of the Missing Information about Iraq’s Weapons, and Top Secret Iraq Weapons Report Says the U.S. Government & Corporations Helped to Illegally Arm Iraq ). Iraq's financial records, and the tracing of them through international institutions would have led to the non-U.S. suppliers, all the way up the chain to the U.S. suppliers, such as Bechtel, who actually threatened to use non-U.S. suppliers to evade the sanctions. Just how many U.S. defense - biological, chemical, and nuclear - companies, who supplied Saddam throughout the 1980s were using that very same mechanism to mask their evasion of the sanctions throughout the 1990s and 2000s - arming Saddam with precisely the items that would be used to justify the invasion of Iraq? These are the very same companies who then profitted off of the war (see Windfalls of War, and Windfalls of War II).

This begs the question: have over a million Iraqis been killed (mostly women and children), and thousands of our own soldiers and civilians killed and tens of thousands maimed, so that the CEOs of weapons manufacturers in the US and UK won't be writing checks for fines and spending a meager few months in minimum security prisons, golfing all day long?

Perhaps it is that the financial trail to them was too plain. What would Americans think ... profiteers arming a madman, perhaps breaking sanctions to arm him further, in order to invade his nation because of the arms, and then reaping even greater profits in supporting the invasion and nation building?

What a successful little business model the boys have, and all its cost is over a million lives and our economy.

The Dodgy Dossier's Secret Note

2008-02-22T11:07:00.000-08:00

Richard Norton-Taylor at the Guardian (UK) (Feb 21, 2008, How Labour used the law to keep criticism of Israel secret) reveals the secreted notes on the Williams draft of the Iraq dossier:

The full extent of government anxiety about the state of British-Israel relations can be exposed for the first time today in a secret document seen by the Guardian.

The document reveals how the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) successfully fought to keep secret any mention of Israel contained on the first draft of the controversial, now discredited Iraq weapons dossier. At the heart of it was nervousness at the top of government about any mention of Israel's nuclear arsenal in an official paper accusing Iraq of flouting the UN's authority on weapons of mass destruction.

The dossier was made public this week, but the FCO succeeded before a tribunal in having the handwritten mention of Israel kept secret.

The FCO never argued that the information would damage national security. The Guardian has seen the full text and a witness statement from a senior FCO official, who argued behind closed doors that any public mention of the candid reference would seriously damage UK/Israeli relations. In the statement, he reveals that in the past five years there have been 10 substantial incidents and 20 more minor ones relating to Israeli concerns about attitudes to their government within Whitehall.

The Information Tribunal, which adjudicates on disputes involving the Freedom of Information Act, agreed to remove the single reference to Israel when it ordered the release of the draft of the Iraqi weapons dossier written by John Williams, the FCO's chief information officer at the time.

Along with unfavourable references to the US and Japan, the reference to Israel was written in the margin by someone commenting on the opening paragraph of the Williams draft. It was written against the claim that "no other country [apart from Iraq] has flouted the United Nations' authority so brazenly in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction".

In statement to the tribunal, Neil Wigan, head of the FCO's Arab, Israel and North Africa Group, said he did not know who had referred to Israel in the margin. He went on: "I interpret this note to indicate that the person who wrote it believes that Israel has flouted the United Nations' authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein."

Its disclosure would seriously damage the UK's relations with Israel, Wigan said. The comparison with Saddam and the "implied accusation of a breach of the UN's authority by Israel are potentially very serious". It was "inevitable" that relations between the UK and Israel would suffer if the marginal note were allowed to enter the public domain, he added.

Wigan observed: "Unfortunately, there is perception already in Israel that parts of the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] are prejudiced against the country". The note on the Williams draft dossier "would therefore confirm this pre-existing suspicion and would increase the damage".

Writing in October last year, he noted that "criticism of Israel received a huge amount of media coverage". The margin comment mentioning Israel would thus be given a "high profile". Harming relations with Israel would undermine the FCO's ability to prevent and resolve conflict "through a strong international system". In addition, there was "an important national interest in relation to counter-terrorism", Wigan said.

The FCO insisted on the removal of the reference to Israel after it lost a long battle to suppress the draft dossier, which was drawn up in early September 2002. It originally argued that the name of the author needed to be protected. It then said the contents of the draft dossier should be suppressed to protect the need for officials to give frank advice. The Williams document was finally released by the FCO last week, three years after it was first requested by Chris Ames, an independent researcher, who pursued his campaign in the New Statesman magazine.....

The Dodgy Dossier

2008-02-19T15:38:00.000-08:00

The John Williams draft of the report used to justify the UK's participation in the Iraq War has been published. See Iraq Dossier -- http://iraqdossier.com

The Goal of the Mortgage Crisis

2008-02-13T16:32:00.000-08:00

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes on the Telegraph (Feb 13 , 2008, US credit crisis escalates as defaults spread):

Defaults in the US housing market are spreading from sub-prime to the much larger stock of top-grade housing debt, threatening to set off a wave of even bigger losses for banks and investment funds.

The Mortgage Bankers Association says default rates on all outstanding home loans in the US have reached 7.3pc, the highest level since modern records began in the 1970s.

Arrears on "prime" mortgages have reached a record 4pc, confounding expectations that middle-class Americans with good credit records would be able to weather the storm.

While sub-prime and close kin "Alt A" total $2,000bn (£1,019bn) of debt, the prime market in all its forms is roughly $8,000bn. If prime default rates rise on their current trajectory, they could ultimately cause huge financial damage....

..."This crisis is not going to stop at mortgages. It is spreading to credit card debt, auto debt, and now student loans. On top of that we think corporate defaults will rise from 1.1pc to between 5pc and 9pc over the next 12 months."

US house prices have fallen by 7.7pc over the past year, according to the Case-Shiller index of the 20 biggest cities. The slide is likely to gather pace as 2.2m mortgages taken out at the height of the credit bubble adjust upwards by 250-300 basis points. Goldman Sachs says house prices may fall by as much as 25pc from peak to trough - creating the worst slump since the Great Depression.

Over 40pc of all mortgages issued from late 2005 to early 2007 are on adjustable rates - a break with the US tradition of fixed-rate borrowing.

Mr Sels said $40bn to $50bn would reset each month from now on, reaching peak pain late this year. "Borrowers never expected to pay the new rates. They assumed they could roll over their mortgages when the time came, but that is now impossible," he said.

"There are very similar problems emerging in Britain, Ireland and Spain. We know from the lending surveys by the Bank of England and the European Central Bank that conditions have tightened a great deal."

Emergency rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve will cushion the blow this year. The federal funds rate has come down from 5.25pc to 3pc since September, and is almost certain to drop further. However, the crisis is now moving with such speed that it may already be too late to avoid a domino effect as one distressed sector topples into the next....

...The latest concern is paralysis in the $250bn US market for auction-rate securities (ARS), which fund state governments. A series of deals has failed over the past two weeks. The risk is a slide in ARS prices along the lines of the mortgage debacle, leaving banks with yet another chunk of losses.

Catherine Austin Fitts notes on her blog (Feb 12, 2008, Is Buffett Positioning to Control Municipal Privatization?):

...the housing bubble and bust is successfully stripping municipalities of their financial sovereignty....

...Enter Warren Buffet to take a position to strengthen the insurance support {backing municipal bonds}....

Does this mean that as municipalities go into technical default or default, Buffet will be in a cross-cutting position to dictate terms to municipalities? So, for example, they have to shut down schools, pass laws requiring terminator seed or sell off their land, water, utilities and other assets.

Seems to me that Buffet is positioning himself to be in the catbird seat to play an invisible IMF to the US municipalities “Argentina.” Buffet and his network can make a fortune enforcing municipal policies and scavenging municipal assets.

___________

The Goal of the Mortgage Crisis: As a community experiences foreclosures, the property tax receipts for a town/city/county plummet. As governments are unable to meet their obligations, they will become insolvent, and will have to sell off their assets. Privatization of water and other natural resources will occur wholesale in the US in this way.

___________

Robert Weitzel and Meredith DeFrancesco report on The Daily Scare (Feb 10, 2008, Suchitoto 13: El Salvador’s “American-made” Terrorism Act in Corporate Play):

In 2001 El Salvador replaced the colon with the U.S. dollar as its national currency. In 2006 its right-wing government replaced lawful dissent with U.S. inspired anti-terrorism legislation as its national policy. In return, the Salvadoran people are offering Americans an object lesson in the value of our Bill of Rights when dollar meets dissent.

On the morning of July 2, 2007, an estimated 400 Salvadorans who were waiting for buses to take them to the small town of Suchitoto to attend a public forum on the privatization of water utilities were accused of blocking the road and were attacked by riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Two women and one man were arrested.

In Suchitoto’s central square, word of the attack and arrests spread through the crowds waiting for the motorcade and press caravan of President Antonio Saca, who was coming to Suchitoto to announce his administration’s new “"National Decentralization Policy,” a plan viewed by many Salvadorans as the first step in privatizing the country’s publicly-owned water resources.

In solidarity with the marchers being attacked, people began moving in the direction of the melee. Met by police and military units supported by helicopters and machine guns mounted on jeeps, people in the front ranks, attempting to avoid further violence, raised their hands in the air pleading for calm and shouting, “we are unarmed.” The riot squad responded by advancing on the crowd firing rubber bullets and tear gas at close range. Many Salvadorans were injured by bullets or overcome by gas. Ten people were arrested.

...The fate of the Suchitoto 13 should be of particular interest to Americans who value the right to lawful dissent and free speech. El Salvador’s Decree 108 was not only modeled on the USA PATRIOT Act, but the vagueness and ambiguity of its language rivals that used in the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in December 2007 by a 404-6 vote and which is currently being considered in the Senate. The language in both countries’ anti-terrorism legislation has been crafted so that constitutionally protected dissent can, with a corporate nod, be prosecuted as acts of terrorism and result in draconian sentences....

...Whatever the defendants’ ultimate charge, Decree 108 has accomplished what President Saca and President Bush and their multinational corporate partners intended. It has instilled fear and hesitation in the minds of citizens whose right to free speech and dissent are inalienable rights guaranteed by their respective constitutions. In short, it is terrorizing citizens into silence....

Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg report on the San Francisco Chronicle (Feb 4, 2008, Rule by fear or rule by law?):

Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.
According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists."...
Fraud-busters such as Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, have complained about these contracts, saying that more taxpayer dollars should not go to taxpayer-gouging Halliburton. But the real question is: What kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people?
Sect. 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," gives the executive the power to invoke martial law. For the first time in more than a century, the president is now authorized to use the military in response to "a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order."
The Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through Congress just before the 2006 midterm elections, allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on a list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and noncitizens alike.
Also in 2007, the White House quietly issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51), to ensure "continuity of government" in the event of what the document vaguely calls a "catastrophic emergency." Should the president determine that such an emergency has occurred, he and he alone is empowered to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure "continuity of government." This could include everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Congress has yet to hold a single hearing on NSPD-51.
U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice (Los Angeles County) has come up with a new way to expand the domestic "war on terror." Her Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR1955), which passed the House by the lopsided vote of 404-6, would set up a commission to "examine and report upon the facts and causes" of so-called violent radicalism and extremist ideology, then make legislative recommendations on combatting it.
According to commentary in the Baltimore Sun, Rep. Harman and her colleagues from both sides of the aisle believe the country faces a native brand of terrorism, and needs a commission with sweeping investigative power to combat it....
...What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens? ...

I'll tell you what the government is contemplating: PRIVATIZATION of public resources, e.g., water. How bad can that be? There's lots of history documented to show how bad it can be:

Small Towns Tell a Cautionary Tale about the Private Control of Water, At World Forum, Support Erodes for Private Management of Water , Water Privatization: The World Bank's Latest Market Fantasy, Fact Pack, Overview at Public Citizen, World Bank, WTO, and corporate control over water, and some thoughts from the Presbyterians

And anyone PROTESTING the privatization of public resources will be designated a DOMESTIC TERRORIST, and you will be sent to one of KBR's lovely camps. Most likely, all of your assets will be seized too. A quiet little forced labor camp in a remote region in your home state.

Anyone else experiencing deja vu? And should we have expected anything less from the grandsons of the men who financed the forced labor camps 70+ years ago in Germany, Poland, and Austria?

___________________

Feb 14, 2008: Check out Elizabeth C. McNichol and Iris Lav's article on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities website (Feb 11, 2008, 20 STATES FACE TOTAL BUDGET SHORTFALL OF AT LEAST $34 BILLION IN 2009; 8 OTHERS EXPECT BUDGET PROBLEMS). The short of it:

At least twenty-five states, including several of the nation’s largest, face budget shortfalls in fiscal year 2009. Of these 25 states, specific estimates are available for 20 states; the combined deficits of these 20 states are expected to total at least $34 billion for fiscal 2009 — which begins July 2008 in most states. Another 3 states expect budget problems in fiscal year 2010, although some of those gaps may occur earlier than expected. Many of the other states have not yet released information about their fiscal status.

Lots of good info on that site.

What do states own that could be 'auctioned off' in a case of insolvency? In the case of just the state of Washington, and just looking at the aquatic resources:

DNR is steward of about 2.4 million acres of state-owned aquatic lands, which include the beds of Puget Sound and the outer coast extending out three miles; 30 percent of the marine shorelines of Puget Sound; the beds of most navigable freshwater rivers and lakes, such as the Columbia River and Lake Chelan; and 60 percent of the freshwater shorelines of navigable rivers and lakes.

The states also administer mineral rights, oil and gas leases. Royalties and rental incomes from oil and gas leases supplement states' coffers by hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Here's an analysis on oil and gas production for just Michigan.

Note the US has 1190.62 trillion cubic feet (total) of natural gas.

Great Lakes Environmental Devastation; Population Poisoning

2008-02-07T15:36:00.000-08:00

Sheila Kaplan, on the Center for Public Integrity's site (Great Lakes Danger Zones), has this important news:

For more than seven months, the nation’s top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states, reportedly because it contains such potentially “alarming information” as evidence of elevated infant mortality and cancer rates.

The 400-plus-page study, Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern, was undertaken by a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the request of the International Joint Commission, an independent bilateral organization that advises the U.S. and Canadian governments on the use and quality of boundary waters between the two countries. The study was originally scheduled for release in July 2007 by the IJC and the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the study, which warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen “areas of concern”—including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee—may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants....

...“It raises very important questions,” Dr. Peter Orris, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Public Health in Chicago and one of three experts who reviewed the study for ATSDR....

...In a December 2007 letter to ATSDR in which he called for the release of the study, Orris wrote: ... this is perhaps the most extensively critiqued report, internally and externally, that I have heard of.”...

Last July, several days before the study was to be released, ATSDR suddenly withdrew it... . In an e-mail obtained by the Center, De Rosa {Christopher De Rosa, then the director of the agency’s division of toxicology and environmental medicine} wrote to Frumkin that the delay in publishing the study has had “the appearance of censorship of science and distribution of factual information regarding the health status of vulnerable communities.”...

...Canadian biologist Michael Gilbertson, a former IJC staffer and another of the three peer reviewers, told the Center that the study has been suppressed because it suggests that vulnerable populations have been harmed by industrial pollutants. “It’s not good because it’s inconvenient,” Gilbertson said. “The whole problem with all this kind of work is wrapped up in that word ‘injury.’ If you have injury, that implies liability. Liability, of course, implies damages, legal processes, and costs of remedial action. The governments, frankly, in both countries are so heavily aligned with, particularly, the chemical industry, that the word amongst the bureaucracies is that they really do not want any evidence of effect or injury to be allowed out there.” ...

...De Rosa, a highly respected scientist with a strong international reputation from his 15 years in charge of ATSDR’s division of toxicology and environmental medicine, was demoted after he pushed Frumkin to publish the Great Lakes report and other studies....

...Barry Johnson, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service and a former assistant administrator of ATSDR, told the Center that before he left in 1999 he recommended that the agency investigate the dangers that chemical contaminants might pose to residents of the Great Lakes states.

“This research is quite important to the public health of people who reside in that area,” Johnson said of the study. “It was done with the full knowledge and support of IJC, and many local health departments went through this in various reviews. I don’t understand why this work has not been released; it should be and it must be released. In 37 years of public service, I’ve never run into a situation like this.”

There is a link to the report obtained by the Center for Public Integrity on the article's site.

Once again, the Bush Administration chooses a path harmful to the general welfare of the citizens of the US.

UK's WMD Dossier Release "Very Soon"

2008-02-06T14:35:00.000-08:00

Chris Ames on the New Statesman (Feb 6, 2008, WMD dossier decision 'very soon', Brown says) has this update:

Gordon Brown has told MPs the government will decide “very soon” whether to release the secret draft of the Iraq wmd dossier written by Foreign Office (FCO) spin doctor John Williams.

The Information Tribunal ruled two weeks ago that the document, which I requested in February 2005, should be released under the Freedom of Information Act.

At Prime Minister’s Questions this lunchtime, Tory MP John Baron asked Brown whether he would “now immediately release the document, and if not, why not?” Brown replied that “a decision will be announced very soon.”

Commenting afterwards Baron said, “The Government has for too long withheld the truth about the role played by spin doctors in producing the Iraq Dossier. Now the Information Tribunal agrees that the Williams draft could have played a greater part in influencing the drafting of the dossier than the Government has so far admitted – even to the Hutton inquiry. The public deserves to decide for ourselves the importance of this document in the run up to war.”

The existence of what is now known as the “Williams draft” was first revealed by the New Statesman’s political editor Martin Bright in November 2006. At the time of the dossier’s production, Williams was the FCO’s press secretary. The fact that a spin doctor produced an early draft of the September 2002 dossier has cast doubt on the government’s assertions that the document that took Britain to war in Iraq was the pure work of the intelligence services.

On 22 January, the Information Tribunal rejected the FCO’s appeal against a decision by the Information Commissioner that the draft should be released. In its ruling, the tribunal criticised inconsistencies in the FCO’s evidence and observed that: “Information has been placed before us, which was not before Lord Hutton, which may lead to questions as to whether the Williams draft in fact played a greater part in influencing the drafting of the dossier than has previously been supposed.”

This evidence included a letter from the FCO to the Commissioner which stated that the draft was prepared “at the request of” Joint Intelligence Committee chairman John Scarlett, now head of MI6. The government has told both the Hutton Inquiry and parliament that Williams produced the draft “on his own initiative”.

The letter also stated that Williams was at a meeting on 9 September 2002 as “a member of a group tasked with drafting a preliminary document described by that meeting as ‘a draft assessment’ to be used in the production of a draft Dossier”. Scarlett produced what the government has always claimed to be the first draft of the dossier a day later. At the time, he referred to “considerable help from John
Williams” towards that draft.

The government has directly denied that the Williams draft includes a reference to the notorious “45 minutes” claim. It is however believed to contain a number of other instances of “sexing-up” that first appeared in Scarlett’s draft. As the New Statesman reported last week, Scarlett’s draft includes the first appearance in a published draft of a false claim that Iraq had “purchased” uranium from Africa. It appears that this claim is also in the Williams draft.

The FCO press office was this afternoon unaware of Brown’s comments and unable to clarify what “very soon” means. The government has until 19 February either to release the document or appeal to the High Court on a point of law. Ministers also have a veto over Freedom of Information Act requests, although this has never been used.

Know Your Enemy

2008-02-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

Agence France-Presse, on Japan Today (Feb 4, 2008, U.S. strategy toward al-Qaida fatally flawed: analysts):

WASHINGTON — In its ideological struggle against al-Qaida, American anti-terrorist strategy too often overlooks the basic tenets of the infamous Chinese warlord Sun Tzu, namely: know your enemy.

That is the fixed view of leading analysts, who conclude that through ignorance of the enemy it faces, ignorance of its nature, its goals, its strengths and its weaknesses, the United States is condemned to failure.

"The attention of the U.S. military and intelligence community is directed almost uniformly toward hunting down militant leaders or protecting U.S. forces, and not toward understanding the enemy we now face," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

"This is a monumental failing not only because decapitation strategies have rarely worked in countering mass-mobilization terrorist or insurgent campaigns, but also because al-Qaida's ability to continue this struggle is based absolutely on its capacity to attract new recruits and replenish its resources.

"Without knowing our enemy, we cannot fulfill the most basic requirements of an effective counter-terrorist strategy: pre-empting and preventing terrorist operations and deterring their attacks," Hoffman added.

Officials said Friday that Abu Laith al-Libi — believed to have been killed when a missile fired by an unmanned U.S. aircraft hit his Pakistani hideout — was a top al-Qaida commander who led Osama bin Laden's terror network in Afghanistan.

He was in fifth position on a classified Central Intelligence Agency wanted list, with a $5 million bounty on his head.

But in using the "al-Qaida" label when talking about suspects arrested or armed fighters killed — indiscriminately and sometimes wrongly, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere — American or Western forces create and feed a confusion which ultimately makes victims of themselves, experts say.

"Using body counts as a criterion to measure effectiveness is a bit like Guantanamo: you produce a tally, you mix up al-Qaida members or just hired hands with people who have only the vaguest of connections, people who have none at all and finally even pure civilians," added French academic Jean-Pierre Filiu, author of "Les Frontieres du Jihad" (The Limits of Jihad).

"When you reach that point, air strikes and the elimination of 'wanted' individuals not only prove fruitless, but actually become counter-productive.

"These actions only intensify al-Qaida recruitment, instead of weakening the organisation.

"The problem is this innate tendency within all administrations or bodies to stack up figures, pull out statistics, use them to show how they are winning, how they are liquidating their enemies, etc," Filiu added.

The "body count" syndrome is actually a "trap" laid by al-Qaida into which the Americans have "fallen" blindly, added Lebanese-American researcher Fawaz Gerges, an international relations specialist at Sarah Lawrence College, New York.

"You cannot win this war on the battlefield, because there is none," said Gerges. "You're facing an unconventional war. The more you rely on military might, the more you lose the war of ideas against al-Qaida and the militants.

"In Iraq, we fell into their trap. We gave them more ideological ammunition. So many Muslims all over the world are now convinced, and this feeling is so entrenched, that the war in Iraq is not against al-Qaida, but against Islam."

Gerges detects a growing appreciation of this phenomenon "even at the heart of the American administration," expressing his belief that a "new understanding" exists which casts George W Bush's war against al-Qaida as "counter-productive."

The Times of India (Feb 4, 2008, Slain Al-Qaida commander openly met Pak officials in Peshawar):

ISLAMABAD: Top Al-Qaida commander Abu Laith al-Libi, killed last week in northwestern Pakistan, openly met Pakistani officials and a Libyan diplomat in Peshawar despite a USD 200,000 reward on his head, a media report said on Monday.

Libi's death in Pakistan was reported by Al Qaida-linked websites and it is believed he was among 12 militants who died in a missile strike carried out by an unmanned aerial vehicle on a house at Khushali Torikhel village in Pakistan's troubled North Waziristan tribal area on January 29.

The terrorist leader from Libya had lived in northwestern Pakistan for years and "felt secure enough to meet officials and visit hospitals" in Peshawar, the Washington Post quoted officials and residents of the city as saying.

As he organised suicide bombings and other attacks in Afghanistan, Libi "found a comfortable refuge in Pakistan's border region", the paper quoted sources as saying.

He "met openly with a Pakistani politician and a Libyan diplomat and called on foreign fighters recovering from their wounds".

The way in which Libi moved unchallenged around the heart of Peshawar, a city of 1.2 million people, underscored "how freely he and other Al-Qaida leaders have been able to operate in Pakistan", the report said.

On one occasion in 2006, Libi "strode into the central prison in Peshawar and another Libyan fighter sat behind bars in the custody of Pakistani authorities... the Al-Qaida leader, the Pakistani politician and the Libyan diplomat argued over whether the militant should be deported against his wishes to Libya or released to fight another day, said Javed Ibrahim Paracha, the PML-N leader who helped arrange the meeting.

(1) We are pursuing a policy that has rarely been successful in defeating insurgencies.

(2) Al-Qaida leaders have complete freedom of movement within Pakistan.

(3) Pakistan is not looking for bin Laden.

(4) Pakistan manages to lose terrorists held in custody.

(5) Jundallah - based in Pakistan - members claim to have been trained by US & British intelligence officers; there is "member movement" between Jundallah & Lashkar-e Jhangvi (LeJ), which "was involved, along with the Jaish e-Mohammad, in the abduction and murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in January 2002".

(6) And the CIA and Musharraf collaborate for a little of the Great Carnac routine on the assassination of the former Pakistani leader who knew where all the dead bodies were buried (including Osama bin Laden's) from the CIA-ISI-jihadi adventures in Afghanistan and the Balkans.

Infinity and Beyond

2008-02-01T12:13:00.000-08:00

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke

Any sufficiently intricate manipulation of government policy is indistinguishable from incomprehensible white noise for the vast majority of America. -- AerynSun

Philip Shenon's The Commission

2008-02-01T11:53:00.000-08:00

Max Holland on his Washington DeCoded Blog (Jan 30, 2008, Commission Confidential) has a review of Philip Shenon's astounding new book:

...In a revelation bound to cast a pall over the 9/11 Commission, Philip Shenon will report in a forthcoming book that the panel’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, engaged in “surreptitious” communications with presidential adviser Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials during the commission’s 20-month investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

Shenon, who led The New York Times’ coverage of the 9/11 panel, reveals the Zelikow-Rove connection in a new book entitled The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, to be published next month by TWELVE books. The Commission is under an embargo until its February 5 publication, but Washington DeCoded managed to purchase a copy of the abridged audio version from a New York bookstore....

...Shenon delivers a blistering account of Zelikow’s role and leadership, and an implicit criticism of the commissioners for appointing Zelikow in the first place—and then allowing him to stay on after his myriad conflicts-of-interest were revealed under oath....

...He depicts Zelikow as exploiting his central position to negate or neutralize criticism of the Bush administration so that the White House would not bear, in November 2004, the political burden of failing to prevent the attacks.....

...Zelikow failed to disclose several additional and egregious conflicts-of-interest, among them, the fact that he had been a member of Rice’s NSC transition team in 2000-01. In that capacity, Zelikow had been the “architect” responsible for demoting Richard Clarke and his counter-terrorism team within the NSC. As Shenon puts it, Zelikow “had laid the groundwork for much of went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know that?”...

...Determined to blunt the Jersey Girls’ call for his resignation or recusal, Zelikow proposed that he be questioned under oath about his activities. General counsel Daniel Marcus, who conducted the sworn interview, brought a copy of the résumé Zelikow had provided to Kean and Hamilton. None of the activities Zelikow now detailed—his role on Rice’s transition team, his instrumental role in Clarke’s demotion, his authorship of a post-9/11 pre-emptive attack doctrine—were mentioned in the résumé....

...In late 2003, around the time his involuntary recusal was imposed, Zelikow called executive secretary Karen Heitkotter into his office and ordered her to stop creating records of his incoming telephone calls. Concerned that the order was improper, a nervous Heitkotter soon told general counsel Marcus. He advised her to ignore Zelikow’s order and continue to keep a log of his telephone calls, insofar as she knew about them....

...Even after his recusal, Zelikow continued to insert himself into the work of “Team 3,” the task force responsible for the most politically-sensitive part of the investigation, counter-terrorism policy....

Why is it important ... crucial to the coverup of 'what really happened' ... that Zelikow concealed his part in the demotion of Clarke? Because it is on the critical path to the "successful" 9/11 operation:

From William Bowles:

...The White House, feeling the heat over charges that President George W. Bush failed to make terrorism an urgent priority before September 11, has released documents showing that one week before the 2001 attacks he ordered plans for military action against al Qaeda.

Portions of a September 4, 2001, national security presidential directive were released as plans were set for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly on April 8 before the September 11, 2001, commission."

…The September 4 presidential directive called on Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to plan for military options 'against Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including leadership, command-control, air and air Defence, ground forces, and logistics.'

It also called for plans against al Qaeda and 'associated terrorist facilities in Afghanistan, including leadership, command-control-communications, training, and logistics facilities.'

Now, you can't get this from Reuters anymore because they've pulled it (as has Wired News — if you look elsewhere in the U.S. media, you'll find a sentence or two buried deep within articles focusing on other related topics), but newspapers in the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and elsewhere have headlined it. This is quite curious, because this is really is an extraordinary story: The administration had actually called for a war against Afghanistan before September 11th, which of course takes away from September 11th as a reason for that war. And to think that they called me crazy nine months ago when I first reported this. Now even the administration is admitting this.

To read the various U.S. stories that actually report this is to become very confused. There are differences between them that are often totally at odds with each other. One might think that the writers were actually reporting from different planets, or if one were cynical, one might think that the administration simply hasn't fully flushed out how they want to spin this story. One sparsely-reported point, for example: The official date on NSPD-9 is September 4th, a full seven days before 9-11. This however is the date that NSPD-9 was first placed on the President's desk for his signature, but it was revised several times before the President actually signed it on September 17th. A more curious but entirely unreported point: If the document was not in final form on 9-11, why is attacking the Taliban mentioned firstand attacking al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9-11, mentioned only second? Oh, to see those earlier pre-9-11 drafts, but of course, that will never happen.

For it's part, the rationale of the administration is obvious. With a date of September 4th on this document, the administration gets to say, "See? Richard Clarke was wrong. We were working on terrorism before 9-11!" Well, this document comes close but doesn't actually say that. What it does is say that the administration was working on a war with Afghanistan before 9-11, and the administration is hoping that everyone will simply assume that these are one and the same. If people do, then NSPD-9 is the "perfect alibi", … except that it isn't.

NSPD-9 is first mentioned in conjunction with the 9-11 commission by Donald Rumsfeld in his prepared remarks before that commission. It is again mentioned by Richard Clarke during his Meet The Press interview, with Clarke then calling for its declassification, clearly feeling that this would vindicate his claims that the administration was slow to move on terrorism. Indeed, while NSPD-9 was clearly worked on well before it reached the President's desk, NSPD-5 (Review of U.S. Intelligence – still classified) suggests that the administration only started to seriously consider terrorism intelligence in May of 2001, four months after it took office. NSPD-5 called for the creation of two panels to study U.S. intelligence capabilities, but it is unclear what if anything these two panels ever did or if they were even assembled. They may very well have been, but the administration's recent appointment of a new commission to do the exact same thing (second article) suggests otherwise.

All of this suggests of course that NSPD-9 is anything but the "perfect alibi". For the administration, if it works, fine, but in declassifying a portion of this directive, the administration is showing how very desperate Clarke's revelations have made it. This is a high risk strategy, and could well backfire before a press willing to look more closely (connect the dots), something they have obviously not yet done.

The problem begins of course with Dick Cheney's extraordinary suggestion (there is a reason this man tries to stay out of the spotlight) that Richard Clarke was "out of the loop". As Josh Marshall pf Talkingpointsmemo.com correctly points out here, if Clarke was given the terrorism oversight job by NSC chief Condoleezza Rice, how could he possibly have been out of the loop? Yet, as Clarke has said, not much was going on within the administration regarding terrorism for a good bit of time, at least to his tastes. Could both of these men be telling the truth? In fact, yes, but only if Cheney is not talking about the "loop" that Clarke is.

Up until shortly after 9-11, Richard Clarke was the administration's "go to" man on terrorism. If it was about terrorism, Richard Clarke was involved. After 9-11, he states that he learned within days that Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were clearly planning to use 9-11 as an excuse to attack Iraq. Indeed, a Vanity Fair article out this week details a meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair just 9 days after 9/11, during which Bush tells Blair that Iraq is next after Afghanistan and Blair essentially agrees. Clarke himself wants nothing to do with this, and so a reassignment (satisfactory to him) takes place. The important thing to note however is that until this point, Clarke is the terrorism czar for the administration.

It is in his role as terrorist czar that Clarke brought forward with him from the Clinton administration some sort of plan for getting to Osama bin Laden that clearly involves the use of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. While the specific level of detail to which this plan had been developed at that time has not been disclosed, Clarke's comments regarding it clearly suggest that it was well beyond the conceptual stage. It is a plan that is soon presented in some fashion to members of the new Bush administration, but within weeks (February 13th) of the inauguration, NSPD-1 (not classified) is issued. NSPD-1 does a number of things, but two are critical. First, NSPD-1 eliminates inter-agency (intelligence) work groups, forcing all intelligence sharing between the various agencies (FBI, CIA, DIA, etc.) through the administration's senior staff. Second, it forces Richard Clarke to the second tier. Richard Clarke is now "out of the loop", and he will not get back into the loop until NSPD-9. These two things will prove to be fatal on 9-11.

Sibel Edmonds, Turkey, Nuclear Power, Missile Technology, Defense Industry

2008-01-29T14:56:00.001-08:00

Luke Ryland has an interview with Sibel on OpEdNews (Jan 28, 2008, Sibel Edmonds: 'Buckle up, there's much more coming.'):

... Sibel Edmonds: ... The US media also suffers from a pack mentality. I was told by one executive that they weren't doing the story because it was 'old news' because 60 Minutes did a single segment in October 2002, even though they only covered a tiny part of the case. This executive literally told me that he'd only cover the story if it was 'hot and sexy.' I often think that I'd need to be able to hire Britney Spears to be a spokesperson - and this is not just for my case, but for any of the many other solid, important cases at the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Apparently this is what it would take to get any coverage.

Of course, given the pack mentality, if any of these stories does become 'hot and sexy' then all the journalists focus on the same issues and there's no differentiation in their reporting....

...Turkey's army of lobbyists in DC are very effective. The US press tends to stay away from any stories critical of Turkey, I would say even more than Israel.

There's also the possible problem of 'eating crow' but I hope this isn't an issue, this story is way too important for any of that. The information that has been published in the Times recently could have easily come out four years ago in the US press. We now need everyone to focus on the important issues....

... Luke Ryland: Two weeks after the first article in the Times about the involvement of high-level US officials being involved with Turkish and Israeli interests in supplying the nuclear black market, President Bush quietly announced that the US will start supplying nuclear technology to Turkey. Do you think that is a coincidence?

Sibel Edmonds: The timing is certainly very, very suspicious. The proposals that are being floated are very suspicious too. There are reports that Turkey will build an enrichment facility, and that Turkey will become the key supplier of nuclear fuel to other Muslim countries who want nuclear power plants. None of this makes any sense.

And again, the US media is nowhere to be seen on this issue. Where are the journalists? Do you remember the noise made a couple of years ago when the US announced that it would supply India with nuclear technology? So far, nearly a week after the announcement and not a single major US media outlet has even reported on the deal! Think of the hypocrisy, with all the saber-rattling at Iran over enrichment.

If it's such a good idea to sell nuclear technology to Turkey, why isn't the White House out there selling the idea? Where are the arguments in the press saying that this will be good for regional stability, or that it will help reduce demand for oil, or even that it is simply good business because US firms will be able to sell their hardware and knowledge? There's nothing! Silence. What does that tell you?....

From Reuters/UK (Jan 28, 2008, Turkish Enka, KEPCO to cooperate on nuclear energy):

Turkish energy-to-construction firm Enka Insaat ENKAI.IS has agreed with Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) ... to work together on nuclear energy in Turkey, the Turkish firm said on Monday.

Enka said in a statement to the stock market that the preliminary agreement was signed on Friday, but gave no more details.

Energy-importer Turkey has said it expects to hold tenders for its first nuclear power plants by May at the latest and aims for construction to start this year....

Note that Fikret Güler is a member of the Board of Enka (see Enka's website), and Hilmi Güler is the Turkish Energy Minister.

From Transnationale.org, KEPCO belongs to:

shareholder ... country ... %
Barclays Plc ... UK ... 0.2
Brandes Investment Partners, L.P ... US ... 3.2
Franklin Resources, Inc ... US ... 0.5
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ... US ... 0.3
ING Groep ... Netherlands ... 0.3
INVESCO International Ltd. ... Jersey ... 0.7
Mellon Financial Corp. ... US ... 0.2
Morgan Stanley ... US ... 0.2
Putnam LLC ... US ... 0.1

KEPCO is also working in Romania, see the 2002 article on PlanetArk.

Thomas Grove and Ercan Ersoy report for Reuters/UK (Jan 28, 2008, INTERVIEW-Turkey Sabanci to pick nuclear partner by mid-March):

Turkey's Sabanci Holding SAHOL.IS will choose by mid-March from up to six European and Asian companies to partner its bid in a Turkish nuclear power plant tender, the head of Sabanci's energy group said on Monday.

"We are looking for a utility company and are in talks with five or six companies ... (We can decide on one) at the end of February or the beginning of March," Selahattin Hakman, the president of the conglomerate's energy group, told Reuters.

Turkey will hold a tender for the construction and operation of three seperate nuclear power station tenders by May at the latest, and construction is targeted to begin this year, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said earlier this month.....

Interestingly, Mustafa Oguz reports for the Turkish Daily News (Jan 21, 2008, Turkey to face serious brainpower deficit in nuclear power):

.... About 20 years ago, Istanbul Technical University's (İTÜ) Nuclear Energy Institute annually received over 100 graduate studies applications, but now the Institute is merely a branch of the University's Energy Institute, preferred by only five graduate studies candidates. “The department has eight professors and five people apply. We must train our own workforce if we speak of independence,” said Bilge....

...“Me and my colleagues spent two years on the safety of a nuclear plant in 1986. I do not see that such precautions can be taken within the framework of the existing law,” he said....

... The nuclear issue, with its economic, scientific and political dimensions is one of the most important matters on Turkey's agenda, yet the country's opposition parties remain aloof to vital developments related to the subject. Representatives of Turkey's three main political parties, namely the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) were supposed to state their parties' views during the problems and solutions part of the Nuclear Energy Arena meet and hear criticism and remarks from experts in the field. Moreover, the platform was opened by the President of United Kingdom Atomic Energy Agency Barbara Thomas Judge, who emphasized nuclear power's new age and spoke about the experiences of her country that is contemplating erecting fourth generation nuclear plants. However, other than the AKP delegate, Taner Yıldız, who gave evasive responses to questions posed by academics on the nuclear law and the lack of trained nuclear brainpower, opposition parties did not make a serious contribution to discussions. The MHP delegate, Professor Alim Işık, tailored his party's energy dossier minutes before his turn, to recite innumerable data on nuclear energy in the world and energy consumption in Turkey, a theme already covered several times during the day. As for the CHP, the party was simply absent. Although the name of Özlem Çerçioğlu was included in the list of speakers, she did not show up and the party did not care to send another representative to the platform.

The event was organized by the Strategic, Technical, Economic Research Center (STEAM).

Joshua Frank on DissidentVoice (Jan 25, 2008, Why Bush Wants to Legalize the Nuke Trade with Turkey) has these insights:

According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds there is a vast black market for nukes, and certain U.S. officials have been supplying sensitive nuclear technology information to Turkish and Israeli interests through its conduits....

...In likely reaction to the London Times report, the Bush Administration quietly announced on January 22 that the president would like Congress to approve the sale of nuclear secrets to Turkey. As with most stories of this magnitude, the U.S. media has put on blinders, opting to not report either Edmonds’ story or Bush’s recent announcement....

...The Bushites seem to be covering their own exposed backsides, for the timing of Bush’s call to sell nuke secrets to Turkey is certainly suspicious, if not overtly conspicuous. It appears the White House has been spooked by Edmonds and hopes to absolve the U.S. officials allegedly involved in the illegal sale of nuclear technology to private Turkish “entities”....

...If Congress does not block or amend Bush’s legislation to sell nukes to Turkey within 90 days, it will become law automatically, likely acting retroactively to clear the alleged crimes of Marc Grossman and his neocon, nuke-trading friends.

Lale Sariibrahimoglu comments in Today's Zaman (Jan 22, 2008, Turkey to acquire missile technology):

...US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy Ed McGinnis, in charge of developing the US's Global Energy Partnership (GNEP), had talks in Ankara on Jan. 17, reportedly supporting Turkey's nuclear energy development plans. But the US has also been urging Turkey to join the 19-nation GNEP platform that envisages, among other things, safe development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes while seeking to control nuclear arms proliferation.

By the way, it is worth recalling that earlier Turkish press reports stating that the US had been warm to the idea of turning Turkey into a nuclear uranium enrichment center through which Iran can also obtain uranium for peaceful purposes did not seem correct.

As far as I understand, the US is not of the opinion that it should encourage Turkey, which has not even started building nuclear energy plants, to enrich uranium. In the eyes of the US, supporting Turkey becoming a center for uranium enrichment is a premature idea....

...Once Turkey begins to acquire the capability to develop nuclear technology to meet its energy needs, its next or parallel step is expected to be to build its missile technology, not nuclear arms, says a Western military source.

Since 2004, Turkey has maintained a policy of boosting its poorly based defense industry toward its development from the status of a medium-level technology base to a higher-level and strategic country, mainly in areas such as missile-building, which requires high technological capability.

To reach that target and become a major player in the defense industry, Turkey has already taken steps to force major military-owned companies to intensify the building of high-tech defense equipment while ending joint production policies that have failed to enable the creation of a meaningful defense industry base in the country.

Ankara has thus increasingly been forging cooperation with countries, including South Korea, that are ready to share their technology with Turkey. China has also been cooperating with Turkey in the development of rockets with a range of 150 kilometers.

Timing is Everything

2008-01-24T16:10:00.000-08:00

For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets, Jan 6, 2008, Times (UK)

Within 2 days ....

From Poynter Online

Topic: Memos Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 1/8/2008 1:56:11 PM
Title: AP to keep a closer eye on Britney
Posted By: Jim Romenesko

Memo from Associated Press' Los Angeles assistant bureau chief
From: Baker, Frank S.
Sent: Tue 1/8/2008 11:58 AM
To: News - Southern California Editorial Staff
Subject: Britney

All:

Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal. That doesn't mean every rumor makes it on the wire. But it does mean that we want to pay attention to what others are reporting and seek to confirm those stories that WE feel warrant the wire. And when we determine that we'll write something, we must expedite it.

Thanks.

Frank

"War on Terrorism" is BOGUS

2008-01-23T15:53:00.000-08:00

Michel Chossudovsky's well researched Al Qaeda and the "War on Terrorism", found on GlobalResearch (Jan 20, 2008) provides a detailed history and excellent summary of what is really happening in this bogus war on terrorism:

....Known and documented, the "Islamic terror network" is a creation of the US intelligence apparatus. There is firm evidence that several of the terrorist "mass casualty events" which have resulted in civilian casualties were triggered by the military and/or intelligence services. Similarly, corroborated by evidence, several of the terror alerts were based on fake intelligence as revealed in the London 2006 foiled "liquid bomb attack", where the alleged hijackers had not purchased airline tickets and several did not have passports to board the aircraft.

The "war on terrorism" is bogus. The 911 narrative as conveyed by the 911 Commission report is fabricated. The Bush administration is involved in acts of cover-up and complicity at the highest levels of government.....

Lies for Iraq War

2008-01-23T15:41:00.000-08:00

Douglass K. Daniel reports for the Associated Press (Jan 23, 2008, Study: False statements preceded war):

...in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.... The study counted 935 false statements.... It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

Center For Public Integrity: http://www.publicintegrity.org/default.aspx

From the United Kingdom, the New Statesman reports (Jan 23, 2008, Another NS victory and 'Release dossier', ministry told):

The Information Tribunal has just rejected an appeal by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to stop the release, under the Freedom of Information Act, of an early draft of the now infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier.

The September 2002 dossier formed part of the government’s spurious case for war in Iraq. The draft in question was produced by John Williams, the FCO’s Head of News at the time. Its existence tore apart the government’s assertion, to the Hutton and Butler inquiries, that the dossier was the work of the intelligence services.

The Tribunal criticised inconsistencies in the Foreign Office’s account. It noted that the FCO’s chief witness and Director of International Security, Stephen Pattinson, "was not involved at the time and volunteered no information about the source of his information".

The decision follows a three-year battle by Chris Ames, a charity researcher from Surrey, who persisted in his quest for the truth....

From Chris Ames:

...the Tribunal has allowed a handwritten note to be redacted which the Foreign Office claimed would be damaging to international relations.

The FCO has said that it is studying the Tribunal decision and declined to name the authors of the handwritten comments....

...The tribunal also reveals that the draft was “annotated in two different persons’ handwriting, suggesting that at least one person other than the author had reviewed and commented on it despite Mr Pattison’s statement that it was put aside the moment it was first presented.” Again here, the tribunal can be seen to be skeptical of the government’s claim that Williams’ work was not taken forward.

However, the tribunal has ordered that one of the handwritten notes should be redacted from the draft when it is published. It is clear that the Foreign Office has claimed that disclosure of this comment would be damaging to international relations, a claim that it did not make at the time of its initial refusal. The decision notice states that this issue is covered in a confidential annexe.

On the content of the draft itself, the Tribunal reveals that some intelligence-related sections of the published dossier bear a resemblance to parts of the Williams draft, although this does not “lead on easily to the conclusion that one had been based on the other”. The dossier was finally published on 24 September 2002, two weeks after Scarlett’s “first draft”, and was central to the case it made to Parliament for war in Iraq.

Responding to the Information Tribunal decision, Conservative MP John Baron said: "This decision lifts the lid on government efforts to cover-up the role played by spin doctors in producing the Iraq Dossier.

"I am now pressing the Foreign Secretary immediately to make public the Williams draft, so that we can assess for ourselves the significance of this document in the run up to war – a war which we should never had been party to.

"The Tribunal agrees that the Williams draft could have played a greater part in influencing the drafting of the dossier than the Government has so far admitted - even to the Hutton Inquiry. The Government cannot hide this document any longer."

US Nuclear Secrets For Sale ... US Media Snoozes

2008-01-22T11:23:00.000-08:00

Editor & Publisher dared to stick their toe into the pool on Sunday (Jan 21, 2008, London 'Times' Story Says U.S. Complicit in Nuclear Proliferation --- Ellsberg Charges Media 'Coverup" Here), after the 2nd week of Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times (UK) publishing that which the US media will not touch: US elected & appointed officials selling nuclear secrets (the 1st scoop - see this blog entry here for link & excerpts - Tuesday, January 8, 2008 Sibel Edmonds Explosive Revelations in the Times). The 2nd scoop by Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert and Joe Lauria at the Times (Jan 20, 2008, FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft) notes:

THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets.

The assertion follows allegations made in The Sunday Times two weeks ago by Sibel Edmonds, an FBI whistleblower, who worked on the agency’s investigation of the network.

Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file.

Edmonds believes the crucial file is being deliberately covered up by the FBI because its contents are explosive. She accuses the agency of an “outright lie”.

“I can tell you that that file and the operations it refers to did exist from 1996 to February 2002. The file refers to the counterintelligence programme that the Department of Justice has declared to be a state secret to protect sensitive diplomatic relations,” she said....

...Edmonds had told this newspaper that members of the Turkish political and diplomatic community in the US had been actively acquiring nuclear secrets. They often acted as a conduit, she said, for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they attracted less suspicion.

She claimed corrupt government officials helped the network, and venues such as the American-Turkish Council (ATC) in Washington were used as drop-off points.

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.

The letter also makes reference to wiretaps of Turkish “targets” talking to ISI intelligence agents at the Pakistani embassy in Washington and recordings of “operatives” at the ATC....

The RAW Story (Jan 20, 2008, British media confirms FBI whistleblower Edmonds' account of secret file) identifies MARC GROSSMAN (Ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997) as the person who provided the warning on Brewster Jennings.

Even the Times story itself has its own intrigue, as reported on The Brad Blog (Jan 19, 2008, UK Sunday Times Scoops US Media Again, Confirms FBI Cover-Up of Documents in Sibel Edmonds Nuke Secrets Case).

Daniel Ellsberg offers these insights on The Brad Blog (Jan 20, 2008, DANIEL ELLSBERG: Covering Up the Coverage - The American Media's Complicit Failure to Investigate and Report on the Sibel Edmonds Case):

... But there is a worse journalistic sin than being scooped, and that is participating in a cover-up of information that demands urgent attention from the public, the U.S. Congress and the courts.

For the last two weeks --- one could say, for years --- the major American media have been guilty of ignoring entirely the allegations of the courageous and highly credible source Sibel Edmonds, quoted in the London Times on January 6, 2008 in a front-page story that was front-page news in much of the rest of the world but was not reported in a single American newspaper or network. It is up to readers to demand that this culpable silent treatment end.

Just as important, there must be pressure by the public on Congressional committee chairpersons, in particular Representative Henry Waxman and Senator Patrick Leahy. Both have been sitting for years on classified, sworn testimony by Edmonds --- as she revealed in the Times' new story on Sunday --- along with documentation, in their possession, confirming parts of her account. Pressure must be brought for them to hold public hearings to investigate her accusations of widespread criminal activities, over several administrations, that endanger national security. They should call for open testimony under oath by Edmonds --- as she has urged for five years --- and by other FBI officials she has named to them, as cited anonymously in the first Times' story....

...It's impossible to believe that they --- or Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal --- could not have acquired documents and testimony that Murdoch's London paper reports on today. Now the challenge to them is to end their silence on that reporting and do their job.....

Note the new rogues gallery (State Secrets Privilege Gallery) on Sibel Edmonds' website (http://www.justacitizen.com/).

The media in India accurately refer to al-qaeda as ISI-Qaeda. Refer to Michel Chossudovsky's excellent Cover-up or Complicity of the Bush Administration? The Role of Pakistan's Military Intelligence (ISI) in the September 11 Attacks.

Musharraf, CIA Perform The Great Carnac

2008-01-18T12:38:00.000-08:00

Pamela Hess reports for the Associated Press on the Detroit Free Press (Jan 18, 2008, CIA pins blame for Bhutto's assassination):

The CIA believes a Pakistani tribal leader’s network was behind the assassination of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Baitullah Mehsud is an extremist with strong ties to al Qaeda and is based in the
federally administered, lawless tribal area of Pakistan, along the Afghan border. He has been blamed for an organized campaign of assassinations of Pakistani officials and suicide bombings in the country.

The CIA arrived at the conclusion that Mehsud was behind the Dec. 27 killing of Bhutto shortly after it occurred, according to an intelligence official who spoke on
condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The Washington Posts first reported the CIA’s take on Friday, in an interview conducted with CIA director Michael Hayden. “This was done by that network around Baitullah Mehsud. We have no reason to question that,” Hayden told the Post.

The government of Pakastani President Pervez Musharraf has blamed Bhutto’s death on Mehsud, but some of her political party and family members have questioned those assertions....

White House E-mails

2008-01-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson report for the Washington Post (Jan 18, 2008, White House Study Found 473 Days of E-Mail Gone):

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional
Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.)....

...Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue....

...The White House is required by law to preserve e-mails considered presidential or federal records, and it is the target of several lawsuits seeking information about missing data and efforts to preserve electronic communications.

The internal study found that for Bush's executive office, no e-mails were archived on 12 separate days between December 2003 and February 2004, Waxman said. Vice President Cheney's office showed no electronic messages on 16 occasions from September 2003 to May 2005.

Archived e-mails were missing from even more days in other parts of the White House, the analysis found. The Council on Environmental Quality and the Council of Economic Advisers, for example, showed no stored e-mails for 2 1/2 months beginning in November 2003. The Office of Management and Budget showed no messages for 59 days -- including the period from Nov. 1, 2003, to Dec. 9, 2003 -- and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative showed no e-mail for 73 days.

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is "no evidence" that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto's assertion "seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us," Waxman said....

...Two advocacy groups suing the Bush administration over its e-mail policies, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive, also said yesterday that the White House's new statements are incomplete and contrary to earlier acknowledgments that some e-mails are missing.

CREW also asserted in court papers filed yesterday that "critical and highly relevant evidence may have been destroyed" by the White House.....

Veterans' Charities Spending Addressed in Congress

2008-01-18T12:21:00.000-08:00

Philip Rucker at the Washington Post (Jan 18, 2008, Chief of Veterans Charities Grilled on Groups' Spending) reports:

...At a raucous, three-hour hearing yesterday, House members questioned California entrepreneur Roger Chapin about his management of two charities. One charity, Help Hospitalized Veterans, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations that were to help wounded soldiers on personal expenses for Chapin, executive director Mike Lynch and Richard A. Viguerie, to whom the charity has awarded millions of dollars in fundraising-consulting contracts, the hearing found.

The expenses included at least $340,000 in meals, hotels and entertainment; a $135,000 loan to Lynch for a divorce settlement with his former wife; a $17,000 country club membership; three airplane tickets to Hawaii; and a $1 million loan to Viguerie for a start-up initiative at his firm, several members of the committee
said....
...Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the committee, said Help Hospitalized Veterans raised more than $168 million from 2004 to 2006. The charity spent a quarter of those donations on the veterans, with the rest going to direct-mail fundraising, salaries and other expenses, Waxman said....
...Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) asked Chapin what would happen if his charities told donors how their donations were spent.
"If we disclose, which I'm more than happy to do, we'd all be out of business," Chapin said. "Nobody would donate. It would dry up."...
...In one heated exchange yesterday, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) questioned Chapin's compensation. In 2006, Chapin and his wife took home a combined $561,971 in salary, bonuses and pension contributions, the committee said.
"I've tried everything under the sun to lower our fundraising costs," Chapin said.
"How about reducing your salary?" Cummings said. "You appear to be doing quite well for yourself and your wife."
"By whose standards?" Chapin shouted back....

Iraq Security Forces Will Need US MIL Assistance for Decade

2008-01-18T12:14:00.000-08:00

Ann Scott Tyson at the Washington Post (Jan 18, 2008, Iraq May Need Military Help for Years, Officials Say) reports:

Senior U.S. military officials projected yesterday that the Iraqi army and police will grow to an estimated 580,000 members by the end of the year but that shortages of key personnel, equipment, weaponry and logistical capabilities mean that Iraq's security forces will probably require U.S. military support for as long as a decade.

"The truth is that they simply cannot fix, supply, arm or fuel themselves completely enough at this point," said U.S. Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik, head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq....

...Iraq "remains reliant on the coalition" for critical gear, such as helicopters, mortars, artillery and intelligence-gathering equipment, he said. Moreover, Iraq's shortage of mid-grade leaders represents "a very real and very tangible hole in proficiency that . . . will affect them for at least a decade."...

...Iraqi officials predict that their forces will be able to assume responsibility for internal security sometime between early 2009 and 2012, and that they will be able to handle external security by 2018 or 2020, according to Dubik....

...The second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T.
Odierno, said yesterday that Iraq could require a U.S. military presence for many years. For example, the United States could provide helicopters and other aircraft to support Iraqi combat operations for "five to 10 years," with "an appropriate number of ground forces that go along with that," Odierno told a Pentagon news conference.

However, such U.S. air support could also be provided by forces stationed outside Iraq at existing U.S. military bases in the Middle East, said Mark Kimmitt, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle Eastern affairs, who also testified before the House panel yesterday....

Bush Admin Pulls a "Clinton"

2008-01-16T16:10:00.001-08:00

Pete Yost reports for the Associated Press on the Detroit Free Press (Jan 16, 2008, White House may have erased e-mail evidence):

The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages — including those pertaining to the CIA leak case — have been taped over and are gone forever.

The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.

The White House “does not know if any e-mails were not properly preserved in the archiving process,” said the statement by Theresa Payton, chief information officer for the White House Office of Administration. “We are continuing our efforts,” said Payton, whose staff is responsible for the White House e-mail system.

If the e-mails were not saved, the White House might have violated two laws requiring preservation of documents that fall into the categories of federal records or presidential records....

...Payton’s sworn statement was filed in response to a federal court order last week in lawsuits by two private groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive.

The lawsuits allege that millions of e-mails are missing from White House servers. The recycling of backup tapes leaves doubt whether any missing e-mails will be recoverable.

“If the backup tapes have been erased or taped over or recycled, it’s hard to imagine where we will find copies of many lost e-mails,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, said in an interview Wednesday.

“It appears that the White House has now destroyed the evidence of its misconduct,” said Anne Weismann, the chief counsel for the ethics group.

“The White House declaration raises more questions than it answers, specifically the likelihood that for a very significant period of time — March 2003 to October 2003 — the White House recycled its backup tapes,” said Weismann.

“As a result there may be no way to recover the missing e-mails from a period in which the U.S. decided to go to war with Iraq, White House officials leaked the identity of Valerie Plame and the Justice Department started a criminal investigation of the White House,” the lawyer said....

The silence of the republicans who decried Clinton's email archival "problem" is deafening.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell - NSA owns the internet

2008-01-16T15:58:00.000-08:00

John Leyden at The Register (UK, Jan 16, 2008, US chief spook pushes electronic dragnet policy) reports:

US cyber-security policies may give US intelligence agencies access to any email, file transfer or web search.
The proposals from National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, which have entered into a draft of US Cyber-Security Policy, would legitimise data trawling on a scale that would make the current controversy about warrantless wiretapping seem like much ado about nothing....
...Intelligence agencies have long angled for this kind of surveillance ability. The infrastructure and computing power needed to tap into Americans' email and web search history may already exist....

For some background, see Reason's interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice (Jan 13, 2006, Inside the Puzzle Palace), a good post on the CannonFire Blog (July 31, 2007, Data mining, the NSA, DOJ corruption and impeachment), UPI's Feb 14, 2006 story Whistleblower says NSA violations bigger, and two stories on SpamDailyNews (April 08, 2006, Whistleblower outs NSA's secret spy room at AT T; and April 07, 2006, EFF: AT T forwards all Internet traffic into NSA) about AT&T forwarding all internet traffic to the NSA.

Michigan Republican Former Representative Mark Deli Siljander

2008-01-16T15:38:00.001-08:00

Lara Jakes Jordan reports for the Associated Press (on Chicago Tribune, Jan 16, 2008, Ex-Lawmaker Charged in Terror Conspiracy) on the ex-Congressman, ex-U.S. delegate to the U.N., ex-lobbyist & his indictment:

A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday on charges of being part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to a supporter of al-Qaida and the Taliban who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.

Mark Deli Siljander, a Michigan Republican when he was in the House, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.

The 42-count indictment, unsealed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Mo., accuses the Islamic American Relief Agency of paying Siljander $50,000 for the lobbying -- money that turned out to be stolen from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Siljander, who served in the House from 1981-1987, was appointed by President Reagan to serve as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations for one year in 1987....

...In the indictment, the government alleges that IARA employed a man who had served as a fundraising aide to Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader and mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The indictment accuses IARA of sending approximately $130,000 to help Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom the United States has designated a global terrorist. The money, sent to bank accounts in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2003 and 2004, was masked as donations to an orphanage located in buildings that Hekmatyar owned.

Authorities described Hekmatyar as an Afghan mujahedeen leader who articipated in and supported terrorist acts by al-Qaida and the Taliban. The Justice Department said Hekmatyar "has vowed to engage in a holy war against the United States and international troops in Afghanistan."

The charges paint "a troubling picture of an American charity organization that engaged in transactions for the benefit of terrorists and conspired with a former United States congressman to convert stolen federal funds into payments for his advocacy," said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein.....

...After leaving the government, he founded the Washington-area consulting group Global Strategies Inc.

The indictment says Siljander was hired by IARA in March 2004 to lobby the Senate Finance Committee in an effort to remove the charity from the panel's list of suspected terror fundraisers.

For his work, IARA paid Siljander with money that was part of U.S. government funding awarded to the charity years earlier for relief work it promised to perform in Africa, the indictment says. Under the grant agreement, IARA was supposed to return any unused funds after the relief project ended in 1999.

Instead, Siljander and three IARA officers agreed to cover up the money's origins and use it on the lobbying effort, the indictment charges....

...The indictment also alleges that on 11 separate occasions the defendants transferred funds from the United States to Iraq through Amman, Jordan, to promote unlawful activity that violated Iraq sanctions....

It has been noted that the USAID is just a front for the CIA (see here, and here, and here, and here, and loads more - google them), and the CIA funded islamists throughout the 1980s & 1990s (Afghanistan & Balkans adventures). Is Siljander/IARA's current predicament just more clean-up from 9/11?

Oil Rebuff

2008-01-16T15:16:00.000-08:00

The Saudis rebuffed Bush's plea for increased oil production to ease prices (see Mark Silva's Saudis reject Bush oil plea, Jan 16, 2008, Chicago Tribune).

However, lack of production/inventory does not seem to be sourcing the rise in prices, as Alan Greenspan stated repeatedly, its oil speculation. For a historical look over the past decade, see the article What Is Driving Oil Prices? by Richard G. Anderson and Jason J. Buol on the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' website, from January 2005 ... there's a nice graphic (from 2004) showing historical spot and future prices for oil. BusinessWeek from November 26, 2007 (A Hot Hand in Oil Speculation) references a Goldman Sachs analyst - Jeffrey Currie - who should be listened to, given his remarkable run at predictions in the oil market. Keith Fitz-Gerald reports on MondayMorning (Jan 10, 2008, Investors Will Benefit From New Plan to Have the United States and China Cooperate in Curbing Oil Speculation) about the future cooperation of the US and China on oil speculation.

Oil speculation is delved into by David Usher on TheReaganWing (June 10, 2007, Oil Price Gouging: From Enron With Love):

...Savvy investment firms and avaricious lawyers analyzed the Enron case – realizing they could turn a huge buck on oil futures – so long as they tacitly let oil companies constrain the oil supply without manipulating the supply directly themselves.

Giant speculative investment funds and oil companies now make tremendous profits raiding the oil spot-market, playing seemingly separate but implicitly cooperative roles serving up the same end-effect as Enron wreaked on California. But this time, the victim is the American consumer, not energy producers and distributors.

Federal and state politicians in both parties have failed to address this “Enroning of America” because government is on the take too. Taxes rise with gasoline prices, fattening political contributions while feeding slush budgets and pork barrels at both the state and federal levels....

...: “Investment banks from Morgan Stanley to Goldman Sachs are making so much money from oil futures that they’ve become a hot investment for all sorts of big-money players.” Ben Dell, an oil analyst and Sanford Bernstein calls it correctly, if not conservatively: “pension funds and other investors are buying oil to remove it from the market — which can help drive up demand — before selling it for a profit some months later”....

...Here is what we can take away from the above information:
(1) U.S. oil companies cut back U.S. distillation capacity substantially between 1980 and 2004. This seeded fears. Spot market prices rose tremendously, thus increasing profits to oil companies.

(2) U.S. oil companies decreased stateside production 40.3% between 1980 and 2004, driving fears about dependence on foreign oil, and creating an illusion that shortages were imminent.

(3) These two items, in conjunction with speculative manipulation of the spot market by banks and pension funds, caused oil company profits to soar. The world’s three largest oil companies netted profits of $172,000 per minute during the second quarter of 2006. Profits going forward look similarly bullish.(22) ....

...This problem is not limited to oil markets. In the name of “deregulation”, investors are now raiding electricity markets nationwide. This is driving up home energy costs for everyone, causing utility companies to defer lifecycle replacement of end-of-life equipment, resulting in massive power outages caused by wet or cold weather failures of antiquated step-down equipment never before experienced by customers....

US Gov't Finally Stops Fighting Family of 9/11 Volunteer EMT

2008-01-16T15:12:00.000-08:00

The Associated Press on the Long Island Newsday (Jan 15, 2008, Feds recognize slain 9/11 volunteer EMT):

After a five year battle, the U.S. government has dropped its effort to prevent a volunteer firefighter killed at the World Trade Center from receiving a federal death benefit for public safety officers who die on the job.

The decision is a belated victory for the family of Glenn Winuk, a longtime member of the Jericho Volunteer Fire Department who rushed to the burning towers on Sept. 11, 2001, to tend to victims of the terrorist attack.

Winuk, 40, died when the skyscrapers collapsed, but for years, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance fought his family's effort to collect a $250,000 payment due to police officers, firefighters and other government emergency workers killed in the line of duty.

The agency took the position that the benefit was only intended to go to active-duty public safety officers, and Winuk didn't qualify because he hadn't been on regular duty with his volunteer department on Long Island since 1998.

The long court battle finally ended on Jan. 10, after the Office of the Solicitor General decided to drop its last appeal in the case.

"It's really terrific. This fight has gone on too long," said Glenn's brother, Jay Winuk.

The move clears the way for Winuk's parents to receive the $250,000 payment, but the family maintains that their primary interest was not getting money, but achieving proper government recognition for Glenn's public service.

"It's very meaningful to my parents," Jay Winuk said.

He added that he hoped President Bush would now see fit to award his late brother the 9/11 Heroes Medal of Valor, which was given to the relatives of 442 other public safety officers killed in the terror attacks.

Glenn Winuk was working at his Manhattan law office the morning of the attacks, but he grabbed a medical bag and raced to pitch in with the rescue effort. When his body was found in the rubble, months later, he was wearing surgical gloves and a stethoscope.

A number of New York officials supported the family's campaign for a payment from the Public Safety Officers Benefits Program, including state lawmakers who passed a statute declaring that Winuk died in the line of duty.

The turning point in the case came when a judge on the Federal Court of Claims sided with the family last June, ruling that the government's denial of the benefit had been arbitrary.

Saudi Weapons Deal, bin Laden's message, Iraq

2008-01-14T15:09:00.000-08:00

Michael Scheuer has a piece on Asia Times Online (Jan 12, 2008, Bin Laden turns heat on Saudi Arabia) analyzing bin Laden's latest (12-29-07) message:

....Bin Laden urges the Iraqi fighters to heed the lesson of the Afghans' historic post-Soviet debacle because "the same thing applies to Iraq today"; leaders are more interested in their own power and status than in making Islam and the ummah (Islamic community) victorious. And while bin Laden warns that Washington is using promises of money, military training and arms to entice the "Islamic Party and some fighting groups [to] support America against Muslims", he leaves no doubt that the Islamists' main enemy in Iraq is now Saudi Arabia, not the supposedly militarily defeated United States....

...Bin Laden goes on to claim that the Saudis are trying to co-opt some of the Sunni mujahideen in Iraq by allowing "some groups to confidently move in the Gulf to receive [financial] support". Riyadh is careful to avoid officially funding its Iraqi insurgent favorites, so its support "is channeled under the banner of raising donations by some unofficial scholars and preachers". Bin Laden warns that "many of them ... are loyal to the state and seek to implement [Riyadh's] policy by pulling the rug from under the honest mujahideen's feet" and forcing them to support a national-unity government that is designed to be the agent of the United States and Saudi Arabia.

He asks the Iraqi mujahideen how they can trust Saudi King Abdullah, who is the "malignant foe" of Islam, the "main US agent in the region" and a man who took it on himself "to tempt and tame every free, virtuous, and honest person with the aim of dragging him to the path of temptation and misguidance ... [and] the path of betraying the religion and nation and submitting to the will of the Crusader-Zionist alliance"....

...While it is clear in the December 29 tape that bin Laden rates the Saudis as the main obstacle to God's victory in Iraq, there is little indication of what he intends to do to destroy Riyadh's ability to stymie the mujahideen there as it did in Afghanistan....

...If bin Laden's assertions are true, and Saudi Arabia's Afghanistan-like intervention in Iraq continues to prevent the mujahideen unity bin Laden advocates, the al-Qaeda chief and his shura (consultative) council may soon confront the very unpalatable necessity of having to break with their traditional grand strategy and move to try to destroy the Saudi regime....

Anne Gearan and Terence Hunt report for the Associated Press on the Detroit Free Press (Jan 14, 2008, Bush Delivers Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia and Bush Seeks Stronger Ties With Arms Deal):

Anne Gearan's article:

...The administration was notifying Congress of its intent to sell $20 billion in weapons, including precision-guided bombs, to the Saudis. It is "a pretty big package, lots of pieces," national security adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters on Air Force One....

Terence Hunt's article:

...Coinciding with Bush's arrival, the administration officially notified Congress it will offer Saudi Arabia sophisticated Joint Direct Attack Munitions - or "smart bomb" - technology and related equipment. The deal envisions the transfer of 900 of the precision-guided bomb kits, worth $123 million, that would give Saudi forces highly accurate targeting abilities.

Some lawmakers fear the systems could be used against Israel but Congress appears unlikely to block the deal because of Saudi Arabia's cooperation in the war on terror and in deterring aggression from Iran.

The United States already has notified Congress of five other packages to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, including Patriot missiles. The total amount of eventual sales as part of the Gulf Security Dialogue is estimated at $20 billion, a figure subject to actual purchases....

HIV Replication Stop Mechanism

2008-01-14T15:04:00.000-08:00

UPI story (Jan 14, 2008, Study finds cell protein that stops HIV):

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 14 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have found a key protein in dendritic cells can stop the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS from replicating.

UCLA researchers found the protein prevents HIV "budding" -- part of the virus' life cycle that is crucial to its ability to replicate and infect other cells.

"If we can block virus generation, then we can control the disease," said UCLA Associate Professor Shen Pang, lead author of the study.

Dendritic cells are specialized white blood cells in the skin, mucosa and lymph nodes that activate lymphocytes, including the T cells that HIV targets. Although dendritic cells can be infected with HIV, studies have shown viral generation from such cells is nearly 100 times lower than from infected T cells, indicating the cells may possess some inhibiting property.

Pang hypothesized that DC-SIGN, a protein expressed in dendritic cells, might be responsible for such inhibition. He and his colleagues found DC-SIGN and a related protein, DC-SIGNR, both demonstrated 95 percent to 99.5 percent inhibition of viral production from host cells.

The study that included postgraduate researcher Qiuwei Wang is scheduled for publication in the April issue of the FASEB Journal and is now available online at www.fasebj.org/cgi/rapidpdf/fj.07-9443comv3.pdf

Queen's Warning to Paul Burrell

2008-01-14T14:59:00.000-08:00

Gordon Rayner and Natalie Paris have this interesting bit on the Telegraph (Jan 14, 2008, Queen warns Paul Burrell of 'powers at work' after Diana's death):

The Queen warned former butler Paul Burrell of "powers at work in this country" shortly after the death Diana, Princess of Wales, her inquest was told.

Mr Burrell said the Queen had made the remarks during a 90-minute meeting with him, but that he had not asked her to clarify what she meant.

Ian Burnett QC, counsel for the inquest, suggested that possible explanations included media chiefs, the Establishment and the security services....

...Mr Burrell said the Queen had shown her concern in such a way because she is "just a wonderful lady"."I think it was a general 'be careful warning' over many issues," he told the court....

The Filipino Monkey Strikes Again! - Iran Threat Source

2008-01-14T14:54:00.000-08:00

Tom Chivers at the Telegraph (Jan 14, 2008, 'Iran threats' may have been work of a heckler)reports:

Threats to US ships in the Strait of Hormuz heard at the end of a Pentagon-released recording of an incident between Iranian patrol boats and US Navy warships last week may have been the work of a local heckler known as the "Filipino Monkey", The Navy Times has reported....
...In accented English a voice is heard to say "I am coming to you ... You will explode in a few minutes." Pentagon officials had previously stated that the voice came from one of the boats, but they are now distancing themselves from that claim, saying instead that they do not know the source of the transmission.
The Navy Times said that the voice in the audio did not match that of an Iranian officer shown speaking to Navy cruiser USS Port Royal over the radio in a video released by the Iranian authorities.
This has led several Navy experts to raise the possibility that a heckler, known locally as the "Filipino Monkey" - or a copycat - could have made the threats.
"Filipino Monkey" is believed to be more than one person. Its modus operandi is to listen in to ship-to-ship radio traffic before jumping in with insults and threats.
According to The Navy Times, US Navy women come in for particularly harsh treatment.
A civilian mariner told the paper that the "Filipino Monkey" phenomenon is worldwide, but more common in areas of heavy shipping such as the Strait of Hormuz....

Philip Agee

2008-01-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

The Telegraph (2:08am GMT 10/01/2008, Philip Agee) has this obituary:

Philip Agee, who died in Havana on Monday aged 72, turned from being a CIA agent into the most notorious of its "ideological defectors"; after leaving the agency in 1969, he made a career out of exposing the names of CIA personnel and attacking its methods.

Agee established his reputation as a critic of the CIA with Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, published in Britain in 1975 prior to its release in America. The book identified approximately 250 Agency officers and agents and claimed that "millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports".

According to the British and American security services, the book led directly to the deaths of several agents. "It was not enough simply to describe what the CIA does," Agee recalled. "It was important to neutralise the effectiveness of everybody doing it."

In 1975, after requests from the American government as well as an MI6 report that blamed Agee's work for the execution of two of its agents in Poland, an order was issued to deport Agee from Britain, where he had been living....

...Agee's version was that it was his Roman Catholic conscience that had persuaded him to leave the CIA, and he certainly succeeded in presenting himself as a principled critic of US intelligence. In 1978 he and a small group of his supporters began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin, a platform for his campaign to "expose" the workings of the CIA. In 1978-79 Agee published two volumes of Dirty Work, which exposed more than 2,000 covert CIA agents in western Europe and Africa as well as details about their activities....

...The son of a Florida businessman, Philip Burnett Franklin Agee was born on July 19 1935. He joined the CIA straight out of college in 1957 and worked as a case officer in several Latin American countries. He described himself as being politically "naive" in his youth, and colleagues recalled him as Right-wing; he argued against the minimum wage, saying that it would bankrupt small businessmen such as his father, who ran a laundry and uniform rental service in Tampa.

By his own account Agee became increasingly disillusioned with the way in which the CIA was supporting the traditional power structures in Latin America, where wealth was in very few hands. "We call this the 'free world'," he wrote, "but the only freedom under these circumstances is the rich people's freedom to exploit the poor."....

...Agee, who was twice married and had two sons, was described after his death by the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma as a "loyal friend of Cuba and staunch defender of the people's struggle for a better world".

Sir Edmund Hillary

2008-01-10T15:50:00.000-08:00

The New Zealand Herald (11:37AM Friday January 11, 2008, Sir Edmund Hillary dies at 88) has Sir Edmund Hillary's obituary, biography:

Sir Edmund Hillary has died aged 88.
Sir Edmund shot to international stardom when he was the first man to scale Mt Everest in 1953.
Prime Minister Helen Clark today described Sir Edmund as the best-known New Zealander to have ever lived and said his passing was a profound loss to New Zealand....

US-British forces blood donations

2008-01-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

Michael Evans, Defence editor for the Times (UK, January 11, 2008, US may have given injured British forces infected blood transfusions) reports:

The medical records of hundreds of British servicemen seriously wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 have had to be investigated by the Ministry of Defence after the Americans admitted that they may have given some of the injured infected blood transfusions.

The Pentagon revealed at a meeting in Washington in early November that, according to its records, 11 British servicemen had received life-saving blood transfusions from American volunteer donors at US military centres in Iraq and Afghanistan over the six-year period. None of the donors had been pre-screened to detect for any sign of HIV, hepatitis C, syphilis or other blood diseases.

However, MoD officials discovered that the US military medical record-keeping was “so poor”, according to one source, that Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, ordered an immediate search of British records to check whether the Americans had treated other wounded servicemen. After weeks of trawling through all the records of those who had been wounded and might have received blood transfusions, the MoD discovered that there were seven more who had received on-the-spot blood donations from American military personnel, giving a total of 18. Two of them had left the Armed Forces. Six British civilian security contractors working for the US military in Iraq had also received emergency blood transfusions after being wounded....

...The Pentagon said the American donors who provided the blood had now tested negative for hepatitis and HIV.

However, there are blood diseases that still have to be eliminated, and none of the 24 Britons involved will know if they are free of contamination for another three weeks. One official said it took three weeks to check for any sign of Chagas disease, a blood infection that can be picked up from insects in South America....

...Although British officials could barely suppress their anger and frustration over the delay by the Americans in informing them of the potential medical crisis, it was acknowledged that the fresh blood provided by the volunteer donors almost certainly saved the lives of the 24 Britons.

Professor Stan Urbaniak, a consultant at the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service in Aberdeen, said that fresh blood,for life-threatening wounds, was the only realistic source to stop massive haemorrhaging and give a chance of survival. “It’s a question of making a judgment between risk and benefit,” he told The Times.

What angered the MoD, however, was that under British procedures, even the emergency blood donors have to be prescreened for contamination. “When there’s an emergency, donors are called for from a panel of servicemen who have been checked. But the US doesn’t do this, they do the checking after the blood has been donated,” one official said....

Abdul Salaam - Afghan warlord who fought against coalition now a governor

2008-01-10T15:37:00.000-08:00

Nick Meo reports on the Times (UK, January 9, 2008, Taleban warlord gets new job as governor):

A feared Taleban commander who fought against British troops until he changed sides has been named governor of the key town of Musa Qala.

The appointment of Abdul Salaam to the crucial job was hailed last night by the Afghan Government, which is redoubling British-supported efforts to persuade Taleban commanders to end their armed struggle.

Officials hope that persuading Mullah Salaam, formerly one of their most ferocious enemies, to “reconcile” will encourage other Taleban commanders to change sides....

...the appointment will be opposed bitterly by many anti-Taleban Afghans who fear that the reconciliation process will allow fundamentalists to return to power, at least at local level. It will also put British soldiers in the unusual position of working closely with a man who was pledged to kill them a few weeks ago.

During the ten months when the Taleban ran Musa Qala, a key opium bazaar town in the north of Helmand, Afghans accused of being British spies were hanged in public, and suspected government collaborators were tortured. Heroin was traded openly in the town, and an estimated half a billion dollars of drugs were stockpiled there. Mullah Salaam was an important leader in the town during that time....

...Yesterday the new governor said that the Taleban had been divided for a while in Musa Qala but the majority were behind him.

“There are two groups of Taleban fighters in Musa Qala and I have the backing of the major one. The Taleban who are against peace and prosperity in Afghanistan, I will fight them,” he said.

The appointment comes soon after two senior international officials from the UN and EU were ordered to leave the country by President Karzai, who accused them of trying to negotiate with Taleban commanders in Musa Qala....

US Navy Backing Off Iranian Threat Claims

2008-01-10T15:28:00.000-08:00

Agence France-Presse on News.com.au (January 11, 2008 08:35am, US Navy threat may not have been Iranian) has this interesting info:

THE US navy says there is "no way to know" if a threat radioed to US warships in the Strait of Hormuz came from Iranian speedboats, casting doubt on the earlier US version of Sunday's confrontation.

"There is no way to know where this (radioed threat) exactly came from. It could have come from the shore... or another vessel in the area,'' Lieutenant John Gay of the US Navy Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said....

...overnight Iran released its own video to counter the charges, showing the crew of a speedboat contacting an American sailor via radio, asking him to identify the US vessels and state their purpose.

State-run Press-TV in Iran said the footage had been released by the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological force involved in the incident. Lt Gay said the threat was made through an "open bridge to bridge circuit'' and it would be "very difficult to determine'' that it came from the Iranian speedboats....

Richard Holt on the Telegraph has this story (5:37pm GMT 10/01/2008, Iranian video 'shows no threat to US navy'):

Iran has released a video which is claimed to show that its boats did not threaten US navy vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, as has been claimed by the Americans.

...the new video, broadcast by Iran's Press TV satellite station, gives a completely different version of the incident....

...Guards Brigadier General Ali Fadavi said Iran's boats had only approached the US ships to examine the registration numbers as they had been unreadable, Press TV said.

The video showed an Iranian naval officer on a small boat speaking via radio to a ship which can not be clearly identified. A total of three ships can be seen on the video.

The Iranian officer says: "Coalition warship 73 this Iranian navy patrol boat".

"This is coalition warship 73. I read you loud and clear," the person replied in what appears to be an American accent.

The Iranian officer then appears to ask for the ships to identify themselves, although not all his words can be understood: "Coalition warship 73 this Iranian navy patrol boat, request side number ... operating in the area this time," the Iranian voice says....

Video : http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1137942530/bclid1155254697/bctid1370834932

The Latest Staged Play

2008-01-09T10:54:00.000-08:00

Hooman Majd has a very interesting post over on HuffingtonPost (It's a Fake, Jan 9, 2008):

The Pentagon's version of the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday morning, involving U.S. Navy warships and Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrol boats is, at the very least highly suspicious. On Tuesday, the Navy released video footage and an audiotape to back its claims that the Iranian boats acted in a threatening and provocative manner, but neither the video nor the audio are particularly convincing as proof that Iran had hostile intentions. The video, which shows what is claimed are Iranian boats speeding around U.S. ships, doesn't show any of the boats hurtling directly towards any of the navy ships, nor does it show what the Pentagon claimed the Iranians then did, namely dropped "white boxes" in the water. (I would have opened fire at those, wouldn't you?) The audio tape is even less convincing, mainly because the person speaking doesn't have an Iranian accent and moreover, sounds more like Boris Karloff in a horror movie than a sailor in the elite branch of Iran's military. (The tape is also separate from any video.) Any Iranian can immediately identify Persian-accented English, particularly if the speaker has had little contact with the West, as is the case with Revolutionary Guardsmen and sailors. Iranians, you see, have difficulty with two consonants such as "p" and "l" next to each other; even Iranians who have lived in America for years will often pronounce "please" as "peh-leeze", or in this case, "explode" as "exp-eh-lode". On the tape, "explode" is pronounced perfectly, albeit as if the speaker was a villain addressing a superhero. Further, it is unimaginable, given what is known about the Revolutionary Guards (and I have met many), that one of its corps would speak in a such a manner, even if the accent were correctly Persian....

Sibel Edmonds Explosive Revelations in the Times

2008-01-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

The Times (UK, For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets, Jan 6, 2008):

...Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions. Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.

Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.
The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain’s Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations....

...She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities’ failure to act.

One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.

Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. “We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda,” a former CIA officer said last week. “There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end.”

It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan.

Edmonds was later to see the scope of the Pakistani connections when it was revealed that one of her fellow translators at the FBI was the daughter of a Pakistani embassy official who worked for Ahmad. The translator was given top secret clearance despite protests from FBI investigators.

Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents.

“The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information,” she said.

“The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their ‘hooking points’, which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.”

One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defence information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.

“He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,” she said.

Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder.

Edmonds said: “Certain greedy Turkish operators would make copies of the material and look around for buyers. They had agents who would find potential buyers.” In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.”....

...In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.

Dave Lindorff at Counterpunch (Jan 7., 2008, Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb A Real 9/11 Cover-Up?) develops an interesting analysis in light of the mysterious Minot-Barksdale live nuke flight:

...If Edmonds' story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and nuclear information from the U.S., it casts an even darker shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained incident last August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and regulations of 40 years' standing, loaded and flew off with six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

That incident only came to public attention because three as yet unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which were picked up by other US news organizations.

An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an "accident," but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is impossible, and argue that there had to have been a chain or orders from above the level of the base commander for such a flight to have occurred.

Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which included several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel occurring in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six 150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been no Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into what happened.

Yet in view of Edmonds' story to the London Times, alleging that there has been an ongoing, active effort for some years by both Al Qaeda and by agents of two US allies, Turkey and Pakistan, to get US nuclear weapons secrets and even weapons, and that there are treasonous moles at work within the American government and nuclear bureaucracy aiding and abetting those efforts, surely at a minimum, a major public inquiry is called for....

And now for some history:

Ewen MacAskill and Ian Traynor reported on The Guardian (September 18, 2003, Saudis consider nuclear bomb):

...Saudi Arabia, in response to the current upheaval in the Middle East, has embarked on a strategic review that includes acquiring nuclear weapons, the Guardian has learned....

...A strategy paper being considered at the highest levels in Riyadh sets out three options:

· To acquire a nuclear capability as a deterrent;

· To maintain or enter into an alliance with an existing nuclear power that would offer protection;

· To try to reach a regional agreement on having a nuclear-free Middle East.

Until now, the assumption in Washington was that Saudi Arabia was content to remain under the US nuclear umbrella. But the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the US has steadily worsened since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington: 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudi....

...In 1988, Saudi bought from China intermediate-range missiles capable of reaching any part of the Middle East with a nuclear warhead.

Four years ago, Saudi Arabia sent a defence team to Pakistan to tour its secret nuclear facilities and to be briefed by Abdul Qader Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb....

Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor at large for UPI, reported on the Washington Times (October 22, 2003, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia in secret nuke pact, repost on GlobalSecurity):

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on "nuclear cooperation" that will provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil, according to a ranking Pakistani insider.

The disclosure came at the end of a 26-hour state visit to Islamabad last weekend by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, who flew across the Arabian Sea with an entourage of 200, including Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal and several Cabinet ministers....

..."It will be vehemently denied by both countries," said the Pakistani source, whose information has proven reliable for more than a decade, "but future events will confirm that Pakistan has agreed to provide [Saudi Arabia] with the wherewithal for a nuclear deterrent." ....

...But the CIA believes Pakistan already has shared its nuclear know-how, working with North Korea in exchange for missile technology.

A Pakistani C-130 was spotted by satellite loading North Korean missiles at Pyongyang airport last year. Pakistan, which is estimated to have between 35 and 60 nuclear weapons, said this was a straight purchase for cash and strongly denied a nuclear quid pro quo.

"Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia," the Pakistani source said, "see a world that is moving from nonproliferation to proliferation of nuclear weapons."

The APS Diplomatic News Service (Nov 10, 2003, Saudi-Pakistani Nuclear Linkage Marks The Opening Of A Sunni Muslim Security Umbrella) had this information:

...in 1999, a Saudi defence delegation led by Defence Minister Prince Sultan visited Pakistan to tour its secret nuclear facilities at Kahuta and to be briefed by Dr. Abdul Qader Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. That visit raised alarms in the West because a tour of the super-secret Kahuta facility was denied even to elected Pakistani prime ministers (like Benazir Bhutto) by the country's military establishment. A paper by the South Asia Analysis Group dated Oct. 1 claimed there were "reports emerging but not confirmed that Pakistan has stored some nuclear weapons in storage in Saudi Arabia, but to remain under Pakistani control".

On Oct. 20, Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-in-chief of United Press International (UPI) and a veteran American journalist with excellent connections in Pakistan, reported that a "ranking" and "unimpeachable Pakistani source" had informed him that "Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on nuclear cooperation" - during the visit by Crown Prince Abdullah to Islamabad at the head of a 200-member delegation including Foreign Minister Prince Saud. De Borchgrave added that the source claimed: "It will be vehemently denied by both countries... but future events will confirm that Pakistan has agreed to provide KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) with the wherewithal for a nuclear deterrent".

Subsequent to the de Borchgrave article, another report by Global Information Systems/Defence and Foreign Affairs Weekly, written by Yossef Bodansky and Gregrory R. Copley, said their "highly reliable" sources in Islamabad and Riyadh reported on Oct. 21 that Islamabad and Riyadh had "reached a secret but definitive agreement to station nuclear weapons on Saudi soil, fitted to a new generation of Chinese-supplied long-range (4,000 to 5,000 km) ballistic missiles which would be under Pakistani command, but clearly with some form of joint Saudi-Pakistani command and control".

Like de Borchgrave, Bodansky and Copley claimed that the deal was struck during Abdullah's visit to Pakistan, adding that they had also discussed the issue at an unreported one-to-one meeting on the margins of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Oct. 15. The GIS/Defence and Foreign Affairs weekly pointed out that basing nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia would give Islamabad a second-strike capability to deter an Indian nuclear or conventional attack. For Saudi Arabia it eases concerns about Israel. During the Saudi delegation's visit, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal said in Islamabad on Oct. 19 that Indian-Israel military cooperation was a "worrying element" which could unleash instability and arms race in the region.

The Center for Defense Information had this interesting revelation on June 30, 2005 (Saudi Nuclear Intentions and the IAEA Small Quantities Protocol):

Saudi Arabia’s recent signing of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Small Quantities Protocol on June 16, 2005, raises larger issues of possible nuclear ambitions on the Arabian Peninsula....

...The controversy centers on Saudi Arabia’s request to the IAEA to sign the Small Quantities protocol in May, after an internal IAEA document came to light calling for a change in the status of the Protocol over concerns it may pose a proliferation risk. The Protocol allows states considered to be of low risk to opt out of more intensive inspection regimes in return for a declaration of their nuclear activities. In addition, the Protocol allows for the possession of up to 10 tons of natural uranium or 20 tons of depleted uranium, and 2.2 pounds of plutonium without reporting. While it does not appear that Saudi Arabia aspires to develop a domestic weapons grade uranium or plutonium-processing ability, 10 tons of natural uranium is still enough by most standards to produce between one and four nuclear devices (depending on their design)....

...There is a slew of evidence that Saudi Arabia sought to acquire nuclear capabilities as early as 1975 when a nuclear research center at Al-Suleiyel was created. Further evidence points to a transfer of up to $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 until just prior to the first Gulf War in a deal to further the Iraqi nuclear program in exchange for weapons, should the program prove successful. There was apparently also an offer on the table to pay for reconstruction of the Osirak reactor destroyed by Israel, whose covert nuclear capabilities make it a mutual concern of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Lastly, several high-level exchanges between Saudi and Pakistani officials and a general warming of relations between these two countries points to Saudi Arabia not only having the intent, motivation, and impetus to procure nuclear weapons, but now also the means.

Interestingly enough, any nuclear threat Saudi Arabia may face from Iran may actually have been proliferated by those whose nuclear program was also funded by the Saudis and whose help the Saudis are now seeking: Pakistan. After the mid-1994 defection to the United States of a former Saudi ambassador to the United Nations, Muhammad Khilewi, thousands of documents were uncovered, some of which hinted at an agreement by which Saudi Arabia partially funded Pakistan’s bomb project in exchange for retaliation with these nuclear weapons in the event of nuclear aggression against the Saudis. In 1999, the reciprocity of this nuclear alliance became even more apparent as Saudi Second Deputy Prime Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz visited Pakistan’s Kahuta uranium enrichment plant with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and both were personally briefed by Dr A.Q. Khan. Then, in 2002, a son of Crown Prince Abdullah attended the firing of the Ghauri, Pakistan’s new nuclear-capable medium-range missile. Further attesting to the cordial nature of the alliance, Nawaz Sahrif, the prime minister of Pakistan deposed by Pervez Musharraf’s 1999 coup, was given amnesty in Saudi Arabia through a deal worked out between Islamabad and Riyadh.

Other evidence for having nuclear intentions stems from Saudi Arabia’s 1988 purchase of between 50 and 60 Chinese CSS-2 missiles. While these missiles are now largely considered obsolete, it is the purchase of a nuclear capable missile with a 3,500 km range and 2,500 kg capacity that is damaging to Saudi claims of innocence. Apparently of concern is the gross inaccuracy of the Chinese missile, rendering it completely ineffective for use with traditional warhead payloads. This points to a possible conclusion that one intended use could be with nuclear warheads, whose destructive radius negates the inherent inaccuracy of the missile. In addition, there has been recent speculation of prospective purchases of more modern Chinese missile systems (such as the CSS-5 and CSS-6) by Saudi Arabia.

G. Parthasarathy (a former High Commissioner to Pakistan) reported in The Hindu Business Line on Oct 25, 2002 (Pervez the proliferator):

...The US has a track record of feigning amnesia in dealing with nuclear or missile proliferation by it friends such as Pakistan and China. When the Reagan administration needed Pakistan's assistance to force the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, President Zia-ul-Haq sent his highly capable Chief of Staff, Gen K.M. Arif, to tell Washington that Pakistan's support would be forthcoming only if no queries were raised about its nuclear weapons programme. The Reagan administration duly obliged. For nearly a decade Washington turned a Nelson's eye to Pakistan's moves to acquire nuclear weapons capability and build a nuclear arsenal with Chinese assistance.

Similarly, when China supplied M 11, and medium-range M 9 missiles to Pakistan, the Clinton administration claimed that as it had not been able to conclusively determine such supplies were taking place, it would not implement American laws requiring sanctions against both China and Pakistan. Gen Powell will, no doubt, find equally convoluted reasons for avoiding sanctions required to be imposed on Pakistan by the US law....

...There is now ample evidence to establish that not only did China provide nuclear weapon designs to Pakistan in the 1980s, but it also augmented and sustained Pakistan's nuclear-enrichment facilities by the supply of critical components such as ring magnets more recently. Less than two years after Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's visit to China, in December 1988, China commenced supply of nuclear-capable M 11 missiles to Pakistan.

It has assisted Pakistan not only by supplying missile components, but also by establishing a missile production unit described as the National Development Complex at Fatehjang in Punjab province. This complex produces the M 9 missiles with a range of around 750 km (christened "Shaheen I" by the Pakistanis) and the intermediate range M 18 missiles (Shaheen II). China has, thus, given Pakistan the delivery systems for missiles that can target most population centres in India. These are realities that cannot be ignored by India in dealing with China.

Pakistan's missile collaboration with North Korea started in the 1990s, when Ms Benazir Bhutto made a secret visit to Pyongyang. Pakistan's nuclear scientist, Dr A.Q. Khan, also visited Pyongyang on a number of occasions. It is now evident that the two sides agreed that in return for North Korea's supply of its nuclear-capable 1200-km range "Nodong" missile, Pakistan would provide the equipment and know-how for Pyongyang to develop gas centrifuge facilities to produce weapons grade enriched uranium. It is inconceivable that such an agreement could have been arrived at between two close allies of China without Beijing's knowledge and approval.
This deal enabled North Korea to go ahead with a nuclear weapons programme, even while pretending to adhere to conditions set by the US and Japan not to develop nuclear weapons capabilities, and subject its plutonium producing facilities to international inspections. There are reports indicating that the nuclear-missile trade between Islamabad and Pyongyang is routed across the Karakoram Highway through China.

In these circumstances, queries do arise about whether there are any other parts of the world to which the China-Pakistan missile/nuclear collaboration extends.

Even when Beijing and Riyadh did not have diplomatic relations, China supplied Saudi Arabia with intermediate range (2000 km) CSS 2 ballistic missiles in the mid-1980s. Unlike in the 1980s, China today needs oil supplies from West Asia. Saudi Arabia is the logical source. At the same time, the otherwise tight-fisted Saudis, who prefer to spend their surplus money in spreading Wahabi extremism rather than financing economic development, have been more than generous in their economic assistance to Pakistan. It was Saudi Arabia that bailed out Pakistan, when its economy was on the verge of collapse following its May 1998 nuclear weapons tests, with supplies of oil at highly concessional credit terms....

AFX (repost on Forbes, March 28, 2006, Saudia Arabia working on secret nuclear program with Pakistan help - report):

Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear program, with help from Pakistani experts, the German magazine Cicero reported in its latest edition, citing Western security sources.

It says that during the Haj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia.

Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them slipped off from pilgrimages, sometimes for up to three weeks, the report quoted German security expert Udo Ulfkotte as saying.

According to Western security services, the magazine added, Saudi scientists have been working since the mid-1990s in Pakistan, a nuclear power since 1998.

Cicero, which will appear on newstands tomorrow, also quoted a US military analyst, John Pike, as saying that Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan's nuclear weapons 'because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear program.'

The magazine also said satellite images indicate that Saudi Arabia has set up a program in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles.

According to some Western security services, long-range Ghauri-type missiles of Pakistani-origin are housed inside the silos.

See Chris Deliso's blog entry on AntiWar.com for some Dennis Hastert & Bill Clinton antics (Hastert, Helicopters, Textron, Turkey, Cash…, August 14, 2005). Lynn Grant's Hastert’s Turkish Allies Tied to Bin Laden (August 15, 2005, repost on Information Clearinghouse) is a must read.

Also note that much of the mujihadeen insurgency against the Soviets was financed by the CIA, and the Saudis - through "charity" donations (see the BBC, The Saudi Connection, How Jihad Made Its Way to Chechnya, How Saudi wealth fueled holy war, and Peter Dale Scott's Al Qaeda, U.S. Oil Companies, and Central Asia). Note that beginning in the late 1990s/early 2000s, Turkey began to feel the influx of Saudi charity - between $6 billion and $12 billon, and that the Saudis have been directly funding the Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

Autism Continues to Rise, Vaccines Without Mercury

2008-01-08T15:10:00.000-08:00

Jia-Rui Chong from the Los Angeles Times reports (Jan 8, 2008, Mercury's removal doesn't stop autism's rise, study shows, repost on the Chicago Tribune):

The prevalence of autism in California children continued to rise after most vaccine manufacturers started to remove the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in 1999, suggesting that the chemical was not a primary cause of the disorder, according to a study released Monday.
The analysis found that from 2004 to 2007, when exposure to thimerosal dropped significantly for 3 to 5 year olds, the autism rate continued to increase in that group from 3.0 to 4.1 per 1,000 children.
"If mercury exposure in vaccines was a major cause of autism, then the number of . . . affected kids should have diminished once they were no longer exposed to thimerosal," said Dr. Robert Schechter, lead author of the study and a medical officer at the state Department of Public Health. "That is not what we found."....
...Over the last two decades, the number of cases has boomed across the country for still-unexplained reasons. Psychiatrists estimated that 20 years ago there were 0.2 to 0.5 cases for every 1,000 children. Last year, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there were 6.6 cases per 1,000 schoolchildren, based on a study of 8-year-olds.....
...The researchers looked at all reported cases in the state starting with children born in 1989. They found the number of cases per 1,000 children has been steadily increasing from that point to March 2007, the end point of the study....
...The National Autism Assn. criticized the study, saying that some children may still be exposed to mercury through either flu shots or trace amounts in other vaccines. The group also said that some vaccines containing thimerosal had expiration dates as late as 2005 and may have been used up to that point.

Heart Disease & Vitamin D "Insufficiency"

2008-01-08T15:03:00.000-08:00

Martin Mittelstaedt on the Toronto Globe & Mail (Jan 8, 2008, Vitamin D insufficiency linked to heart disease) reports on this stunning medical research:

...Although it is well known that vitamin D is needed for good bone health, a study released yesterday found that not having enough of the sunshine vitamin is also linked to a higher risk of heart disease.

The research, based on a group of white Americans living near Boston, found that those with low levels of vitamin D in their blood were 62 per cent more likely to develop heart failure, strokes and other circulatory problems than those with more of the nutrient.

Those with both high blood pressure and low vitamin D status had about twice the risk of developing serious cardiac-related problems.

"Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased cardiovascular risk, above and beyond established cardiovascular risk factors," said Thomas Wang, the study's lead author and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

"The higher risk associated with vitamin D deficiency was particularly evident among individuals with high blood pressure."

He said the finding raises the possibility that people may be able to reduce their risk of heart disease by treating vitamin D deficiency through supplements or lifestyle
changes....

...The new U.S. study, which is appearing in the current issue of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, was based on blood tests of 1,739 people from the Framingham, Mass., area, where the annual period during which people can't naturally produce vitamin D is about the same as in Toronto. About 28 per cent of participants were considered to have inadequate vitamin D status....

...To test the hypothesis that vitamin D is linked to heart disease, researchers analyzed the amounts of the nutrient in blood samples taken between 1996 and 2001 from healthy individuals of an average age of 59 who didn't exhibit signs of heart disease.

Over a follow-up period of about five years, 120 participants developed heart failure and other cardiac-related problems. Those with low vitamin D status were found to be at far higher risk of these ailments.

According to the study, one possibly explanation is that vitamin D receptors are found in cells throughout the heart and in other parts of the circulatory system, including the inside lining of blood vessels. The genes in these cells may malfunction when they don't get enough of the nutrient. Low vitamin D status may also cause an increase in inflammation....

...In light of the finding, the association {American Heart Association} recommends that people try to get adequate amounts of the vitamin through diet. Vitamin D is found naturally in salmon, mackerel, sardines and cod liver oil. It is also added to milk and some other foods.

The new finding is one of many recent discoveries about the health effects of vitamin D. Last year, U.S. researchers found that taking vitamin D supplements reduced the risk of cancer. In response to the study, and other research showing the vitamin may have an anti-cancer effect, the Canadian Cancer Society began recommending people take up to 1,000 international units of the vitamin daily. A cup of milk contains about 100 IU.

Marine Mammal Protection - Persian Gulf

2008-01-08T14:55:00.000-08:00

Kaveh L Afrasiabi has an interesting piece on the Asia Times Online today:

A federal judge in Los Angeles has imposed rigid limits on the navy's use of mid-frequency sonar off the coast of southern California. The sonar is suspected of causing disruption to whale and dolphin navigation systems.
The ruling, in response to a case brought by environmentalists, bans sonar within 12 nautical miles of the California coast, increases the navy's "shut down" zone for sonar use near marine mammals, and mandates the navy monitor for marine mammals one hour prior to sonar exercises as well as during them.
The court's finding, with "near certainty" that US naval sonic "mitigation schemes" are "grossly inadequate to protect marine mammals from debilitating levels of sonar exposure", has direct bearing on the navy's operations in the Persian Gulf, which include active sonar training "under actual conditions".
The navy's surface ships and submarines stationed in the Persian Gulf use sonar to detect Iran's Russian-made diesel submarines. And given the mass stranding of several species of whales following US naval exercises in, among other places, the Bahamas, the Canary Islands, Hawaii, North Carolina, Japan, Spain, Taiwan, and the US Virgin Islands, these operations could be called challenged....

...Recently, the US Navy went on record in support of the use of "all US environmental laws worldwide", but this was before the California decision....

...The US Navy's use of high intensity, mid-frequency sonar is probably behind the alarming rate of self-stranding dolphins and whales on Iran's beaches. The Persian Gulf is the habitat of 40 different types of dolphins and the largest living mammal, the blue whale, and both species are endangered by US sonar activities. These activities, per the US court ruling, "cause irreparable harm" to marine mammals. Many more mammals may have died in deeper waters and, in the absence of any systematic study and data, we may be witnessing only the tip of the iceberg with beached mammals....

...From the prism of international (environmental) law, US naval activities that harm the national resources of Iran and other Persian Gulf countries are prime for litigation in national and international courts. This is not to mention the pollution caused by the shipping noise as well as "military solid wastes" connected to explosives, munition fragments and other toxic material dumped into the Persian Gulf each time the US Navy holds a maneuver....

...Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad recently unveiled a cooperative plan for the Persian Gulf that prioritizes environment, and it would be a pity for Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council to ignore it....

...But the US has a special role to play. At a minimum, it can train Persian Gulf fishermen whose nets are partly responsible for the death of marine mammals, on how to install noisemakers ("pingers") to deter cetaceans from fishnets. In some cases, such as harbor porpoises in the Gulf of Maine, the use of pingers has significantly reduced the number of mammals becoming entangled....

U.S. Marines Shot At & Killed Innocent Civilians

2008-01-08T14:48:00.000-08:00

Jay Price reports for the News & Observer (Raleigh, NC; Witness: Marines fired on harmless civilians, Jan 8, 2008):

CAMP LEJEUNE — After they were attacked by a car bomb, a Marine Special Operations unit drove down an Afghan highway for several miles shooting at — and apparently killing — motorists who posed them no threat, said the first witness Tuesday in an unusual hearing into the incident.

A former counterintelligence Marine with the unit said that as the convoy was returning to its base the turret gunner in the Humvee in front of him shot at “at least five and fewer than twenty” vehicles.

The Marine, former Staff Sgt. Nathaniel Travers, described seeing flashes of ugly scenes as he drove past cars careening off the road. Other cars were stopped, he said, with slumped occupants, including the frightened face of a child in the back seat of a car.

“I really felt that there were a lot of people that died that day who didn’t need to,” he said. “They were just driving their cars.”

Travers' account was similar to that given by civilian witnesses to an Afghan human rights group after the March 4 incident. As many as 19 people were killed and up to 50 wounded, according to earlier reports....

...None of the 30 Marines on the patrol has been charged with a crime. The hearing was ordered to examine the facts and evidence....

...The hearing, called a court of inquiry, is believed to be the first of its type help by the Marines in more than 50 years. Information that comes out of it could lead to legal charges, but the hearing is an administrative procedure to sort out the facts and evidence.

Argentina, Brazil, Operation Condor

2008-01-08T14:37:00.000-08:00

The Mercopress has the story of dissident "tracking" stations for Argentina, staged in Brazil (Argentina under Plan Condor had tracking stations in Brazil, Jan 7, 2008):

The 1976-1983 Argentine dictatorship held information bases in San Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which were meant to “detect people connected to the subversion”, according to a legal prosecution started in Argentina, reported the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper on Sunday.

The probe, which investigated the existence of Argentine bases in neighboring countries during the 1970s and 80s under the framework of the Cóndor Plan, a military scheme organized by Latin American regimes in the 70s and 80s to eliminate political dissidents, was opened at the request of Argentina’s prosecutor office.

The case concluded last December 18, when one policeman and seven military officers, among them former Army commander Cristino Nicolaides, were convicted of human rights violations.

The document, based on the testimony of the Argentine Army Intelligence Battalion 601 prison warden Néstor Norberto Cendón, revealed the Argentine bases were connected to this military unit, an interrogation and torture centre located in Buenos Aires city.

The bases were in charge of intercepting members of the Montoneros guerilla group in foreign territory, and of keeping the Argentine military authorities informed of their movements.

Cendón declared the Army’s intelligence also had bases in Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay as part of a military operation against the Montoneros, called “Murciélago,” as part of the Cóndor Plan.

A week ago, another Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de Sao Paulo, published declarations by General Agnaldo Del Nero Augusto admitting the neighboring country’s collaboration in the detention of Argentine and other leftist militants as part of the Cóndor Plan.

Del Nero Augusto denied that Argentine detainees had been killed by his government but admitted Brazil’s collaboration in intelligence and training tasks with other dictatorships.

“We didn’t kill. We detained them and handed them over. That’s no crime”, he said, adding that “when we were tipped that a suspect was coming into Brazil the praxis was to arrest him and send him back to his country of origin. I believe that is what happened with the two Argentine-Italians, both Montoneros”.

General Del Nero Augusto was defiant about the actions of the time, “they were members of a communist subversive organization trying to enter the country. What crime is to have them detained?” The detainees were handed to Argentina where they joined the long list of thousands of disappeared.

The Brazilian general said the Condor plan was a “necessary” response to the Revolutionary Coordination Junta of subversive groups from the area which was organized in Paris following the downfall of Chilean Socialist president Salvador Allende.

“We were forced to react” against an organization which included Argentina’s ERP, Uruguay’s Tupamaros; Chile’s MIR and Bolivia’s ELN insisted General Del Nero Augusto.

However he underlined that the Brazilian participation in the Plan Condor was “limited to collaborating with information, handing over foreign agents and monitoring subversives”. The general said that “terrorist groups ignore and violate the rule of the law yet they demand democratic guarantees”.

“Our mistake was not declaring the state of war, just saying “we’re at war” and that would have been the end of all of it”.

A few days later, another Brazilian military officer played down his country’s participation in the Cóndor Plan, and argued that they would not have deported the rebels if they had known they were to be killed.

Chalmers Johnson on Charlie Wilson's War

2008-01-07T15:15:00.000-08:00

The Asia Times online (Jan 8, 2008) has a TomDispatch.com repost of Chalmers Johnson's excellent article - Second thoughts on Charlie Wilson's War:

I have some personal knowledge of Congressmen like Charlie Wilson (Democrat - 2nd District, Texas, 1973-1996) because, for close to 20 years, my representative in the 50th Congressional District of California was Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now serving an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence for soliciting and receiving bribes from defense contractors.
Wilson and Cunningham held exactly the same plummy committee assignments in the House of Representatives - the Defense Appropriations Sub-committee plus the Intelligence Oversight Committee - from which they could dole out large sums of public money with little or no input from their colleagues or constituents.
Both men flagrantly abused their positions - but with radically different consequences. Cunningham went to jail because he was too stupid to know how to game the system - retire and become a lobbyist - whereas Wilson received the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Clandestine Service's first "honored colleague" award ever given to an outsider and went on to become a US$360,000 per annum lobbyist for Pakistan....
...The author of this glowing account, [the late] George Crile, was a veteran producer for the CBS television news show 60 Minutes and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper.... However, he never once mentions that the "tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists" the CIA armed are the same people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew a hole in the side of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on September 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon....
...Crile repeatedly says that president Jimmy Carter signed such a finding ordering the CIA to provide covert backing to the mujahideen after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The truth of the matter is that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion....
...Neither a reader of Crile, nor a viewer of the film based on his book would know that, in talking about the Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s, we are also talking about the militants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s....
... Among those supporting the Afghans (in addition to the US) was the rich, pious Saudi Arabian economist and civil engineer, Osama bin Laden.... Charlie Wilson's war thus turned out to have been just another bloody skirmish in the expansion and consolidation of the American empire - and an imperial presidency. The victors were the military-industrial complex and our massive standing armies. The billion dollars' worth of weapons Wilson secretly supplied to the guerrillas ended up being turned on ourselves....
...Simply put, it is imperialist propaganda and the tragedy is that four-and-a-half years after we invaded Iraq and destroyed it, such dangerously misleading nonsense is still being offered to a gullible public. The most accurate review so far is James Rocchi's summing-up for Cinematical: "Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia."

Deadly Hospital Superbug Source ID'd - Doctor's nametags

2008-01-07T15:11:00.000-08:00

The New Zealand Herald has this fascinating story:

Deadly superbug bacteria are being carried on doctors' name tags and straps slung around their necks, potentially infecting sick and vulnerable patients.

Australian research has revealed for the first time that ID badges and their holders, known as lanyards, can harbour dangerous antibiotic-resistant bugs that increasingly wreak havoc in hospitals across the Tasman.

New Zealand specialist, Auckland Hospital's clinical head of microbiology Dr Sally Roberts, said doctors here wore name badges in a similar fashion - and it was likely many of their lanyards could also be contaminated with germs.

"It's the same as pens, computer keyboards, men wearing ties, women wearing false fingernails and rings - there are many different pieces of adornment that we wear that are potentially colonised with germs," said Dr Roberts.

"Whether there's an actual link between them being colonised and spreading it to patients is unclear."

The best known superbug, called MRSA or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, was much more prevalent in Australian hospitals than in New Zealand hospitals, said Dr Roberts.

MRSA infects 2000 Australian hospital patients each year, killing 35 per cent of them.

Previous studies have found the bug present on doctors' coats, stethoscopes and pens, and now Melbourne researchers have recorded high rates on name tags and lanyards.

An analysis of 71 workers at Monash Medical Centre showed 27 lanyards and 18 badges carried pathogenic bacteria, according to research published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

"Lanyards and identity badges are worn by both male and female clinical staff for long periods of time without cleaning," said co-author Dr Rhonda Stuart, an infectious diseases physician at the centre....

Dinosaur extinction was drawn out; insects a possibility

2008-01-07T15:06:00.000-08:00

Bonnie Malkin has an interesting story on the Telegraph today:

They included some of the largest and most powerful creatures to ever roam the earth, but the downfall of the dinosaurs may be attributable to nothing more fearsome than the humble biting insect.

Disease spread by mosquitos, ticks and mites could have been a major factor in the demise of the ancient reptiles, according to a new theory.

Research by George Poinar, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University in America, also found an explosion in the number of insects would have changed the nature of plant life on Earth, making it harder for dinosaurs to survive.

Bees and other pollinators helped to promote the rapid spread of flowering plants, leading to the loss of vegetarian dinosaurs' traditional food sources.

As the plant-eating dinosaurs declined, so would their predators.... dinosaur extinction was drawn out over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years....

Pakistan not looking for bin Laden

2008-01-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

Agence France-Presse reports today:

Pakistan is not specifically looking for Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, as there is no proof he is in Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf said Sunday.

"We are not particularly looking for him, but we are operating against terrorists and Al Qaeda and militant Taliban. And in the process, obviously, combined, maybe we are looking for him also," the Pakistani leader told CBS television in an interview aired late Sunday.

Asked what Pakistan was doing to find the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Musharraf said it was fighting extremism and terrorism.
"We are fighting first of all Al-Qaeda. Let's take Al-Qaeda. We have arrested or eliminated about 700 Al-Qaeda leaders ... which other country has done this?"

"Well, which other country has Bin Laden?" his CBS interviewer replied, inciting a sharp retort from the Pakistani leader.

"No, I challenge -- I don't accept that at all. There is no proof whatsoever that he is here in Pakistan."

Mahmoud Ali Durrani, Pakistan's envoy to the United States, sought to clarify Musharraf's remark, in an exchange with CNN.....

...Durrani noted that US and other foreign intelligence agencies believe bin Laden to be sheltering in the tribal area along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But "that's just speculation," the envoy said.

"Believe me. If they knew or we knew we would have taken him out," he
said....

...The New York Times reported that under a proposal being discussed in Washington, CIA operatives based in Afghanistan would be able to call on direct military support for counter-terrorism operations in neighboring Pakistan.

On Sunday, Agence France-Presse reported:

The Pakistani military reacted angrily Sunday to reports that US President George W. Bush is considering covert military operations in the country's volatile tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

"It is not up to the US administration, it is Pakistan's government who is responsible for this country," chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad told AFP.

"There are no overt or covert US operations inside Pakistan. Such reports are baseless and we reject them."....

Sears' Spyware

2008-01-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

Shaun Waterman, UPI, reports today:

Catalog giant Sears Holdings Corp. is under fire for installing what critics say is spyware on customers' computers when they join its online community.

Privacy advocates says the software program -- which tracks every Web site users visit and every search, purchase or other transaction they make, including e-mail they send, and sends details to an online market research company -- is spyware and is banned by federal trade regulations.

For its part, the company says it goes to "great lengths" to disclose the nature of the program users' have installed on their computers.

According to privacy specialist and Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ben Edelman, Sears' "My SHC Community" program falls short of the standards required for disclosure of such software by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

"The FTC requires that, before any such tracking programs are installed, consumers give 'express consent,'" Edelman told United Press International, quoting from a recent commission settlement with two spyware vendors.

"That means they (Sears) have to 'clearly and prominently disclose' anything 'material' about the program. … That disclosure has to be 'unavoidable' and take place 'prior to … and separate from,' any final licensing agreement," he added.

"Sears clearly is falling short of those requirements," Edelman concluded, calling the failure "remarkable" and "very brazen."

Spyware researcher Benjamin Googins of Islandia, N.Y.-based CA Inc., who first blogged about the issue, pointed out that the software sends data about consumers' Internet activity not to Sears' own Web site, but to a site registered to ComScore Inc., an online market research firm, which he said was a violation of the promise in the SHC Community's privacy policy that the information is transmitted to "our servers."....

Robber Barons Source the Credit Crisis

2008-01-04T15:49:00.000-08:00

Pam Martens has an excellent analysis of the credit crisis/mortgage meltdown/bank credit crunch at Counterpunch (Jan 3, 2008, The Free Market Myth Dissolves into Chaos, also posted on The Daily Scare):

...Collectively losing $70 Billion in a matter of months with projections of ongoing losses climbing to as much as $400 Billion globally sounds like serious trouble to me. And, it's very uncharacteristic of Wall Street to lose billions of its own money....
...Before we break out the bubbly over Wall Street finally getting a taste of how it feels to be mauled, reflect on what it might mean to average Americans if the least knowledgeable market participants own the banks that hold their savings, money market, car loan, credit card, mortgage; and these firms' stocks are loaded up in 401(k) plans....
...The rating agencies, Standard and Poor's, Moody's and Fitch gave the indigestible concoction a AAA rating based on that whipped cream. That the rating was requested and paid for by the issuer of the CDO was no trifling matter, as future events would expose....
...The Citigroup translation goes like this: we've been buying the AAA-rated super senior tranches all along because we were told by the physics brainiacs that these securities were walled off from losses by over collateralization. Our pat answer for how we got $25 billion of CDOs back on our balance sheet this summer is going to be a "liquidity put." We are standing by the position that we gave our buyers the right to "put" the securities back to us without losses under certain conditions. (How that complies with securities laws banning guarantees against losses has yet to be addressed. How one can make an arms length sale of a security and still be contractually bound to take it back on the balance sheet has also not been addressed. Stockbrokers would lose their job, livelihood and licenses if they used this defense. This raises the additional question of regulatory passes for the privileged, another serious contributor to inefficient markets.)
Stan O'Neal's answer on behalf of Merrill Lynch is, on its face, very humble and simple: mistakes were made; errors of judgment. Recent articles, however, have raised suspicions that Merrill was not only holding the AAA tranches because they thought they were safe from losses because of over collateralization, but was also making hedging bets against the very subprime debt they were selling to customers; in other words, Enronomics: heads I win, tails you lose....
...the securitization market has no Federal and State banking regulators to monitor its behavior. The only bodies that provide oversight or implicit regulation are the NRSROs [rating agencies] -- bodies that are inherently biased towards their paymasters, the securitization [Wall Street] firms....
...Efficient markets need transparency and alert cops on the beat. Why is that so difficult to achieve? Because opacity and rigged markets produce the desired goal of enriching the one percent who now own 44% of the wealth of the nation. This one percent, in turn, keeps Congress on a short leash by holding the purse strings to campaign funding....

Will Mushie finally get his F-16s?

2008-01-04T15:20:00.000-08:00

Reuters on News.com.au (Jan 1, 2008, Lockheed to supply 18 F-16s to Pakistan) reports:

LOCKHEED Martin Corp (LMT.N) was awarded a $US498.2 million ($569.53 million) contract to supply F-16 aircraft to Pakistan...

...Lockheed will sell 12 F-16C plus 6 F-16D planes to Pakistan under the contract...

...Pakistan has received about $US10 billion ($11.43 billion) in US funding since 2001 ...

...The US has agreed to sell Pakistan up to 36 new F-16 jets together with refurbished F-16s....

This is part of the deal made in 2003, and finalized in 2005, as reported by Kyodo News (June 24, 2003, Pakistan expects to get 28 F-16s from U.S., now on FindArticles):

...It said that in exchange for the package, Pakistan would provide greater operation access to U.S. troops in seeking out al-Qaida and Taliban activists hiding in Pakistan, particularly in tribal areas adjoining Pakistan.

During the war against then Soviet Union troops in the 1980s, Pakistan had negotiated purchase of 28 F-16 aircraft from the U.S., but their supply was withheld when the U.S. imposed an embargo on all economic and military assistance to Pakistan in 1990 because of its nuclear program.

The U.S. wrote off $1 billion in loans to Pakistan and rescheduled the remaining $2 billion for repayment over a period of 35 years after the 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S. The think tank suggested that remaining $2 billion may get written off now.

The Islamic Republic News Agency (Iran) (Pakistan receives two F-16s fighter planes: official posted here) reported the arrival of two of the jets' order in December 2005, after Musharraf decided to postpone additional purchases due to earthquake relief needs. The Taipei Times reported (Nov 6, 2005, Pakistan postpones buying F-16s) "An F-16 can cost up to about US$40 million, depending on the model and the configuration." Pakistan has already purchased the Swedish version of AWACS. The Associated Press on the Sydney Morning Herald (March 26, 2005, Bush rewards Pakistan with fleet of F-16s) notes that Pakistan paid in advance for their 1980s F16s, that order never being completed.

Taliban Militants Captured - Swat Valley

2008-01-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

Deutsche Welle (Jan 3, 2008) has this story (Pakistan captures militants in Swat valley) :

Pakistani security forces say they have captured 52 pro-Taliban militants in the country's northwest Swat valley. The area has been a battlefield since late October when President Pervez Musharraf sent in government troops to combat militant followers of a radical Islamic cleric Maulana Fazlullah. Musharraf has blamed the Bhutto killing on Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud, the head of a Taliban umbrella organisation TTP.

TTP = Tehrik-e-Taliban (Taliban Movement Pakistan).

Interestingly, the TTP was just formed in December as Mushie lifted the emergency sanctions, from Bill Roggio on The Long War Journal:

As President Pervez Musharraf lifts the state of emergency, the Taliban in the tribal areas and the Northwest Frontier Province have united under a single banner, and a single leader. On Friday, a shura, or council, of 40 senior Taliban leaders established the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan -- the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan -- and appointed powerful South Waziristan Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud its leader.

The shura was made up of Taliban representatives from the seven tribal agencies of North and South Waziristan, Khyber, Orakazi, Bajaur, Mohmand, and Kurram, as well as the settled districts of Swat, Bannu, Tank, Lakki Marwat, Dera Ismail Khan, Kohistan, Buner, and the Malakand division.

The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan demanded the Pakistani military halt operations in Taliban territory and release of their members. The Taliban also stated it would continue the fight against Coalition forces in Afghanistan.

"The meeting participants have demanded an immediate end of the military operation being carried out in Swat, and given a 10-day ultimatum to the government to pullout troops from the area," the Nation reported. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan also demanded "the closure of the military checkposts in North and South Waziristan and release of all Taliban activists including former Lal Masjid Khateeb Maulana Abul Aziz."

“Our main aim is to target the US allies in Afghanistan but the government of Pakistan’s ill-strategy has made us to launch a defensive Jihad in Pakistan,” spokesman Maulvi Omar stated. “The government of Pakistan would be paid in the same coin now,” Mehsud said.

The consolidation of the disparate "local Taliban" movement is a logical step in the Taliban's insurgency campaign in northwestern Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban, while allied with al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, has operated as local groups. The creation of a unified Taliban movement in Pakistan will allow them to better coordinate both military and political operations inside Pakistan, as well as with the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda.

The meteoric rise of Mehsud stems from his ability to organize and command large numbers of fighters, fend off the Pakistani military in South Waziristan, take the fight to neighboring agencies and districts, and organize a nationwide suicide bombing campaign. The government cut a deal with Mehsud in 2006 to end the fighting in South Waziristan. Last year it was estimated Mehsud commanded an army of 30,000 fighters. He has been directly implicated in a series of suicide attacks on military and government officials throughout the course of 2007.....

Baitullah and Abdullah Mehsud are from the same tribe. Abdullah Mehsud is the 'talibani'/al qaeda, who, upon release from GITMO, went to Pakistan, and kidnapped CHINESE ENGINEERS working in South Waziristan, and one was killed during the Pak forces' rescue mission.