Worldwide Rally to Protest Obama's Policy in Africa's Horn

The Eritrean American community in the Washington, D.C., area and surrounding states will hold a massive rally today, February 22, 2010, to protest the Obama administration’s policy for the Horn of Africa in general, and Africa’s newest nation, Eritrea, in particular.

The rally, which is also expected to draw thousands of protesters from across the Mid Atlantic and Mid West states, is set to start at 10am, at Lafayette Park, in front of the White House.  A similar protest will be held the same day in the West Coast, in San Francisco, CA.

These rallies are part of a world wide campaign, including Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to protest an unjust, illegal and reckless sanctions measure rammed by the Obama administration recently through the UN Security Council against Eritrea based on fabricated charges manufactured by this young nation’s traditional enemies, especially Ethiopia, with regards to Somalia. This misguided measure is a reflection of Washington’s disastrous policy for the Horn of Africa which has been crying for change for nearly two decades.

Eritrea, which was among the first nations to join the Coalition of the Willing in 2003, has made indelible contributions in the fight against terrorism in the Horn of Africa and surrounding regions. US and Eritrean national interests have a lot in common because both want to see this region free of terror and terrorists.  However, the sanctions against Eritrea come after a 10 year hostile policy towards the new nation by successive US administrations in order to appease the murderous minority regime ruling Ethiopia today.

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Karzai: Too Many Civilians Dead by NATO

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that NATO's efforts to prevent civilian deaths during its operations are not enough because innocent people keep dying, as the military alliance continued its offensive in a key Taliban stronghold.

In a speech at the opening session of the Afghan parliament, Karzai also repeated his call to Taliban fighters to renounce al Qaeda and join with the government - an appeal that may have more resonance after recent arrests of Taliban leaders in Pakistan.

Karzai held up a picture of an 8-year-old girl who he said was the only one left to recover the bodies of her 12 relatives, all killed when two NATO rockets struck their home during the offensive in the southern town of Marjah. He called the incident a tragedy for all Afghanistan.

Karzai said NATO has made progress in reducing civilian casualties and air bombardments - which have been responsible for some of the largest incidents of civilian deaths. And he thanked NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who attended the speech, for "standing with us honestly in this effort."

However, Karzai stressed that the effort is not sufficient.

"We need to reach the point where there are no civilian casualties," Karzai said. "Our effort and our criticism will continue until we reach that goal."

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US School District accused of using laptops to spy on students at home

LONDON GUARDIAN

A school district in Pennsylvania spied on students through web cameras installed on laptops provided by the district, according to a class action lawsuit filed this week.

Lower Merion school district, in a well-heeled suburb of Philadelphia, provided 2,300 high-school students with Mac laptops last autumn in what its superintendent, Christopher McGinley, described as an effort to establish a "mobile, 21st-century learning environment".

The scheme was funded with $720,000 (£468,000) in state grants and other sources. The students were not allowed to install video games and other software, and were barred from "commercial, illegal, unethical and inappropriate" use.

The district retained remote control of the built-in webcams installed on the computers – and used them to capture images of the students, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court this week.

The ruse was revealed when Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton high school, was hauled into the assistant principal Lindy Matsko's office, shown a photograph taken on the laptop in his home and disciplined for "improper behaviour".

According to Robbins, Matsko said the school had retained the ability to activate the laptop webcams remotely, at any time. Backed by his parents, Robbins filed a lawsuit on behalf of all students provided with laptops by the school.

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Afghan mess bigger than we thought

By Robert A. Wehrle

Are we winning? After returning from a 15- month stint in Afghanistan, I find this is the single most-often-asked ques -tion as I make the rounds to re-establish old acquaintances and friendships. Strategically, our focus seems to have sharpened in the past 10 months. We've finally agreed to fight a counterinsurgency, and that will focus efforts at every level. But I know least about that. 

At the operational level, where I worked with the Afghan National Police (ANP) for 15 months, things look a lot worse. 

Operationally, the effort is broken. Assets are misdirected, poorly managed and misused. Graft and corruption in the Afghan forces are endemic, and coalition forces unwittingly enable that corruption. Let's break that into two parts: 

Misdirected, mismanaged and misused:
There are several related facets to this issue. Aid agencies, nongovernmental agencies and coalition state and defense departments have all poured money and materiel into the country in poorly coordinated efforts. The Afghan National Army (ANA) has received orders of magnitude more money than the ANP. In any counterinsurgency effort, the police play a vital role in maintaining the rule of law at the local level, but the Afghan police force is pathetically underresourced and undermanned.

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The new underground economy

The underground or "black" economy is rapidly rising, and the fault is mainly due to government policies. 

Here is the evidence. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) released a report last week concluding that 7.7 percent of U.S. households, containing at least 17 million adults, are unbanked (i.e. those who do not have bank accounts), and an "estimated 17.9 percent of U.S. households, roughly 21 million, are underbanked" (i.e., those who rely heavily on nonbank institutions, such as check cashing and money transmitting services). As an economy becomes richer and incomes rise, the normal expectation is that the proportion of the unbanked population falls and does not rise as is now happening in the United States. 

Tax revenues are falling far more rapidly at the federal, state and local level than would be expected by the small drop in real gross domestic product (GDP) and changes in tax law that have occurred since the recession began. The currency in circulation outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve banks and the vaults of depository institutions - that is, the currency held by individuals and businesses - has grown by 13.3 percent in the last two years, while real nominal (not inflation-adjusted) GDP has not grown at all, and real (inflation-adjusted) GDP incomes have fallen by more than 3 percent. With the growth of electronic means of payment and financial service providers, it would be expected that the currency component of GDP would fall, not rise. 

The underground economy refers to both legal activities, such as often found in construction and services industries where taxes are not withheld and paid, and illegal activities, such as drug dealing and prostitution.

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DHS Lost Dozens of Guns, According to Internal Report

ABC NEWS

Guns meant to help safeguard America found their way into the hands of known criminals after absent-minded federal officers left firearms unsecured everywhere from fast-food restaurants to bowling alleys, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security.

Nearly 300 guns were misplaced by or stolen from federal officials between fiscal years 2006 and 2008, some of which were never reported lost, the report concluded. Some of the guns were recovered later by local law enforcement from suspected gang members after they had been engraved with gang signs. 

"The Department of Homeland Security, through its components, did not adequately safeguard and control its firearms," according to the January report, which looked at seven of the department's agencies.

Firearms were left unattended in an idle vehicle in a parking lot, the restroom of a fast-food restaurant, a clothing store, a lunch box and a bowling alley, the report said. 

One gun was locked in the trunk of an officer's car along with body armor and radio equipment, but the key to the trunk was left next to the vehicle's windshield wipers. 

Another gun was left on the bumper of a car and fell off when the officer drove away.

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Beware of the loopholes in the new credit card law

WASHINGTON POST

Beginning Monday, some of the more outrageous practices of credit card issuers will be outlawed. But just like a bully on a playground who doesn't punch when the teacher is watching, lenders will find ways to continue pummeling consumers. 

The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (also known as the Credit CARD Act) established sweeping changes intended to help curtail certain industry practices, reduce unfair fees and rein in huge interest rate increases. Under the new law, issuers also are required to disclose how long it will take customers to eliminate their debt if they choose to make only minimum monthly payments. 

"This law is putting the consumer in a stronger position. It's not absolving them from the requirement that they pay their bills, but it levels the playing field quite a bit," said Austan Goolsbee, a member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. Credit card reform falls under his portfolio. 

The CARD Act is a big blow to the bullying tactics that issuers have employed for so long. However, as with any law, loopholes exist. Here are just a few of them under the CARD Act: 

-- Issuers cannot raise interest rates on existing balances. If you have a balance, your old interest rate will apply to that balance. 

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Another Wave of Real Estate Distress

A mortgage crisis like the one that has devastated homeowners is enveloping the nation's office and retail buildings, and few places are likely to be hit as hard as Washington.

The foreclosure wave is likely to swamp many smaller community banks across the country, and many well-known properties, including Washington's Mayflower Hotel and the Boulevard at the Capital Centre in Largo, are at risk, industry analysts say. 

The new round of financial pain, which some had anticipated but hoped to avoid, now seems all but certain. "There's been an enormous bubble in commercial real estate, and it has to come down," said Elizabeth Warren, chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, the watchdog created by Congress to monitor the financial bailout. "There will be significant bankruptcies among developers and significant failures among community banks." 

Unlike the largest banks, such as Citigroup and Wachovia, that got into so much trouble early on, the community banks in general fared better in the residential mortgage crisis. But their turn is coming: Not only did community banks issue a higher proportion of commercial loans, but they also have held on to them rather than sell them to other investors. 

Nearly 3,000 community banks -- 40 percent of the banking system -- have a high proportion of commercial real estate loans relative to their capital, said Warren, whose committee issued a report on commercial real estate last week.

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Torture, whoever carries it out, degrades the values we uphold

Britain’s intelligence and security services are admant that they do not practise, condone or turn a blind eye to torture. 

They get angry about any suggestion that this is not the case, with Jonathan Evans, head of MI5, firing off a rare and indignant article to the press only last week. 

But the demand for a full and frank inquiry into the claims of complicity in detainee ill treatment is fast becoming irresistible. 

Mr Evans has admitted that the Security Service was “slow” to detect changes in US policy that allowed a range of abusive techniques to be used.

But the idea that the intelligence services’ mistakes were the result of naivety is hard to sustain. Who can forget those images from Guantánamo Bay of al-Qaeda detainees hooded and shackled? The Americans released the pictures to show how tough they were prepared to be in the War On Terror. But they horrified people and soured sympathy for the US. 

It is stretching credibility to argue that, having seen those propaganda pictures, Britain did not think there was something very questionable about the way our most important ally was treating terror suspects. 

The counter-terrorism agencies make a better argument: 9/11 changed their world in an instant. MI5, the domestic intelligence service, was half its current size and had to shift its focus from Irish republican terrorism to al-Qaeda.

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Dubai has evidence Mossad killed Hamas man: report

Dubai's police chief said in a report on Saturday that his force has evidence incriminating the Mossad in the killing of a Hamas commander in the Gulf emirate last month, despite Israeli denials.

"Among the new evidence available to Dubai police which incriminates the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, and confirms its involvement in the murder ... are telephone communications between the culprits who have been detected," Dhahi Khalfan said in the newspaper Al-Bayan.

Mahmud al-Mabhuh, one of the founders of Hamas's military wing, was found dead in his luxurious Dubai hotel room on January 20.

"Dubai police also have reliable information that some perpetrators bought their tickets in other countries using credit cards bearing the same identity revealed" previously by the emirate, he added.

"Therefore, the perpetrators used the same passport in several countries," Khalfan said, reiterating that "the Mossad is 99-percent involved" in the assassination of Mabhuh.

Neither in the case of the telephone calls nor of the credit cards did Khalfan say how the link to Mossad was drawn.

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Dutch Government Falls Over Stance on Troops!

NY TIMES

BERLIN — A last-ditch effort to keep Dutch troops in Afghanistan brought down the governing coalition in the Netherlands early Saturday, immediately raising fears that the Western military coalition fighting the war is increasingly at risk.

Even as the allied offensive in the Taliban stronghold of Marja continued Saturday, it appeared almost certain that most of the 2,000 Dutch troops would be gone from Afghanistan by the end of the year. The question plaguing military planners was whether a Dutch departure would embolden the war’s critics in other allied countries, where debate over deployment is continuing, and hasten the withdrawal of their troops as well.

“If the Dutch go, which is the implication of all this, that could open the floodgates for other Europeans to say, ‘The Dutch are going, we can go, too,’ ” said Julian Lindley-French, professor of defense strategy at the Netherlands Defense Academy in Breda. “The implications are that the U.S. and the British are going to take on more of the load.”

The collapse of the Dutch government comes as the Obama administration continues to struggle to get European allies to commit more troops to Afghanistan to bolster its attempts to win back the country from a resurgent Taliban. President Obama has made the Afghan war a cornerstone of his foreign policy and, after months of debate, committed tens of thousands more troops to the effort.

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DOJ: Bush administration lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee cleared on torture rap

The Justice Department is letting Bush administration lawyers off the hook for condoning the use of harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks.

The investigation had brought outraged protests from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other defenders of Bush-era terrorist interrrogation methods.

John Yoo and Jay Bybee showed lousy judgment, but not professional misconduct by writing memos authorizing techniques such as waterboarding, the Justice Department report concludes, sources said.

After the memos were revealed, civil liberties groups and other critics argued that the Bush lawyers were advocating the illegal use of torture and called for Yoo and Bybee to be punished.

Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility originally determined that Yoo and Bybee should be disciplined for writing the memos.

But David Margolis, an associate deputy attorney general, disagreed, clearing Yoo and Bybee of any wrongdoing.

"This decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work" performed by the pair, Margolis wrote.

Government crisis deepens over Binyam Mohamed torture revelations

The political fallout over revelations of Britain’s complicity in the torture by US forces of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed has embroiled the Brown government and MI5 in equal measure.

Following confirmation by the Court of Appeal last week of Mohamed’s claim that the MI5 intelligence agency was fully aware of the brutal treatment he received, and even provided information and questions to be asked by his torturers, senior political figures, including the attorney general at the time, have demanded that the government provide answers.

Ethiopian-born Mohamed, a British resident, was arrested in Pakistan on April 10, 2002 as he was about to board a flight to Britain. After being imprisoned and tortured in Pakistan, he was turned over to the FBI. A victim of extraordinary rendition at the hands of the CIA, he was flown to Morocco, where he was again tortured, including being slashed with scalpels or razor blades on his chest and penis. He was moved to Afghanistan, where he was frequently tortured in the infamous “Dark Prison” before being finally detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Held at Guantanamo for four years, he again suffered torture and abuse.

Mohamed was finally released in February 2009 without charge, after nearly seven years in captivity. He is now suing the British government.

After the failure of a challenge by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the Court of Appeal made public seven redacted paragraphs from its earlier findings based on 42 still classified documents, handed over by US intelligence to MI5 and confirming that Mohamed had been tortured.

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Russia warns US against attacking Iran

The chief of Russia's General Staff, Nikolai Makarov, has warned the US against striking Iran over the country's nuclear program.

"The consequences, I believe, would be dreadful for Iran, as well as Russia, the entire Asia-Pacific community," Makarov said on Wednesday.

The Russian military chief further suggested that the United States might turn its military attention on the Islamic Republic once its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been completed.

Amid a US campaign to drum up support for new anti-Iran sanctions, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned on Tuesday that world powers would "regret" any moves against the country.

"If anybody seeks to create problems for Iran, our response will not be like before," Ahmadinejad said at a press conference in Tehran.

"Something will be done in response that will make them (the world powers) regret [their action]," the Iranian chief executive added. "However, we prefer they steer towards cooperation [with Iran]."

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Israel reels from backlash at killing of Hamas militant

THE INDEPENDENT

After the excitement at a story worthy of Hollywood, the political fallout. Sharp questions are starting to be asked in Israel about an operation which left the physical appearance of the assassins exposed, appeared to have usurped the identities of, and perhaps even endangered, uninvolved Israeli citizens, and risked a serious diplomatic backlash because of the operatives' use of European passports to enter Dubai. 

If the assassination, as seems probable despite the plea of "no evidence" by Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman yesterday, involved the country's overseas intelligence agency, Mossad, it will not of course be the first time it has hit trouble over its use of foreign passports. In 2005, two Israelis were convicted of fraudulently trying to obtain New Zealand passports. When the government in Auckland secured an apology from the Israeli authorities it regarded that in itself as proof that the two men were acting on behalf of the Jewish state.

Although there was no immediate UK confirmation yesterday, the Israeli press also reported that Israel was obliged to apologise when British passports the agency had been using were left in a phone booth in West Germany in 1987. Ten years later, Canada protested over the use of its passports in the famously botched attempt to assassinate the Hamas political bureau head Khaled Meshal in Amman – a failure which led at Jordan's insistence to the Gaza Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin being freed from jail.

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Robert Fisk: Britain's explanation is riddled with inconsistencies. It's time to come clean

THE INDEPENDENT

Collusion. That's what it's all about. The United Arab Emirates suspect – only suspect, mark you – that Europe's "security collaboration" with Israel has crossed a line into illegality, where British passports (and those of other other EU nations) can now be used to send Israeli agents into the Gulf to kill Israel's enemies. At 3.49pm yesterday afternoon (Beirut time, 1.49pm in London), my Lebanese phone rang. It was a source – impeccable, I know him, he spoke with the authority I know he has in Abu Dhabi – to say that "the British passports are real. They are hologram pictures with the biometric stamp. They are not forged or fake. The names were really there. If you can fake a hologram or biometric stamp, what does this mean?" 

The voice – I know the man and his origins well – wants to talk. "There are 18 people involved in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Besides the 11 already named, there are two Palestinians who are being interrogated and five others, including a woman. She was part of the team that staked out the hotel lobby." Two hours later, an SMS arrives on my Beirut phone from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. It is the same source.

"ONE MORE THING," it says in capital letters, then continues in lower case. "The command room of the operation was in Austria (sic, in fact, all things are "sic" in this report)... meaning the suspects when here did not talk to each other but thru the command room on separate lines to avoid detection or linking themselves to one another... but it was detected and identified OK??" OK? I ask myself.

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Robert Fisk: Passport to the truth in Dubai remains secret

It's a propaganda war. Whoever killed the Hamas official in Dubai – let's speak frankly – it's part of an old, dirty war between the Israelis and the Palestinians in which they have been murdering their secret police antagonists for decades. Whose were the passports? Or should we say "passports". So here's a moment to reflect on realities. 

Many Dubaians believe that the collapse of the emirate's economy last year was the revenge of Western banks – spurred on, of course, by the Americans – to punish them for allowing Iranian shell companies to use Dubai as a sanctions-busting base during the cold-hot war between the US-Israeli alliance and Iran. Now the Americans (or the Israelis – you can take your pick) want to turn Dubai into the Beirut of the Gulf. That was actually a headline last week – in The Jerusalem Post, of course – which painted Dubai as dangerous as it was economically calamitous.

But hold on a minute. According to a Dubai "source" of The Independent – readers will have to judge what this means – the security forces of the aforesaid emirate informed a "British diplomat" in Dubai (presumably the consul, since the embassy is in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi) of the UK passport details almost six days ago and "did not receive an appropriate reply". If this is true – the Foreign Office will be wrathful in its denials – then why didn't the British immediately express their outrage at the use of forged British passports and cough up details of the equally outrageous frauds a week ago? This misuse puts every British citizen at risk.

Yet the Foreign Office – so keen to warn British citizens of the dangers they face in the Middle East – sat on their large behind and did bugger all. I'm sorry.

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US bank lending falls at fastest rate in history

David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said lending has fallen by over $100bn (£63.8bn) since January, plummeting at an annual rate of 16pc. "Since the credit crisis began, $740bn of bank credit has evaporated. This is a record 10pc decline," he said.

Mr Rosenberg said it is tempting fate for the Fed to turn off the monetary spigot in such circumstances. "The shrinking in banking sector balance sheets renders any talk of an exit strategy premature," he said.

The M3 broad money supply – watched by monetarists as a leading indicator of trouble a year ahead – has been contracting at a rate of 5.6pc over the last three months. This signals future deflation. The Fed's "Monetary Multplier" has dropped to a record low of 0.81, evidence that the banking system is still broken.

Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said demands for higher capital ratios and continued losses from the credit crisis are both causing banks to cut lending. The risk of a double-dip recession – or worse – is growing by the day.

"It is absurdly premature to think of withdrawing stimulus while bank credit is still sliding. To have allowed this monetary collapse to occur a full 18 months after the financial cataclysm is extreme incompetence. They seem to have forgotten that the lesson of the 1930s was the falling quantity of money," he said.

Paul Ashworth, US economist for Capital Economics, said that certain Fed officials are clearly worried about lending since they slipped in a warning that bank credit "continues to contract" in their latest statement.

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TSA takes explosives screening to fliers

USA TODAY

Airport screeners for the first time will begin roving through airports taking chemical swabs from passengers and their bags to check for explosives, the Transportation Security Administration said Tuesday.

The program, already tested at five airports after the attempted Christmas Day bomb plot on a U.S.-bound airliner, begins nationwide in a few weeks, TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said. Screeners will push carts with bomb-detection machines around airport gates and checkpoint lines to randomly check passengers' hands and carry-on bags for explosive residue.  

Metal detectors now used at checkpoints can't spot materials such as the powdered explosives that bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly hid in his underwear to get through a checkpoint in Amsterdam's airport.   

Abdulmutallab is accused of trying to blow up Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit, where it landed safely.  

"Had Abdulmutallab been subjected to a (chemical) inspection, there's a high probability it would have picked up the explosives," RAND Corp. security analyst Brian Jenkins said. "The machines are extraordinarily sensitive."  

Shortly after the Dec. 25 incident, the TSA ran a 17-day test at the five airports to see whether bomb-sensing equipment could be rolled on carts to check random passengers.  

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Israelis convinced: Mossad behind Dubai hit

By STEVEN GUTKIN
Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli security officials said Wednesday they were convinced the Mossad was behind the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai and harshly criticized the spy agency for allegedly stealing the identities of its own citizens to carry out the hit.

Names released by Dubai matched seven people living in Israel, raising questions about why the agency would endanger its own people by using their passport data as cover for a secret death squad.

At the same time, some Israeli experts said the Dubai evidence pointed to a setup to falsely blame Israel.

A vague comment from Israel's foreign minister, who neither confirmed nor denied Mossad's involvement, only added to the spy novel-like mystery surrounding the slaying of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was found dead Jan. 20 at a luxury hotel near Dubai's international airport.

"Israel never responds, never confirms and never denies," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in Israel's first official comment on the affair, then added: "I don't know why we are assuming that Israel, or the Mossad, used those passports."

Some senior Israeli security officials not directly involved in the case were less circumspect, saying they were convinced it was a Mossad operation because of the motive _ Israel says al-Mabhouh supplied Gaza's Hamas rulers with their most dangerous weapons _ and the use of Israeli citizens' identities.

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