February 1, 2012

Source: Reuters

The Taliban, backed by Pakistan, are set to retake control of Afghanistan after Nato-led forces withdraw from the country, according to reports citing a classifed assessment by US forces.

The Times described the report as secret and “highly classified”, saying it was put together last month by the US military at Bagram air base in Afghanistan for top Nato officers. The BBC also carried a report on the leaked document.

“Many Afghans are already bracing themselves for an eventual return of the Taliban,” the report was quoted as saying. “Once Isaf (Nato-led forces) is no longer a factor, Taliban consider their victory inevitable.”

The document stated that Pakistan’s security agency was helping the Taliban in directing attacks against foreign forces – a charge long denied by Islamabad.

Full article here

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January 16, 2012

Source: CNet

Internal Homeland Security documents describing specifications for border-crossing scanners, which emit gamma or X-ray radiation to probe vehicles and their occupants, are raising new health and privacy concerns, CNET has learned.

Even though a public outcry has prompted Homeland Security to move away from adding X-ray machines to airports–it purchased 300 body scanners last year that used alternative technology instead–it appears to be embracing them at U.S.-Mexico land border crossings as an efficient way to detect drugs, currency, and explosives.

The Z Portal scanner in use at the San Ysidro, Calif. border crossing uses high energy X-ray radiation to probe the interior of vehicles. Homeland Security says it’s safe for humans, but some biophysicists disagree.

The Z Portal scanner in use at the San Ysidro, Calif., border crossing uses high energy X-ray radiation to probe the interior of vehicles. Homeland Security says it’s safe for humans, but some biophysicists disagree.

A 63-page set of specifications (PDF), heavily redacted, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center through the Freedom of Information Act, says the scanners must “be based on X-Ray or gamma technology,” which use potentially dangerous ionizing radiation at high energies, and “shall be capable of scanning cars, SUVs, motorcycles and busses.”

Read More…

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January 14th, 2012

Via: AFP:

Agents with Israel’s Mossad agency posed as American CIA agents in operations to recruit members of the Pakistani militant group Jundallah, a report in Foreign Policy magazine said Friday.

Using American dollars and US passports, the agents passed themselves off as members of the Central Intelligence Agency in the operations, notably in London, according to memos from 2007 and 2008, said the report.

Jundallah (Soldiers of God) says it is fighting for the interests of the southeastern province’s large ethnic Baluch community, whose members, unlike most Iranians, mainly follow the Sunni branch of Islam.

The Baluch straddle the border with neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan and Jundallah militants have taken advantage of the unrest in the region to find safe haven in the border region.

In July it claimed responsibility for attacking the Grand Mosque in the provincial capital Zahedan, reportedly targeting members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps, killing 28 people.

“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” a US intelligence officer told Foreign Policy.

“Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought,” said the official.

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January 14th, 2012

Via: AFP:

Production of opium and the illicit crop’s value soared in Afghanistan last year, the United Nations said in a report released Thursday.

According to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, farmer income derived from Afghanistan’s opium crop in 2011 was $1.4 billion (1.09 billion euros), representing nine percent of GDP.

“Opium is therefore a significant part of the Afghan economy and provides considerable funding to the insurgency and fuels corruption,” Yury Fedotov, executive director of the UN office, said in a statement.

Afghanistan grows about 90 percent of the world’s opium. The UN said poppy-crop cultivation covered more than 131,000 hectares in 2011, up seven per cent from the previous year.

The overall opium crop increased by 61 per cent, from 3,600 metric tons in 2010 to 5,800 metric tons in 2011.

The value of the opium yield rose 133 percent from 2010, when plant diseases killed much of the Afghan crop.

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November 16, 2011

Source: TownHall.com

The Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Stellar is reporting the federal case file against illegal Mexican bandits accused of killing Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, has disappeared.

The case against the alleged killers of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry has disappeared from federal court records, apparently sealed by a federal judge.

In May, federal prosecutors won an indictment against Manuel Osorio-Arellanes and others, and they announced it with a press release. Only Osorio-Arellanes’ name was visible in the indictment, but there were blacked-out words where other defendants’ names go.

Osorio-Arellanes was charged with second-degree murder and was not considered the likely shooter. He had been wounded during the gunfight that left Terry dead.

But in the ensuing months, the case disappeared from court records.

Why? Nobody is saying.

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In public Sunday, President Obama was at a summit unsuccessfully leaning on Russia and China to back diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuke program.

In private Sunday, there was more evidence of an efficient and brutal covert operation that continues to degrade Iran’s military capabilities.

Iranian officials revealed that one of the 17 men killed in a huge explosion at a munitions depot was a key Revolutionary Guard commander who headed Iran’s missile program. And the IRNA state news agency reported that scientists had discovered a new computer virus in their systems, a more sophisticated version of the Stuxnet worm deployed last year to foul up Iran’s centrifuges.

Iran said the army base explosion was an accident and the new Duqu virus was contained. But Israeli newspapers and some U.S. experts said it appeared to be more from an ongoing secret operation by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat.

The covert campaign encompasses a series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and a similar explosion at another Iranian missile base two years ago both widely attributed to the Mossad.

“May there be more like it,” was all Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said when Army Radio asked about the new blast.

There was a third mysterious event: The son of a top Iranian hard-liner was found dead — a seeming suicide — in a Dubai hotel on Sunday. His father called it “suspicious” and linked to the base explosion, without elaborating.

Israel was accused of deploying the 11 agents who killed a top Hamas terrorist in a Dubai hotel last year.

Tension has risen in recent weeks between Iran and the United States as a key United Nations report said Iran was close to being able to build a nuclear weapon.

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Hawaii, Obama tried to get Russia and China to back a bid to tighten sanctions on Iran, meeting individually with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Afterward, Hu didn’t even mention Iran, and Medvedev said only that he had spoken with Obama about Iran.

Obama came under withering fire from the GOP presidential candidates at a debate Saturday, when the front-runners agreed he had been too weak on Iran and vowed to go to war to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions if needed.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) slammed Obama for not being “smart” on Iran.

Gingrich said he would launch “maximum covert operations” against Iran, “including taking out their scientists. . . . All of it covertly, all of it deniable.”

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters that pressure on Iran had put its leadership in disarray, and “the Iranian economy has ground to a halt.”

hkennedy@nydailynews.com

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Smoke rises from an explosion at a Revolutionary Guard ammunition depot outside Tehran, which, according to Iranian officials, killed at least 15 people on
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2099376,00.html#ixzz1dfE4eF4f

Editor’s Note: This is reminiscent of the Israel attack on the Syria reactor. Syria didn’t want to lose face just like Iran today. The Iranian regime tries to force its citizens view the world through their funhouse mirrors. That ridiculous propaganda they released to the news media over the weekend would make a real propagandist like Willy Munzenberg roll in his grave. 

Israeli newspapers on Sunday were thick with innuendo, the front pages of the three largest dailies dominated by variations on the headline “Mysterious Explosion in Iranian Missile Base.” Turn the page, and the mystery is answered with a wink. “Who is Responsible for Attacks on the Iranian Army?” asks Ma’ariv, and the paper lists without further comment a half-dozen other violent setbacks to Iran’s nuclear and military nexus. For Israeli readers, the coy implication is that their own government was behind Saturday’s massive blast just outside Tehran. It is an assumption a Western intelligence source insists is correct: The Mossad — the Israeli agency charged with covert operations — did it. “Don’t believe the Iranians that it was an accident,” the official tells TIME, adding that other sabotage is being planned to impede the Iranian ability to develop and deliver a nuclear weapon. “There are more bullets in the magazine,” the official says.

The powerful blast or series of blasts — reports described an initial explosion followed by a much larger one — devastated a missile base in the gritty urban sprawl to the west of the Iranian capital. The base housed Shahab missiles, which, at their longest-range, can reach Israel. Last week’s report from the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran has experimented with removing the conventional warhead on the Shahab-3 and replacing it with one that would hold a nuclear device. Iran says the explosion was an accident that came while troops were transferring ammunition out of the depot “toward the appropriate site.”(See why ties are threatened between the U.S. and Iran.)

The explosion killed at least 17 people, including Maj. Gen. Hassan Moqqadam, described by Iranian state media as a pioneer in Iranian missile development and the Revolutionary Guard commander in charge of “ensuring self-sufficiency” in armaments, a challenging task in light of international sanctions.

Coming the weekend after the release of the unusually critical IAEA report, which laid out page upon page of evidence that Iran is moving toward a nuclear weapon, the blast naturally sharpened concern over Israel’s threat to launch airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Half the stories on the Tehran Times website Sunday referenced the possibility of a military strike, most warning of dire repercussions.

But the incident also argued, maybe even augured, against an outright strike. If Israel — perhaps in concert with Washington and other allies — can continue to inflict damage to the Iranian nuclear effort through covert actions, the need diminishes for overt, incendiary moves like air strikes. The Stuxnet computer worm bolloxed Iran’s centrifuges for months, wreaking havoc on the crucial process of uranium enrichment.

And in Sunday’s editions, the Hebrew press coyly listed whatYedioth Ahronoth called “Iran’s Mysterious Mishaps.” The tallies ran from the November 2007 explosion at a missile base south of Tehran, to the October 2010 blast at a Shahab facility in southwestern Iran, to the assassinations of three Iranian scientists working in the nuclear program, two last year and one in July.(See photos of the semi-official view of Iran.)

At the very least, the list burnishes the mystique of the Mossad, Israel’s overseas spy agency. Whatever the case-by-case reality, the popular notion that, through Mossad, Israel knows everything and can reach anywhere is one of the most valuable assets available to a state whose entire doctrine of defense can be summed up in the word “deterrence.” Which doesn’t mean Israel is the only country with a foreign intelligence operation inside Iran. The most recent IAEA report included intelligence from 10 governments on details of the Iranian nuclear effort. And in previous interviews, Western security sources have indicated that U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies have partnered with Israel on covert operations inside Iran. Sometimes the partner brings specific expertise or access. In other cases, Iranian agents on the ground who might harbor misgivings about Israel are allowed to believe they are working only with another government altogether.

Saturday’s blast was so powerful it was felt 25 miles away in Tehran, and so loud that one nearby resident with combat experience thought he had just heard the detonation of an aerial bomb. “Frankly it did not sound like an arms depot from where I was because when one of those goes off, it is multiple explosions over minutes, even hours depending on the size of the facility,” the resident says. “All I heard was one big boom. I was sure from the quality of the noise that anyone in its immediate vicinity was dead. Something definitely happened but I would not trust the [Revolutionary] Guards to be absolutely forthcoming as to what it was.”

With reporting by Aaron J. Klein/Tel Aviv

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November 11th, 2011

Via: Mother Jones:

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, returning to Gitmo for the arraignment of alleged USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, reports how much the island prison is costing American taxpayers these days.

The Pentagon detention center that started out in January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning.

That’s more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil.

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November 4, 2011

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Hotel Guests Recruited with Homeland Security TV Spots

November 3rd, 2011

Via: USA Today:

The Department of Homeland Security is recruiting hotel guests to join the fight against terrorism.

Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.

During the PSA, which starts with a woman exiting a yellow taxi in front of a train station, a narrator says, “Maybe you see something suspicious. Can you be sure? If you see something, say something to authorities.”

The PSA, which will be interspersed with other messages on the welcome screen, will be the same in all 5,400 hotels that LodgeNet serves. It ends by telling viewers to contact “local authorities.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says that reaching the “millions of guests that stay at hotels and motels each year is a significant step in engaging the full range of partners in our Homeland Security efforts.”

The federal government gained access to hotel TV sets by forming a partnership with the hotel industry’s largest association — the American Hotel & Lodging Association — which connected DHS with LodgeNet, the industry’s largest TV-content provider.

By entering hotels at a time when the hospitality industry is on the rebound, the government has the power to tap a growing, captive audience. Recent research from LodgeNet says 98% of hotel guests turn on their hotel TV, and the average guest keeps it on for more than three hours per day.

Ann Parker, a LodgeNet spokeswoman, describes the PSAs as “well done and professional” and says the decision to air them was not difficult.

“It’s about everyone doing their part to help keep each other and the country safe,” she says.

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by Stephen Lendman

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Video: Al-qaeda Flag flying on new ” moderate ” govt benghazi courthouse in Libya

CNN Ireport

October 29, 2011 Islamists make their their presence know in Benghazi, Libya. An Al Qaeda flag now flies freely over over the court house in Benghazi where the February 17th “revolution” started…

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October 30th, 2011

Via: Time:

A wave of CIA drone strikes targeting al-Qaeda figures in Yemen is stoking widespread anger there that U.S. policy is cruel and misguided, prioritizing counterterrorism over a genuine solution to the country’s raging political crisis.

Politics has never been a concern to Sam al-Homiganyi and his fellow teenagers. This month, though, they were shocked by the sudden death of a friend and are struggling to understand why.

Fighting back tears, his gaze fixed downward, al-Homiganyi, a lean-looking 15-year-old from the outskirts of Sana’a, told TIME, “He was my best friend, we played football together everyday.” Another of his friends spoke up, gesturing to the gloomy group of jeans-clad boys around him: “He was the same as us. He liked swimming, playing computer games, watching movies … you know, normal stuff.” (See photos of Yemen on the brink.)

The dead friend was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old born in Denver, the third American killed in as many weeks by suspected CIA drone strikes in Yemen. His father, the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, also an American citizen, was killed earlier this month, along with alleged al-Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan, who was from New York. When Abdulrahman’s death was first reported in the Western press, his age was given as 21 by local Yemeni officials. Afterward, however, the Awlaki family put out a copy of Abdulrahman’s birth certificate.

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• Posted on October 22, 2011 at 12:07pm by Buck Sexton
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• Comments (743)

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October 22, 2011

Source: All Gov.

 

In the nation’s capital, crime does pay for defense contractors.

The Department of Defense has admitted that it has rewarded hundreds of companies convicted of fraud with new deals that totaled more than $1.1 trillion.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who requested the information from the Pentagon, said,

“The ugly truth is that virtually all of the major defense contractors in this country for years have been engaged in systemic fraudulent behavior, while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.”

Examples include Lockheed Martin, which in 2008 paid $10.5 million to settle charges that it defrauded the government by submitting false invoices related to the Titan IV space launch vehicle program. The following year Lockheed pulled in $30.2 billion from the Defense Department.

Northrop Grumman paid $62 million in 2005 to settle fraud charges, but by the next year, received nearly $13 billion in contracts, which amounted to a 16% increase over the previous year. In 2009, they were hit with a $325 million bill for malfeasance.

Boeing has paid more than $600 million in civil settlements, and TRW $436 million.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

Sen. Bernie Sanders: Fraudulent Defense Contractors Paid $1 Trillion (BuzzFlash)

Report to Congress on Contracting Fraud (Department of Defense) (pdf)

Table 1A- Criminal Convictions (Senator Bernie Sanders) (pdf)

Some Government Contractors are Too Big to be Banned (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)

Northrop Settles Largest-Ever Defense Fraud Suit…But Loses Nothing (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

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