Authorities Quietly Reverse Underwear Bomber Official Story

Authorities have quietly reversed the official story behind the Christmas Day underwear bomber attack and acknowledged that an accomplice was involved, despite weeks of denial and derision of eyewitness Kurt Haskell’s description of a sharp-dressed man who helped Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab board Flight 253 in Amsterdam.

Buried in the last two paragraphs of a story about alleged female suicide bombers coming from Yemen, an ABC News report contains the following bombshell.

“Federal agents also tell ABCNews.com they are attempting to identify a man who passengers said helped Abdulmutallab change planes for Detroit when he landed in Amsterdam from Lagos, Nigeria.”

“Authorities had initially discounted the passenger accounts, but the agents say there is a growing belief the man have played a role to make sure Abdulmutallab “did not get cold feet.”

Detroit lawyer Kurt Haskell maintained from the beginning that he saw a well-dressed Indian man aid the accused bomber to board the plane despite the fact that he had no passport and was on a terror watch list.

“While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time,’” reported the Michigan Live news website.

Click to read more...

UN in secret peace talks with Taliban

Taliban commanders held secret exploratory talks with a United Nations special envoy this month to discuss peace terms, it emerged tonight.

Regional commanders on the Taliban's leadership council, the Quetta Shura, sought a meeting with the UN special representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, and it took place in Dubai on 8 January. "They requested a meeting to talk about talks. They want protection, to be able to come out in public. They don't want to vanish into places like Bagram," the Reuters news agency quoted a UN official as saying, referring to the Bagram detention centre at a US military base outside Kabul.

The Dubai meeting was confirmed to the Guardian by officials with knowledge of the encounter, but they said they could provide no further details.

It was the first such meeting between the UN and senior members of the Taliban. The fact that it took place suggests that peace talks have revived since exploratory contacts between emissaries of the Kabul government and the Taliban in Saudi Arabia last year broke down.

It also suggests that some Taliban members might be prepared for the first time to put faith in an international organisation to broker a deal to end the nine-year war.

News of the Dubai meeting surfaced at the end of a day-long conference in London intended to map out a transition over five years from a Nato-led military campaign to Afghan-led effort involving more political, social and economic measures to end the fighting.

Click to read more...

Afghan cleric shot dead by Western troops; NATO apologizes

LA TIMES

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - Western troops traveling through the capital of Afghanistan in a military convoy Thursday shot dead an Islamic cleric, apparently mistaking him for a would-be suicide bomber, officials and witnesses said.

NATO acknowledged that its forces had fired on what appeared to be a "threatening vehicle," and expressed regret over the death. Afghan police said two of the cleric's children were in the car with him, but that they were unhurt.

The incident took place hours before Afghan President Hamid Karzai, speaking to a major security conference in London, urged that greater care be taken when foreign troops come into contact with civilians.

The fatal shooting, which occurred during morning rush hour, took place close to a U.S. military base on the city's eastern edge that had been the scene of a suicide car bombing two days earlier. Eight Western troops and at least half a dozen Afghan civilians were injured in that blast, outside an installation known as Camp Phoenix.

After Thursday's shooting, protesters staged a small but angry demonstration near the gates of the base, blocking traffic and shouting anti-American slogans.

Click to read more...

Afghan military strategy doomed without big changes, UN chief warns

The military strategy in Afghanistan is seriously flawed and is doomed to failure without major adjustments, the outgoing head of the UN there has warned.

Kai Eide, who will stand down as UN Special Representative in March, was withering in his assessment of the Afghan surge recently set in motion by President Obama. He warned that the military focus was at the expense of a “meaningful, Afghan-led political strategy” and that Western troops and governments had left Afghans feeling that they faced “cultural invasion”.

Speaking to The Times before today’s conference on Afghanistan, he said that the international community must stop operating according to “strategies and decisions that are taken far away from Afghanistan”.

“Very unfortunately, the political strategy has become an appendix to the military strategy. The strategy has to be demilitarised — a political strategy with a military component.”

Mr Eide added that he supported the arrival of more US and Nato troops but that they had to be used to train Afghan forces. He said that the latter were better than any international forces because Westerners still struggled to understand the sensitivities of the country.

He expressed deep concern at the tactical approach of British and other Western troops, which aimed to remove the Taleban from an area, hold it and then develop local infrastructure and security forces. “

Click to read more...

Darling to hold secret talks with bankers in Davos

LONDON GUARDIAN

Alistair Darling is to hold private talks with an elite group of City bankers in Davos on Friday amid warnings from global business executives that tough new curbs on the financial sector would hold back economic recovery.

Leaders of both UK and international banks will seek reassurance from the chancellor that the windfall tax on bank bonuses is not the start of a concerted crackdown that will make London a less attractive place to do business.

Bob Diamond, the president of Barclays, today strongly attacked Barack Obama's plans to limit the size and scope of Wall Street banks. A new era of "­narrow" banks would be harmful, ­Diamond warned: "The impact on jobs, global trade and the global economy would be very negative."

Peter Sands, the chief executive of Standard Chartered, will host talks at which bankers will voice their unhappiness at what they see as a populist attack on their industry. He said that there was a growing risk that fragmented regulation initiatives would "create enormous complexity" and encourage banks to play one regulator off against another.

Darling is expected to tell the bankers that while the government wants the G20 group of developed and developing nations to draw up plans for better financial regulation, it also wants the City to thrive.

Click to read more...

CBO chief warns of long, slow recovery

The director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had little but bad news on the economy for Congress.

The pace of the U.S. economic recovery will be "slow in the next few years," and the unemployment rate will average 10 percent through the end of fiscal 2011, while the annual budget deficit will likely remain above $1 trillion, CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf told the House Budget Committee on Wednesday.

The CBO chief told the congressional panel that he expected economic growth in fiscal 2010, which ends Sept. 30, will be just 1.6 percent, and the unemployment rate will average 10.2 percent. The outlook for fiscal 2011 is not much better, he warned, saying that growth in the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) will barely accelerate to 1.8 percent and the unemployment rate barely budge, averaging 9.8 percent for the year.

Mr. Elmendorf, citing another in the string of forecasts that his well-respected nonpartisan office had developed, also warned that annual budget deficits are likely to top $1 trillion for this year and next and remain at stratospheric levels for years. The resulting public debt will make up a huge share of the overall economy and remain a constant threat to economic growth for the foreseeable future.

"It is true that as we push [publicly held debt] in this country to 60 percent of GDP at the end of this [fiscal] year and beyond that over the next few years, we're moving into territory that most developed countries stay out of," Mr. Elmendorf told the House budget panel. "That raises the risk" of seriously adverse economic consequences "every step that we go."

Click to read more...

CBO Report: Stimulus price tag soars, jobless rate rises

WASHINGTON TIMES

The economic stimulus bill's price tag has risen to $862 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday — a $75 billion jump that's a result in part to the fact that, despite the spending, joblessness has risen and the government is paying out more than expected on unemployment benefits.

The CBO, in a new report, also said spending in fiscal 2010 will push the deficit to more than $1.3 trillion, or nearly the record $1.4 trillion deficit recorded in 2009.

The dire warnings fueled spending hysteria, which hit Washington in full force this week after Democrats' health care overhaul got shelved last week.

President Obama plans to call for a freeze on non-security spending in Wednesday's State of the Union address — but advisers said it wouldn't take effect until 2011.

"In 2010, we are focused on making sure we can get people back to work. In 2011, when we believe the economy will be back on stronger footing, we're going to be looking to make sure the footing we are putting them on is a more sustainable discretionary footing," said White House deputy budget director Rob Nabors.

Click to read more...

Revealed: See Who Was Paid Off In The AIG Bailout

HUFFINGTON POST

A key question at the heart of the controversial bailout of AIG is just how much money the government lost. The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have worked to keep that number secret and to conceal who was on the winning end.

An unredacted document obtained by the Huffington Post list the damage in detail. Goldman Sachs alone, for instance, got $14 billion in government money for assets worth $6 billion at the time -- a de facto $8 billion subsidy, courtesy of taxpayers.

The list was produced as part of a congressional investigation led by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee into the federal bailout of AIG.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by now-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, purchased a slew of souring assets from the world's biggest banks for 100 cents on the dollar in November and December 2008. A scathing report by a government watchdog held Geithner responsible for the overpayments.

The New York Fed initially pressured AIG to keep the list hidden from investors, regulators and the public. When it was eventually filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC allowed the Fed and AIG to keep the details secret. A heavily-redacted version was made public last March.

Click to read more...

U.S. military teams, intelligence deeply involved in aiding Yemen on strikes

WASHINGTON POST

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials. 

The operations, approved by President Obama and begun six weeks ago, involve several dozen troops from the U.S. military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), whose main mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. The American advisers do not take part in raids in Yemen, but help plan missions, develop tactics and provide weapons and munitions. Highly sensitive intelligence is being shared with the Yemeni forces, including electronic and video surveillance, as well as three-dimensional terrain maps and detailed analysis of the al-Qaeda network. 

As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations. 

The broad outlines of the U.S. involvement in Yemen have come to light in the past month, but the extent and nature of the operations have not been previously reported. The far-reaching U.S. role could prove politically challenging for Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who must balance his desire for American support against the possibility of a backlash by tribal, political and religious groups whose members resent what they see as U.S. interference in Yemen. 

Click to read more...

Secret detention may amount to crime against humanity: UN experts

UN human rights experts warned on Wednesday that "widespread and systematic" secret detention of terror suspects could pave the way for charges of crimes against humanity.

In their first in-depth global study on the practice, the experts said the practice had spread to almost all regions of the world and was continuing.

The study, which is due to be submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in March, listed 66 states that have been involved in secret detentions, mainly over the past nine years.

In spite of international norms protecting individual rights, "secret detention continues to be used in the name of countering terrorism around the world," the report added.

"If resorted to in a widespread and systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a crime against humanity," the authors cautioned in their executive summary.

The "global war on terror", which was launched by President George W. Bush's administration after the September 11 attacks, had "reinvigorated" the use of secret detentions in an organised manner, the authors of the study said.

The campaign marked "the progressive and determined elaboration of a comprehensive and coordinated system of secret detention of persons suspected of terrorism, involving not only US authorities, but also other states in almost all regions of the world," it added.

Click to read more...

Pentagon calls for ‘Office of Strategic Deception’

Remember the Pentagon Office of Special Plans that helped collect dubious intelligence that led to the war in Iraq? Or the program where the Pentagon secretly briefed military analysts to promote the Iraq war?

Meet the would-be Office of Strategic Deception.

In a little-noticed report earlier this month, the Defense Department's powerful Defense Science Board recommended creation of an entity designed solely for "strategic deception" against US adversaries.

"Specifically," the report reads (pdf), "we recommend that the Secretary [of Defense] task both the Under Secretaries of Defense for Policy and Intelligence, and the Joint Staff, working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to create a tiger team to lay out courses of action and a way ahead for establishing a standing strategic surprise/deception entity. Once the initial work has been completed, all parts of the interagency should be brought into this effort."

"Strategic deception has in the past provided the United States with significant advantages that translated into operational and tactical success," it continues. "Successful deception also minimizes U.S. vulnerabilities, while simultaneously setting conditions to surprise adversaries."

Deception is a common war-time tactic nations use to gain a leg up on their enemies, but as Wired notes, the Pentagon apparently believes the United States must begin engaging in strategic tricks even before it wages war against another country.

Click to read more...

AP: Haiti govt gets 1 penny of US quake aid dollar

Less than a penny of each dollar the U.S. is spending on earthquake relief in Haiti is going in the form of cash to the Haitian government, according to an Associated Press review of relief efforts.

Two weeks after President Obama announced an initial $100 million for Haiti earthquake relief, U.S. government spending on the disaster has nearly quadrupled to $379 million, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced Wednesday. That's about $1.25 each from everyone in the United States.

Each American dollar roughly breaks down like this: 42 cents for disaster assistance, 33 cents for U.S. military aid, nine cents for food, nine cents to transport the food, five cents for paying Haitian survivors for recovery efforts, just less than one cent to the Haitian government, and about half a cent to the Dominican Republic.

The U.S. government money is part of close to $2 billion in relief aid flowing into Haiti - almost all of it managed by organizations other than the Haitian government, which has been struggling to re-establish its authority since the quake. On Wednesday, a defensive President Rene Preval acknowledged his country's reputation for graft, but said aid money isn't lining the pockets of government officials.

"There's a perception of corruption, but I would like to tell the Haitian people that the Haitian government has not seen one penny of all the money that has been raised - millions are being made on the right, millions on the left, it's all going to the NGOs (nongovernmental organizations)" Preval said, speaking in Creole at a news conference.

Click to read more ...

Haiti and the seismic weapon

by Thierry Meyssan

The controversy that followed the publication on our website of an article entertaining the possibility that the earthquake in Haiti was caused artificially, calls for clarification. Yes, seismic weapons do exist and the United States, among others, have them. Yes, the U.S. military forces were pre-positionned to be deployed to the island. These facts are not conclusive in themselves but they certainly warrant heightened scrutiny into this matter.

Click to read more...

Who Really Attacked Congress?

The Anthrax Attacks Remain Unsolved

WALL STREET JOURNAL

The investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks ended as far as the public knew on July 29, 2008, with the death of Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md. The cause of death was an overdose of the painkiller Tylenol. No autopsy was performed, and there was no suicide note.

Less than a week after his apparent suicide, the FBI declared Ivins to have been the sole perpetrator of the 2001 Anthrax attacks, and the person who mailed deadly anthrax spores to NBC, the New York Post, and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. These attacks killed five people, closed down a Senate office building, caused a national panic, and nearly paralyzed the postal system.

The FBI's six-year investigation was the largest inquest in its history, involving 9,000 interviews, 6,000 subpoenas, and the examination of tens of thousands of photocopiers, typewriters, computers and mailboxes. Yet it failed to find a shred of evidence that identified the anthrax killer—or even a witness to the mailings. With the help of a task force of scientists, it found a flask of anthrax that closely matched—through its genetic markers—the anthrax used in the attack.

This flask had been in the custody of Ivins, who had published no fewer than 44 scientific papers over three decades as a microbiologist and who was working on developing vaccines against anthrax.

Click to read more...

Foreign Office lawyer says Iraq war was illegal

London Times

The most senior Foreign Office lawyer at the time of the invasion of Iraq said today that he had considered the Iraq war to be illegal because it had not been authorised by the United Nations.

In potentially explosive testimony to the Iraq Inquiry, Sir Michael Wood also told how Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, had told the Americans he was "entirely comfortable" to be making the case for military action a year before the invasion eventually took place.

That runs counter to Mr Straw's own evidence to the inquiry last week, when he insisted that he had only "very reluctantly" supported the war.

Both Sir Michael, the former chief legal adviser at the FCO, and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, testified to Sir John Chilcot's panel of inquiry, which has already heard from a succession of senior officials and ministers and is due to quiz Tony Blair on Friday.

Ms Wilmshurst became the only British civil servant to quit over the war when she resigned days before the first attacks on Iraq, telling her superiors that an invasion without UN sanction would be a "crime of aggression".

Click to read more...

Obama Administration's Use of Drones Responsible for Increase in Civilian Deaths

The Obama administration is ramping up its use of drone unmanned aircraft to execute targeted killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps in other locations - and, in the process, killing civilians along with insurgents, and risking the compromise of US moral imperatives and foreign policy goals.

That's the view of a leading civil rights organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), calling on the president to lift the curtain of secrecy and level with the American people.

The ACLU is asking the government to release basic information about its use of drones to execute targeted killings. The group believes that "the use and proliferation of this tactic must be the subject of public scrutiny and debate." The strikes are reportedly being carried out both by US military forces and the CIA.

The request is seeking information, including who may be targeted and the geographical limits on where drone strikes may occur. It wants information about the scope and consequences of drone strikes, including a breakdown of the total number of people killed, the civilian casualty toll, the number of people killed who were fighters with the Afghan Taliban or al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or who had some other terror-related affiliation or status.

"The public has been kept in the dark and is therefore unable to assess the wisdom or legality of the strikes," the group claimed.

Click to read more...

Taliban 'buy out' fund to cost hundreds of millions

LONDON // An international fund amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars will be established this week in a bid to buy off Taliban leaders in Afghanistan.

An outline for the strategy, which will be principally funded by the US, Japan and Britain, was reported to have been drafted at a meeting in Abu Dhabi two weeks ago of top-level diplomats from 20 countries. 

The announcement of the establishment of the Peace and Reintegration Trust Fund, which will seek to “split the Taliban” by luring into mainstream politics any leaders not connected to, or ready to break their links with, al Qa’eda is due to be announced at the end of Thursday’s summit on Afghanistan in London.

Some will see the plan as the most public acknowledgement yet that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan. 

But, assuming the scheme is approved on Thursday, it will represent the most comprehensive political attempt to draw the sting out of the insurgency since the fall of the regime in 2001.

According to The Times yesterday, the draft communiqué to be issued at the end of the conference also foresees Afghan troops “taking the lead and conducting the majority of operations in the insecure areas of Afghanistan within three years and taking responsibility for physical security within five years”.

Click to read more...

The Shout Heard ’Round the World on Feb 19!

1,000 Architects & Engineers Call for a Real 9/11 Investigation
Press Conference and Dinner February 19, 2010

AE911Truth will hold a press conference on Friday, February 19, at 11:00 AM at the Marines Memorial Club and Hotel in San Francisco. We will announce and honor the milestone of our achievement of obtaining 1,000 architects and engineers (A/E's) petitioning for a real investigation into the destruction of the 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers.

Invitations are being sent to more than 400 local AIA members, to many local, national, and international media outlets, and to more than 15,000 AE911Truth.org petition signers and supporters from around the world.

The press conference will include a large-screen scrolling display of all 1,000 A/E's; statements by Richard Gage, AIA, founder of AE911Truth and several petition signers; and a short ten-minute presentation of "9/11: Blueprint for Truth" – the explosive evidence for the engineered destruction of the 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers. A press kit including the AE911Truth DVD will be made available to all attendees.

We will also be inviting various leaders in the 9/11 Truth movement to this milestone event. We are working with We Are Change and other 9/11 Truth organizations to deliver hardcopy petition press kits to every member of Congress.

Click to read more...

Evidence on Kelly death sealed for 70 years!

The official heading an inquiry into the suspicious death of a British weapons inspector who cast doubts on the main argument for invading Iraq has secretly ordered all evidence locked up for 70 years.

Lord Hutton, who chaired the 2003 inquiry, which controversially concluded that Doctor David Kelly's death has been a suicide, secured a 70-year seal on all major evidence, including medical records — none of which had ever been made public.

The unprecedented move was revealed last week, sparking fresh uproar and allegations of a government cover-up — considering that by 2073 anyone with the least interest, or stake, in the case will probably be long dead.

Kelly was mysteriously found dead in the woods near his Oxfordshire home in July 2003, just days after his name was leaked as the source of a pre-war BBC documentary that undermined the now-notorious 45-minute dossier as highly exaggerated.

The clandestine restrictions came to light when a group of 13 doctors challenging the Hutton verdict received a letter from the Oxfordshire County Council in answer to their calls to see the postmortem file.

"It fits in with the subversion of due process we have seen for six years. It is extraordinary…I am shocked but not surprised by this," the Daily Mail quoted Dr. David Halpin, one of the group of 13 doctors, as saying on Saturday.

Click to read more ...

Probe into NY Fed over AIG disclosure

The New York Federal Reserve is being investigated by Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the troubled assets relief programme, over its disclosure of documents relating to the bail-out of AIG and its counterparties.

In a statement submitted to the House oversight committee, Mr Barofsky said his team is examining whether the New York Fed improperly withheld information about the AIG bail-out from the Securities and Exchange Commission and his office.

Separately, congressional investigators were on Monday finishing their review of thousands of e-mails and other documents prior to an appearance on Capitol Hill on Wednesday by Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary and former New York Fed president.

E-mails between New York Fed officials, some of which have been obtained by the Financial Times, show the institution trying to keep private details of the $27.1bn in payments to AIG counterparties, arguing that specifics did not have to be disclosed to the SEC.

“They conspire about how they can disclose less so that they can have less questions,” said Darrell Issa, the senior Republican on the committee, who has spearheaded the congressional investigation. “One can say, well, who was harmed? Any time you don’t want the public to see you have to assume that what was harmed was a potential better decision.”

The New York Fed said it “has and will continue to co-operate fully” with Mr Barofsky’s office. The Treasury declined to comment.

Click to read more...