Report: NSA's Warrantless Spying Resurrects Banned 'Total Information Awareness' Project

Total Information Awareness -- the all-seeing terrorist spotting algorithm-meets-the-mother-of-all-databases that was ostensibly de-funded by Congress in 2003, never actually died, and was largely rebuilt in secret by the NSA, according to the Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman.

In a fantastic story Monday, Gorman pulls together threads and lays out what many have suspected and alleged in lawsuits -- the NSA is collecting and sifting through immense amounts of data about who Americans talk to, what they are interested in, how they spend their money and where they travel in order to find secret terrorism cells inside America.

The NSA is engaged in a widespread mining of so-called transactional data -- domestic telephone records, credit card purchases, travel data, international financial data, internet searches, subject lines and headers of emails -- pulling in immense data about Americans and foreigners, which it then uses to find particular targets -- or even, according to Gorman -- to decide what cities to target for blanket surveillance.

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address.

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Soldiers in Iraq Given Untested H2O

U.S. soldiers at a military base in Iraq were provided with treated but untested wastewater for nearly two years by KBR, the giant government contractor, and may have suffered health problems as a result, according to a report released yesterday by the Pentagon's inspector general.

The inspector general said that from March 2004 to February 2006, KBR inappropriately distributed chlorinated wastewater to 5,000 U.S. troops at Camp Q-West, located at the Qayyarah West airfield about 180 miles north of Baghdad. The wastewater had been processed by a reverse-osmosis purification system and treated with chlorine before being distributed to showers and latrines on the base.

The report said that from October 2005 to June 2006, sick-call records showed 38 reported illnesses that "an attending medical official said could be attributed to water, such as skin abscesses, cellulites, skin infections and diarrhea." The report said it was impossible to definitively link the treated water to all the illnesses.

At a handful of other bases that were audited, both KBR and the military failed to perform required water-quality checks, the report stated. At Camp Ar Ramadi in Anbar province, auditors found that of 251 soldiers interviewed, 44 percent reported water provided for personal hygiene that was discolored or had an unusual odor. Four percent of the soldiers said they got sick from the water.

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New Camera Brings About Vast Improvement for Surveillance

Researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville have developed a wide-angle camera that will be able to provide security forces with the ability to monitor large areas through high-resolution images taken from a satellite or an airborne craft, according to researcher David Pollock.

It was Pollock who first discovered that if you point a large number of lenses toward a common point, and then make a small correction on each of the lenses, you provide a camera with capabilities that far surpass existing technologies.

"If you look at high-resolution images taken by satellite or aircraft, the field-of-view in those photographs is tiny," he said. "This camera provides anyone with the ability to view the entire scene and, simultaneously, zoom in closely on a certain area with very high resolution at real time."

Flying at an altitude of 15,000 feet, a developmental version of the camera can see a 21-kilometer diameter area with a resolution of 0.3 meters. As a comparison, most Google Earth imagery is 1 meter.

The optics systems patent shared by UAHuntsville and Sony Corp. provides this unique coverage and resolution, according to Pollock.

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Poland Uses Coercion Before Agreeing to Missile Shield

President Bush promised yesterday to upgrade Poland's antiquated armed forces with a plan to be developed before he leaves office in January as he sought to secure an agreement that would allow the United States to establish an antimissile system in Eastern Europe despite vigorous Russian objections.

Meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at the White House, Bush appeared to boost efforts to get his missile defense program on track in the face of deep skepticism in Warsaw. Tusk came to office in November far cooler to the idea of stationing U.S. interceptors on Polish soil than his predecessor, and until recently talks had bogged down.

Poland has maintained that its air defenses must be upgraded before it accepts any U.S. system, particularly given Russian threats to target the country if American interceptors are based there. Bush implicitly linked the two issues yesterday. "Mr. Prime Minister, before my watch is over, we will have assessed those needs and come up with a modernization plan that's concrete and tangible," he told Tusk in front of television cameras in the Oval Office.

Tusk interpreted that as a deal, saying that he and Bush "came to a conclusion . . . that the missile defense system and the modernization of the Polish forces . . . come in one package.

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U.S. Envoy Admits Role in Aldo Moro Killing

An American envoy has claimed that he played a critical role in the fate of Aldo Moro, the former Italian prime minister who was murdered by terrorists in 1978.

Steve Pieczenik, an international crisis manager and hostage negotiator in the State Department, said that Moro had been "sacrificed" for the "stability" of Italy.

In a new book called We Killed Aldo Moro, Mr Pieczenik said he was sent to Italy by President Jimmy Carter on the day that Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, a far-Left terrorist group.

Moro, who had been prime minister for a total of more than five years between 1963 and 1976, was snatched at gunpoint from his car in Rome.

He had been heading to parliament for a crucial vote on a ground-breaking alliance he had proposed between the Christian Democrat Party and the Italian Communist Party.

The alliance enraged both sides of the political spectrum in Italy, and also upset both Moscow and Washington.

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The Federal Reserve's Rescue has Failed!

The verdict is in. The Fed's emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed.

Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter.

The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into the safest pockets of the US credit universe.

It is hard to imagine a more plain-vanilla outfit than the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages bridges, bus terminals, and airports.

The authority is a public body, backed by the two states. Yet it had to pay 20pc rates in February after the near closure of the $330bn (£166m) "term-auction" market. It had originally expected to pay 4.3pc, but that was aeons ago in financial time.

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I Was Kidnapped by the CIA

For hours, the words come pouring out of Abu Omar as he describes his years of torture at the hands of Egypt's security services. Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice raped.

He mentions, almost casually, the hearing loss in his left ear from the beatings, and how he still wakes up at night screaming, takes tranquilizers, finds it hard to concentrate, and has unspecified "problems with my wife at home." He is, in short, a broken man.

There is nothing particularly unusual about Abu Omar's story. Torture is a standard investigative technique of Egypt's intelligence services and police, as the State Department and human rights organizations have documented myriad times over the years. What is somewhat unusual is that Abu Omar ended up inside Egypt's torture chambers courtesy of the United States, via an "extraordinary rendition"—in this case, a spectacular daylight kidnapping by the Central Intelligence Agency on the streets of Milan, Italy.

First introduced during the Clinton administration, extraordinary renditions—in which suspected terrorists are turned over to countries known to use torture, usually for the purpose of extracting information from them—have been one of the cia's most controversial tools in the war on terror.

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U.S. Prisons: Big Business & A New Form of Slavery

Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million - mostly Black and Hispanic - are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don't have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don't like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, "no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens." The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world's prison population, but only 5% of the world's people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates.

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House Judiciary Committee Files Suit to Compel Former White House Council & Chief of Staff to Cooperate

By Mike Lillis

In a move to test the John Adams’ statement that the nation should be one of laws and not men, the House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit (pdf) Monday against two White House aides—one current and one former—who have refused to cooperate with a congressional investigation surrounding the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The Bush administration, citing executive privilege, has said that both Harriet Miers, former White House council, and chief of staff Josh Bolten are immune to congressional requests urging cooperation in the investigation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a statement Monday rejecting that claim.

Congress, on behalf of the American people, is clearly entitled to the information that is being sought – it involves the politicization of the Justice Department and law enforcement, not national security information nor communications with the President. The President has no grounds to assert executive privilege.

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Report: Blackwater Cost Government Millions by Saying Their Employees Weren't Their Employees

Super-private security firm Blackwater has managed to stay out of the headlines for the last couple of months. But that might be about to change.

House oversight committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) released a memorandum this afternoon to committee  members that Blackwater is evading  tax and employment laws by deceptively labeling its armed guard employees as "independent contractors." In March 2007, the committee found that Blackwater had cost the IRS $50 million by improperly labeling its employees. Today’s report found the following:

- Blackwater has received $1.25 billion in federal contracts since 2000. Despite this haul, they have asked for- and gotten- special privileges for the government as a "small business." The State Dept. has awarded Blackwater $144 million in small business set asides since 2000. The reason is that when armed employees are counted as independent contractors their staff is considered small enough for the designation.

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N.Y. Times: New York Governor Linked to Prostitution

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who gained national prominence relentlessly pursuing Wall Street wrongdoing, has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a law enforcement official and a person briefed on the investigation.

The wiretap captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a hotel room, according to an affidavit filed in federal court in Manhattan. The person briefed on the case and the law enforcement official identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.

Mr. Spitzer, a first term Democrat, today made a brief public appearance during which he apologized for his behavior, and described it as a “private matter.” He did not address his political future.

“I have acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong,” said Mr. Spitzer, who appeared with his wife Silda at his Manhattan office. “I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promised better.”

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U.S. Economy Could Fall Because of Wars!!!

The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show.

In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the "burn" rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with "best-case" and "realistic-moderate" scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion -- or more -- by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.

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Is U.S.Taxpayer Money Funding Iraq Reconstruction?

The Democratic chairman and Republican former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee have asked government auditors to determine what Iraq is doing with the billions of dollars in oil revenue it generates.

"We believe that it has been overwhelmingly U.S. taxpayer money that has funded Iraq reconstruction over the last five years, despite Iraq earnings billions of dollars in oil revenue over that time period that have ended up in non-Iraqi banks," Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John Warner, R-Va., said Friday in a letter to the head of the Government Accountability Office.

"At the same time, our conversations with both Iraqis and Americans during our frequent visits to Iraq, as well as official government and unofficial media reports, have convinced us that the Iraqi government is not doing nearly enough to provide essential services and improve the quality of life of its citizens," they said.

The senators estimated that Iraq will realize "at least $100 billion in oil revenues in 2007 and 2008."

They asked specifically that the GAO determine:

- Estimated oil revenues from 2003-2007.

- How much the U.S. and Iraq each have spent annually during that period on training, equipping and supporting Iraqi security forces as well as reconstruction, governance and economic development.

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Israel Defies Freeze on Illegal Settlements

Israel approved plans yesterday to build 330 new homes in a suburban West Bank settlement north of Jerusalem. The move was denounced by the Palestinian Authority as "a slap in the face of the peace process" and called on the Quartet of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia to "act to get Israel to revoke the decision".

Saeb Erakat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator, said: "This is a provocative action by Israel that demonstrates its intention of further strengthening illegal occupation and colonisation of Palestinian territory."

He branded the timing of the decision as "outrageous" because it came on the eve of American-Israeli-Palestinian talks to assess the two sides' performance under the international road map for peace. Expansion of settlements is supposed to be frozen under the terms of the peace process. The settlements, illegal under international law, already account for nearly 40 per cent of West Bank territory. The UN warned recently that they are making the achie-vement of an eventual two state solution elusive.

Israel, which denied the plan was being launched in retaliation for Thursday's massacre of eight students in a Jerusalem yeshiva seminary, defended the decision, despite earlier undertakings to stop building on the West Bank.

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U.S. Fails a Fourth Time to Hit Al-Qa'ida Suspect in Somalia

A U.S. missile strike in Somalia, aimed at a man described by the Pentagon as a "known al-Qa'ida terrorist", succeeded only in hurting six civilians and killing three cows and a calf, the IoS has learned.

At least one Tomahawk missile was believed to have been fired from a US submarine off the Somali coast on Monday. It hit a shack in the small town of Dobley, four miles from the Kenyan border. Dobley is one of several towns and villages in southern Somalia that are now under the administration of Islamists connected to the former Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which briefly controlled most of southern and central Somalia in 2006.

The attack was the fourth known strike by the US inside Somalia since it backed Ethiopia's invasion of the country in December 2006. All have been aimed at men Washington believes to be responsible for terrorist attacks in East Africa. None has been successful.

Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the target of Monday's attack, is wanted in connection with the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which killed at least 224 people.

He is also believed to be connected to the suicide bombing of a Mombasa hotel in 2002, which killed 13 people, and a failed attack on an Israeli airliner.

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Japan IDs All Its Citizens

"While RealID in the US is a threat whose implementation is a ways in the future, the Japanese long ago implemented something similar; and there has been very little complaint raised about it. The Juki Net (Residents Registration Network — link in Japanese) has been silently developing since 1992. The system involves an 11-digit unique number to identify every citizen in Japan, and the data stored against that ID covers name, address, date of birth, and gender.

Many Japanese citizens seem to be oblivious that such a government-run network exists. Juki Net had a spotlight shone on it recently because a number of citizens around the country sued against it, citing concerns of information misuse or leakage.

And while an Osaka court ruled against the system, the Japanese Supreme Court has just ruled it is not unconstitutional, on the grounds that the data will be used in a bona-fide manner and there's no risk of leakage. While there is a longstanding registration system for us foreigners in Japan, what astonishes me is how the government can secretly implement such a system for its citizens, and how little concern the media and Japanese citizens in general display about the privacy implications."

Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the AP found. For example, the head of a group representing major California suppliers said the public "doesn't know how to interpret the information" and might be unduly alarmed.

How do the drugs get into the water?

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet.

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Pentagon Stiffs Soldiers out of Education Benefits

Members of the Minnesota National Guard returning from the longest tour of any ground combat unit in Iraq were surprised to learn that they were not eligible for the education benefits that they expected to receive under the G.I. Bill.

The Minnesota National Guard's First Brigade Combat Team of the 34th Infantry Division was deployed in Iraq for 22 months, 125 days longer than they had originally been scheduled for. This involuntary extension, a part of President Bush's "surge" strategy for the war, made the 2,600 soldiers' tour of duty the longest of any ground combat unit in Iraq. Recently, however, 1,162 of the soldiers learned that because their orders were written for 729 days instead of 730 (as the other 1,338 soldiers' orders were), they were not eligible for increased education benefits.

Under the Montgomery G.I. Bill of 1984, soldiers who serve for less than 730 days are entitled to Reserved Education Assistance program payments for as long as they are still enrolled in military service. Soldiers who serve for 730 days or more, however, have the option to pay $1,200 in exchange for a $234 per month higher payment. Perhaps more significantly, this benefit can be used for up to ten years after military service ends.

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Faber: Bernanke Will Destroy the Dollar

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will "destroy the U.S. dollar" by cutting interest rates, investor Marc Faber said.

Bernanke's reduction in the target rate for overnight loans between banks to 3 percent has spurred a rout in U.S. stocks and gains in oil and gold prices, said Faber, the Gloom, Boom & Doom report publisher who told investors to buy gold at the start of its six-year rally.

The U.S. is now in a ``de-leveraging'' phase where banks make fewer loans, stunting economic growth, Faber said. He estimated that a U.S. recession began two or three months ago.

``In the U.S., they pursue essentially economic policies that target consumption, which in my opinion is misguided,'' Faber said in an interview with Bloomberg Television from Chicago. ``They should pursue economic policies that stimulate capital investment and capital formation.''

The Standard & Poor's 500 Index is down 9.7 percent since Sept. 18, when the Fed began cutting the fed funds target to 3 percent from 5.25 percent. The dollar has lost 9.2 percent of its value versus the euro, crude oil futures gained more than 29 percent and gold added 34 percent during that time.

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Secret Police Release Lawyer After 2 Day Detention

Editor's note: Is the NWO planning to emulate the Chinese model and apply it to the American people?

A prominent Chinese human rights lawyer was released Saturday after two days of secret police detention.

Teng Biao, 34, said police questioned him about articles calling for an independent and fair legal system that he has written for his blog and overseas Chinese Web sites. China's Communist Party controls the judiciary, which routinely imprisons dissidents after convicting them in secret trials.

"I was released around 1:40 this afternoon, and they put me down at a place near my home," Teng said in a telephone interview. "The police were from the Beijing Public Security Bureau, but they don't allow me to tell any more details."

Teng has defended dissidents and been an outspoken critic of human rights abuses in China, especially as international scrutiny has increased ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games, which open here Aug. 8.

Witnesses said Teng was forced into a black Jetta without license plates after he had driven home Thursday evening, according to his wife, who reported him missing that night.

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