SIBEL EDMONDS: THE TRAITORS AMONG US

SIBEL EDMONDS, a former FBI translator, claims that the following government officials have committed what amount to acts of treason. They are lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman. But is Sibel Edmonds credible?

“Absolutely, she’s credible,” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told CBS’s 60 Minutes when he was asked about her in 2002. “The reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.” Edmonds’s remarkable allegations of bribery, blackmail, infiltration of the U.S. government and the theft of nuclear secrets by foreign allies and enemies alike rocked the Bush Administration. In fact, Bush and company actually prevented Edmonds from telling the American people what she knew—up until now.

John M. Cole, an 18-year veteran of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments, revealed the panic of upper-echelon officials when Edmonds originally started talking back in 2002. “Well, the Bureau is gonna have to try to work something out with Sibel,” Cole said an FBI executive assistant told him at the time, “because they don’t want this to go out and become public.”

But they couldn’t “work something out with Sibel” because, it seems, she wasn’t looking to make a deal. Edmonds says she was looking to expose what she believed to be the ugly truth about the infiltration of the U.S. government by foreign spies.

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Afwerki: 'The border war was a conflict instigated by the US'

Twenty years after the liberation from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Africa's youngest nation, has emerged as strategically vital to the stability of the region and the wider global agenda.

Eritrea is struggling to balance the needs of its people with the perceived threats to the nation.

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The truth about the Mossad

Last November, a sharp-eyed Israeli woman named Niva Ben-Harush was alarmed to notice a young man attaching something that looked suspiciously like a bomb to the underside of a car in a quiet street near Tel Aviv port. When police arrested him, he claimed to be an agent of the Mossad secret service taking part in a training exercise: his story turned out to be true – though the bomb was a fake.

No comment was forthcoming from the Israeli prime minister's office, which formally speaks for – but invariably says nothing about – the country's world-famous espionage organisation. The bungling bomber was just a brief item on that evening's local TV news.

There was, however, a far bigger story – one that echoed across the globe – two years ago this week, when a bomb in a Pajero jeep in Damascus decapitated a man named Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the military leader of Lebanon's Shia movement Hizbullah, an ally of Iran, and was wanted by the US, France and half a dozen other countries. Israel never went beyond cryptic nodding and winking about that killing in the heart of the Syrian capital, but it is widely believed to have been one of its most daring and sophisticated clandestine operations.

The Mossad, like other intelligence services, tends to attract attention only when something goes wrong, or when it boasts a spectacular success and wants to send a warning signal to its enemies. Last month's assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai, now at the centre of a white-hot diplomatic row between Israel and Britain, is a curious mixture of both.

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Deep secrets: Former cold war agent gagged by the CIA

He remembers the women sunbathing naked on the deck of a passing yacht. He remembers, too, the lurking menace of a Russian intelligence-gathering trawler, watching from afar as one of the most audacious American coups of the cold war unfolded on the ocean floor, 16,500ft beneath the Pacific surface.

David Sharp recalls every detail of the 1974 mission known as Project Azorian, one of the most ambitious, expensive and politically volatile clandestine operations launched by the CIA.

As one of the CIA’s agents in charge of recovering a sunken Soviet submarine and its cargo of nuclear-tipped missiles, Sharp spent 63 days at sea on what he described last week as a “marvellous engineering effort and a marvellous security effort to keep it under wraps”.

The broad outlines of the historic intelligence feat have been written about and debated for decades, have been publicly acknowledged by governments in both Washington and Moscow and have inspired countless conspiracy theories and malevolent accusations. Yet the man who knows most about the Hughes Glomar Explorer recovery ship and its effort to retrieve the Soviet Golf-II submarine K-129 is still being gagged by the CIA.

Sitting in a coffee shop close to his home on the Maryland shore near Annapolis, Sharp scarcely looks a threat to US national security.

He is 75, silver-haired and sprightly, with a glint in his eye as he talks about his 27 years of service in the CIA and how he felt morally obliged to “play by the rules” when he decided to write a memoir about the K-129 adventure. That meant submitting his manuscript to a CIA vetting board.

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Meir Dagan: the mastermind behind Mossad's secret war

LONDON TIMES

IN early January two black Audi A6 limousines drove up to the main gate of a building on a small hill in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv: the headquarters of Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence agency, known as the “midrasha”.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stepped out of his car and was greeted by Meir Dagan, the 64-year-old head of the agency. Dagan, who has walked with a stick since he was injured in action as a young man, led Netanyahu and a general to a briefing room.

According to sources with knowledge of Mossad, inside the briefing room were some members of a hit squad. As the man who gives final authorisation for such operations, Netanyahu was briefed on plans to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a member of Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza.

Mossad had received intelligence that Mabhouh was planning a trip to Dubai and they were preparing an operation to assassinate him there, off-guard in a luxury hotel. The team had already rehearsed, using a hotel in Tel Aviv as a training ground without alerting its owners.

The mission was not regarded as unduly complicated or risky, and Netanyahu gave his authorisation, in effect signing Mabhouh’s death warrant.

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IRS issues new guidelines on obtaining home buyer tax credits

Despite blizzards that shut federal offices for days, the Internal Revenue Service issued new guidance Feb. 12 on the two tax credit programs that are powering the country's real estate markets -- the $6,500 credit for repeat buyers and the $8,000 first-time buyer credit.

The new IRS policy clarified documentation that taxpayers need to submit to successfully obtain either credit. When Congress revised the credit programs in November, it ordered the IRS to tighten its rules and monitoring to curtail widespread frauds that had emerged earlier in 2009.

These included fictitious home purchases in which people claimed and received $8,000 checks from the government on transactions that had never occurred. .

To avoid such abuses in the revised credit program -- which is scheduled to be available for qualified purchases closed through June 30 -- Congress directed the IRS to spell out documentation standards in detail and to install monitoring systems to spot fraud upfront. Among the keys to the monitoring system is that all documentation accompanying credit claims comply with the IRS' detailed rules.

Here's what the agency wants:

* A fully executed IRS Form 5405 (available at www.irs.gov) on which taxpayers provide information supporting their claim of eligibility, including income and home purchase date.

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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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