Posts tagged US

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (L) and his wife Maria Clemencia with President Obama at the height of the Secret Service Sex Scandal.

The US Secret Service, embroiled in a deepening sex scandal, said Saturday it had suspended 11 agents assigned to President Barack Obama’s trip to Colombia amid reports they had used prostitutes.

Five US military personnel are also being investigated for misconduct said to have taken place at the same hotel where the Secret Service staff were staying in the Caribbean resort city of Cartagena, and have been confined to barracks.

US Secret Service Assistant Director Paul Morrissey said the allegations were made on Thursday against

the Secret Service personnel, who included both special agents and Uniformed Division Officers, though none of them was assigned to Obama’s personal security detail.

“The nature of the allegations, coupled with a zero tolerance policy on personal misconduct, resulted in the Secret Service taking the decisive action to relieve these individuals of their assignment, return them to their place of duty and replace them with additional Secret Service personnel,” he said in a statement.

But Morrissey stressed that “these actions have had no impact on the Secret Service’s ability to execute a comprehensive security plan for the president’s visit to Cartagena.”

The personnel involved were taken to the service’s Washington headquarters for interviews on Saturday as the agency’s internal affairs division investigates the matter.

“As a result, all 11 employees have been placed on administrative leave. This is standard procedure and allows us the opportunity to conduct a full, thorough and fair investigation into the allegations,” Morrissey said.

He said the incident, which threatened to overshadow the Summit of the Americas, “is not reflective of the behavior of our personnel as they travel every day throughout the country and the world performing their duties in a dedicated, professional manner.”

“We regret any distraction from the Summit of the Americas this situation has caused,” he added.

(Source: news.ninemsn.com.au)

American drones have killed as many as 10 people in the first such missile strike since Barack Obama officially acknowledged the covert CIA programme.

(Source: telegraph.co.uk)

BEIJING - China on Monday asked the United States to abandon its “Cold War mentality” and cease making groundless accusations against China, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Spokesman Liu Weimin made the remark at a daily press briefing when commenting on an annual national security threat assessment report delivered by the U.S. government.

The report stated that China has invaded American computer networks on a large scale, stolen intellectual property and conducted economic espionage. The report also named Chinese intelligence agencies as the biggest threat to the U.S. in relevant fields for the next few years.

Liu said the accusations are “totally fictitious” and were made with an ulterior motive in mind.

Cyberattacks are transnational and anonymous, Liu said, adding that it is “unprofessional and irresponsible” to deduce the source of an attack without a thorough investigation.

The spokesman said China has repeatedly declared its stance on issues regarding Internet security. China is willing to continue cooperation with the international community on safeguarding Internet security, he added.

(Source: chinadaily.com.cn)

WikiLeaks: US targets EU over GM crops

US embassy cable recommends drawing up list of countries for ‘retaliation’ over opposition to genetic modification

The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any Euroxpean Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.

In response to moves by France to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety in late 2007, the ambassador, Craig Stapleton, a friend and business partner of former US president George Bush, asked Washington to penalise the EU and particularly countries which did not support the use of GM crops.

“Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits.

“The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices,” said Stapleton, who with Bush co-owned the Dallas/Fort Worth-based Texas Rangers baseball team in the 1990s.

In other newly released cables, US diplomats around the world are found to have pushed GM crops as a strategic government and commercial imperative.

Because many Catholic bishops in developing countries have been vehemently opposed to the controversial crops, the US applied particular pressure to the pope’s advisers.

Cables from the US embassy in the Vatican show that the US believes the pope is broadly supportive of the crops after sustained lobbying of senior Holy See advisers, but regrets that he has not yet stated his support. The US state department special adviser on biotechnology as well as government biotech advisers based in Kenya lobbied Vatican insiders to persuade the pope to declare his backing. “… met with [US monsignor] Fr Michael Osborn of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, offering a chance to push the Vatican on biotech issues, and an opportunity for post to analyse the current state of play on biotech in the Vatican generally,” says one cable in 2008.

“Opportunities exist to press the issue with the Vatican, and in turn to influence a wide segment of the population in Europe and the developing world,” says another.

But in a setback, the US embassy found that its closest ally on GM, Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the powerful Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the man who mostly represents the pope at the United Nations, had withdrawn his support for the US.

“A Martino deputy told us recently that the cardinal had co-operated with embassy Vatican on biotech over the past two years in part to compensate for his vocal disapproval of the Iraq war and its aftermath – to keep relations with the USG [US government] smooth. According to our source, Martino no longer feels the need to take this approach,” says the cable.

In addition, the cables show US diplomats working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto. “In response to recent urgent requests by [Spanish rural affairs ministry] state secretary Josep Puxeu and Monsanto, post requests renewed US government support of Spain’s science-based agricultural biotechnology position through high-level US government intervention.”

It also emerges that Spain and the US have worked closely together to persuade the EU not to strengthen biotechnology laws. In one cable, the embassy in Madrid writes: “If Spain falls, the rest of Europe will follow.”

The cables show that not only did the Spanish government ask the US to keep pressure on Brussels but that the US knew in advance how Spain would vote, even before the Spanish biotech commission had reported.

(Source: Guardian)

The UN’s chief nuclear inspector arrived in Iran on Sunday on a mission to clear up “outstanding substantive issues” on Tehran’s atomic program, and called for dialogue with the Islamic state.

Before departing from Vienna airport, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief inspector Herman Nackaerts told reporters that talks were long overdue.

“We are trying to resolve all the outstanding issues with Iran,” he said.

“In particular we hope that Iran will engage with us on the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program. We are looking forward to the start of a dialogue, a dialogue that is overdue since very long.”

Mr Nackaerts is leading a six-person IAEA team due to meet Iranian officials from later on Sunday until Tuesday. The delegation touched down in Tehran early on Sunday morning, the official news agency IRNA reported.

The team also includes IAEA number two Rafael Grossi, an Argentine, and the watchdog’s senior legal official Peri Lynne Johnson, a US citizen, according to diplomats.

Mr Nackaerts, who is Belgian, declined to comment on who he would meet during the trip, which is aimed at clearing up what the IAEA called “outstanding substantive issues” on Tehran’s nuclear program.

Expectations are low, with the delegation not expected to be given access to any sites mentioned in a damning IAEA report in November that raised suspicions Iran had done work developing nuclear weapons.

IRNA quoted Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi, in Addis Ababa for an African Union meeting, as saying he was “optimistic” about the delegation’s visit.

“We have always had a broad and close cooperation with the agency and we have always maintained transparency as one of our principles working with the agency,” he said.

The agency added that the team would probably visit the Fordo enrichment site south of the capital Tehran.

Earlier this month, the IAEA said Iran had begun enriching uranium to 20 per cent purity deep inside a mountain bunker at Fordo, taking it significantly closer to the 90 per cent mark needed for a nuclear bomb.

With Iran repeatedly denying it wants nuclear weapons and dismissing the IAEA report as baseless, the watchdog’s chief Yukiya Amano on Friday urged the Islamic republic to show “substantial cooperation” during the visit.

The report, which has led to a substantial increase in pressure on Iran from the United States, the European Union and others, detailed a string of areas in which it said Iranian activities were highly suspicious.

Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has insisted that Tehran is not dodging negotiations and was ready to sit down with world powers Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States, and Germany for talks.

AFP

(Source: abc.net.au)

Six hours southeast of Atlanta off the Georgia coast on Sapelo Island, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of an ancient walled city which predates the construction of Egypt’s pyramids. Known as the Sapelo Shell Ring Complex, this ancient city was constructed around 2300 B.C. and featured three neighborhoods each surrounded by circular walls twenty feet in height constructed from tons of seashells. Some of the earliest pottery in North America was also found buried in the remains of this lost city.

The site is quite an enigma because at the time of its construction the Native Americans living in the area were simple hunters and gatherers who had yet to invent agriculture. Many scholars believe agriculture is a prerequisite for civilization. Did these simple tribal people somehow make the leap from hunting-and-gathering to civilization in a single bound producing not only a walled city but also the new technology of pottery without the benefit of agriculture? Or did an already civilized people arrive on the coast of Georgia from elsewhere and, if so, where did they come from and why?

Just thirty years before the construction of the Sapelo Shell Rings researchers have noted that Bronze Age civilizations around the world show a pattern of collapse. According to the website LostWorlds.org:

“In the Middle East, Akkadian Sumer collapsed at this time and the Dead Sea water levels reached their lowest point. In China, the Hongsan culture collapsed. Sediments from Greenland and Iceland show a cold peak around 2200 BC. The population of Finland decreased by a third between 2400 and 2000 BC. In Turkey’s Anatolia region, including the site of ancient Troy, over 350 sites show evidence of being burnt and deserted. Entire regions reverted to a nomadic way of life after thousands of years of settled agricultural life. In fact, most sites throughout the Old World which collapsed around 2200 BC showed unambiguous signs of natural calamities and/or rapid abandonment.”

What happened around 2200 B.C. that could have caused such widespread devastation?

Meteor Storms & Cosmic Catastrophe?

Evidence is mounting that this devastation came from the sky. Astronomers have theorized that at this time Earth passed through a dense concentration of cosmic debris. Just picture the asteroid scene in Star Wars and you’ll get the idea. Yet researchers don’t think much of this debris actually impacted the ground. Instead they believe these meteors exploded in air bursts high above the ground, creating an ancient version of an atomic bomb blast.

These air bursts would have first incinerated everything within tens if not hundreds of miles. Next they would have created hurricane force winds which would have obliterated any above-ground structures as well as forests.

Astronomers believe this catastrophe was similar to the Tunguska Event which flattened 80 million trees over a 2,000 square mile area of Russian Siberia in 1908. Russian scientists believe this event was caused by the explosion of a large meteor tens of meters across at an altitude of 3-6 miles. A similar event is thought to have caused the climate downturn in 3200 BC which flash froze the so-called Ice Man in the Swiss Alps.

Who Built the Sapelo Shell Rings?

At the time of European contact, two Native American tribes were known for constructing round, walled villages: the Timucua and Yuchi. Archaeologists believe some time in the past the Timucua migrated to Georgia and Florida from South America since their language was similar to that spoken by Indians in Venezuela. Did they flee their homeland after it was devastated by a meteor swarm that destroyed huge swaths of jungle? The Rio Cuarto impact craters in Argentina are thought by some geologists to date to this time period which supports the idea that South America was affected by the same event that struck the Old World.

The Yuchi also have a legend that they arrived in Georgia after “the old moon broke” and devastated their island homeland. Could they have thought these meteors were pieces of the moon falling to Earth? Could impact tsunamis have devastated their island home in the Bahamas forcing them to flee to the mainland? Only further research will answer the questions.

(Source: sott.net)

The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See this and this. (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago.)

The IAEA report being trumpted as a casus belli contains no new information, but is based on a re-hashing of old, debunked claims stemming from “laptop documents”.

State Department cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the new IAEA head was heavily backed by the U.S., based upon his promises of fealty to the U.S. Indeed, as we’ve seen in the nuclear energy arena, the IAEA is not a neutral, fact-based organization, but a wholly-captured, political agency.

But where did the documents come from originally?

As Gareth Porter noted in 2008:

The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the “laptop documents” – 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop – as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme.

But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by U.S. and foreign analysts. German officials have identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organisation.

Interestingly, the Bush Administration – and especially Dick Cheney – helped to fund the MEK (see confirming articles here and here).

And the New York Times, Washington Post and others are reporting that Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former national security adviser Fran Townsend and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey are supporting the MEK as well.

So the terrorist group which “found” the documents is funded by neoconservatives who want to overthrow Iran. What a coincidence!

And as Gareth Porter notes in the above-linked article, the Mossad may have created the documents in the first place:

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad.

One thing is clear: the U.S. and its allies have a long history of using forged documents as an excuse for war.

BEIJING (AP) — China on Monday slammed the United States’ new Asian-focused defense strategy, saying its accusations of a lack of openness in Beijing’s military policy were “groundless and untrustworthy.”

The strategy unveiled Thursday shifts the U.S. military focus away from Iraq and Afghanistan and makes a renewed commitment to assert America’s position in the Asia-Pacific region.

The document says the growth of China’s military power must be accompanied by greater clarity in its strategic intentions to avoid causing friction in the region.

In response, China said it was committed to peaceful development and a “defensive” policy.

“China’s strategic intent is clear, open and transparent,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin told reporters at a regular briefing.

“Our national defense modernization serves the objective requirements of national security and development and also plays an active role in maintaining regional peace and stability. It will not pose any threat to any country,” Liu said. “The charges against China in this document are groundless and untrustworthy.”

He added that maintaining peace, stability and prosperity in the region serve the common interests of all Asia-Pacific countries “and we hope the U.S. will play a more constructive role to this end.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the U.S. is not anticipating military conflict in Asia, but that it became so bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that it missed chances to improve its strategic position elsewhere.

Panetta said the Asia-Pacific region is growing in importance for the U.S. economy and national security, so the nation needed to maintain “our military’s technological edge and freedom of action.”

The new strategy also identified India as a long-term strategic partner that can serve as a regional economic anchor and provider of security in the Indian Ocean region. It said the U.S. will try to maintain peace on the Korean peninsula by working with allies and others in Asia to defend against North Korean provocations.

(Source: Guardian)

• Fake profiles used by Department of Homeland Security, says privacy group
• List of keywords flags ‘danger’ signal
• DHS may attempt to identify users from their accounts
• Keywords include ‘virus’, ‘drill’ and ‘illegal immigrant’

The Department of Homeland Security makes fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the specific purpose of scanning the networks for ‘sensitive’ words - and tracking people who use them.

Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS’s ‘watch’ list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group.

The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as ‘human to animal’ and ‘outbreak’ to other, more obscure words such as ‘drill’ and ‘strain’.

The DHS also watches for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’.

The DHS outlined plans to scans blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘outbreak’, ‘drill’, ‘strain’, ‘virus’, ‘recovery’, ‘deaths’, ‘collapse’, ‘human to animal’ and ‘trojan’, according to an ‘impact asssessment’ document filed by the agency.

When its search tools net an account using the phrases, they record personal information.

It’s still not clear how this information is used - and who the DHS shares it with.

An online privacy group, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre has requested information on the DHS’s scans, which it says the agency announced in February.

The privacy group has requested information on the DHS, and contractors it claims are working with the agency to scan social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The group says that the government has used scans of social media before to analyse specific events - such as the 2010 BP oil spill - but this general ‘watching’ of social media using fake profiles is new.

‘The initiatives were designed to gather information from ‘online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,’ to store and analyze the information gathered, and then to ‘disseminate relevant and appropriate de-identified information to federal, state, local, and foreign governments and private sector partners,’ the group said in a court filing.

The group claims that a request under the Freedom of Information Act to access the documentation has gone unanswered.

(Source: Daily Mail)

Civil rights groups dismayed as Barack Obama abandons commitment to veto new security law contained in defence bill

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.

Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of “a war that appears to have no end”.

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the “war on terror” to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.

The legislation’s supporters in Congress say it simply codifies existing practice, such as the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. But the law’s critics describe it as a draconian piece of legislation that extends the reach of detention without trial to include US citizens arrested in their own country.

“It’s something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent.”

There was heated debate in both houses of Congress on the legislation, requiring that suspects with links to Islamist foreign terrorist organisations arrested in the US, who were previously held by the FBI or other civilian law enforcement agencies, now be handed to the military and held indefinitely without trial.

The law applies to anyone “who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaida, the Taliban or associated forces”.

Senator Lindsey Graham said the extraordinary measures were necessary because terrorism suspects were wholly different to regular criminals.

“We’re facing an enemy, not a common criminal organisation, who will do anything and everything possible to destroy our way of life,” he said. “When you join al-Qaida you haven’t joined the mafia, you haven’t joined a gang. You’ve joined people who are bent on our destruction and who are a military threat.”

Other senators supported the new powers on the grounds that al-Qaida was fighting a war inside the US and that its followers should be treated as combatants, not civilians with constitutional protections.

But another conservative senator, Rand Paul, a strong libertarian, has said “detaining citizens without a court trial is not American” and that if the law passes “the terrorists have won”.

“We’re talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk,” he said. “Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.”

Paul was backed by Senator Dianne Feinstein.

“Congress is essentially authorising the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge,” she said. “We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge.”

Paul said there were already strong laws against support for terrorist groups. He noted that the definition of a terrorism suspect under existing legislation was so broad that millions of Americans could fall within it.

“There are laws on the books now that characterise who might be a terrorist: someone missing fingers on their hands is a suspect according to the department of justice. Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has more than seven days of food in their house can be considered a potential terrorist,” Paul said. “If you are suspected because of these activities, do you want the government to have the ability to send you to Guantánamo Bay for indefinite detention?”

Under the legislation suspects can be held without trial “until the end of hostilities”. They will have the right to appear once a year before a committee that will decide if the detention will continue.

The Senate is expected to give final approval to the bill before the end of the week. It will then go to the president, who previously said he would block the legislation not on moral grounds but because it would “cause confusion” in the intelligence community and encroached on his own powers.

But on Wednesday the White House said Obama had lifted the threat of a veto after changes to the law giving the president greater discretion to prevent individuals from being handed to the military.

Critics accused the president of caving in again to pressure from some Republicans on a counter-terrorism issue for fear of being painted in next year’s election campaign as weak and of failing to defend America.

Human Rights Watch said that by signing the bill Obama would go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.

“The paradigm of the war on terror has advanced so far in people’s minds that this has to appear more normal than it actually is,” Malinowski said. “It wasn’t asked for by any of the agencies on the frontlines in the fight against terrorism in the United States. It breaks with over 200 years of tradition in America against using the military in domestic affairs.”

In fact, the heads of several security agencies, including the FBI, CIA, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general objected to the legislation. The Pentagon also said it was against the bill.

The FBI director, Robert Mueller, said he feared the law could compromise the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be more complicated to win co-operation from suspects held by the military.

“The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain co-operation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.

Civil liberties groups say the FBI and federal courts have dealt with more than 400 alleged terrorism cases, including the successful prosecutions of Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, Umar Farouk, the “underwear bomber”, and Faisal Shahzad, the “Times Square bomber”.

Elements of the law are so legally confusing, as well as being constitutionally questionable, that any detentions are almost certain to be challenged all the way to the supreme court.

Malinowski said “vague language” was deliberately included in the bill in order to get it passed. “The very lack of clarity is itself a problem. If people are confused about what it means, if people disagree about what it means, that in and of itself makes it bad law,” he said.