Eideard

Taking fingerprints of one of the dead attackers
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The top U.S. military officer accused Pakistani intelligence on Thursday of backing violence against U.S. targets including the American Embassy in Afghanistan…

Admiral Mike Mullen said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) played a role in the September 13 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, supporting militants known as the Haqqani network. That network, he said, is a “veritable arm” of the ISI.

The embassy attack was the latest in a series of violent episodes that were a blow to U.S. efforts to bring the Afghan war to a peaceful close.

Pakistan’s interior minister rejected the U.S. accusations of Islamabad’s links to the Haqqanis, one of the most feared insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan. The minister, Rehman Malik, also warned against a unilateral U.S. ground attack on the Haqqanis, who are based in Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal territories…

A complete break between the United States and Pakistan — sometimes friends, often adversaries — seems unlikely, if only because the United States depends on Pakistan as a route to supply U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and as a base for unmanned U.S. drones…

But support in the U.S. Congress for curbing assistance or making conditions on aid more stringent is rising rapidly. And Mullen, CIA Director David Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have all met their Pakistani counterparts in recent days to demand Islamabad rein in militants.

Bruce Riedel, a former top CIA analyst with close ties to the Obama White House, which he once advised, told Reuters administration officials have told him that militants who attacked the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul on September 13 phoned individuals connected with the ISI before and during the attack.

Following the attacks, Riedel said, U.S. security forces collected cell phones the attackers had used. These are expected to provide further evidence linking militants to ISI.

RTFA for beaucoup details.

Yes, I know all the history and have my own opinion about how things got this way. But, between no legal structure encompassing tribal bandits and apparently little or no inclination to divest backwards elements inside portions of the military and ISI, Pakistan will remain a well-armed and therefore more dangerous variation on the gangster turf which lies between Afghanistan and India. That adds nothing to the future of the people of Pakistan.

Muslims and dark-skin folks / Proven Euro genes / White businessmen

Billing it as a way to end the one-size-fits-all approach to airport security, the International Air Transport Association on Tuesday unveiled a mock-up of what it called the “Checkpoint of the Future.”

Instead of a single screening procedure applied to all fliers, the group envisions that passengers would be divided into risk categories based on the information available about them. Otherwise called profiling.

They would then be directed to one of three lanes: “Known Traveler,” “Normal” and “Enhanced Security.”

The first — and quickest — lane would only be available to fliers who have registered and undergone background checks with their governments.

Normal screening in the second lane would apply to the majority of travelers. New technology would allow them to walk through without having to take off their clothes or shoes, or unpack their bags.

Passengers for whom less information is available, who are randomly selected or who are deemed to be an “elevated risk,” would receive more screening in the third lane.

The system would focus resources on passengers who pose the greatest threat while reducing the hassle for the vast majority of travelers who are low risk, said the International Air Transport Association, which represents the world’s major airlines…

“That means moving from a system that looks for bad objects to one that can find bad people,” Bisignani said.

Should be immensely popular with patriotic American bigots – until the first time TSA/FBI/NSA sends them through the “wrong” corridor.

If and when it becomes a system approved by all the Right politicians, they plan on adding a fourth doorway which sends you directly to Gitmo – or a gas chamber.

Within months after the Bush administration relaxed limits on domestic-intelligence gathering in late 2008, the F.B.I. assessed thousands of people and groups in search of evidence that they might be criminals or terrorists, a newly disclosed Justice Department document shows.

In a vast majority of those cases, F.B.I. agents did not find suspicious information that could justify more intensive investigations. The New York Times obtained the data, which the F.B.I. had tried to keep secret, after filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act…

The statistics shed new light on the F.B.I.’s activities in the post-Sept. 11 era, as the bureau’s focus has shifted from investigating crimes to trying to detect and disrupt potential criminal and terrorist activity.

It is not clear, though, whether any charges resulted from the inquiries. And because the F.B.I. provided no comparable figures for a period before the rules change, it is impossible to determine whether the numbers represent an increase in investigations.

Still, privacy advocates contend that the large number of assessments that turned up no sign of wrongdoing show that the rules adopted by the Bush administration have created too low a threshold for starting an inquiry. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has left those rules in place.

Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that the volume of fruitless assessments showed that the Obama administration should tighten the rules.

“These are investigations against completely innocent people that are now bound up within the F.B.I.’s intelligence system forever,” Mr. German said. “Is that the best way for the F.B.I. to use its resources?”

RTFA for the sort of details we have come to expect from our government – whether that government is Republican or Democrat. Padding out the spy bureaucracy may enable bigger budgets; but, I doubt if there is any bona fide proof of increased security or safety.

If anything, diminishing capacity of terror organizations around the world is doing more to protect American citizens than FBI agents responding to anonymous phone calls about someone secretly wearing a turban in his bathroom at night.

A concerned citizen from Orlando, Fla., called in the Orange County Bomb Squad after seeing a suspicious object on the road.

The suspicious object in question? A toy pony.

That’s right, a child’s toy pony. The bomb squad promptly dashed to the scene, inspected the pony and then did the sensible thing: They blew it to kingdom come…

“We’re just not taking any chances at all. We’re just making sure everything is fine,” an officer said. Yeah! Why would there be a toy animal there anyway? Well, it’s only 100 yards from an elementary school, so … probably because of that.

And this cost the taxpayers of Orange County how much?

Leading progress towards peace in Yemen

At first, the news from Yemen on May 25 sounded like a modest victory in the campaign against terrorists: an airstrike had hit a group suspected of being operatives for Al Qaeda in the remote desert of Marib Province, birthplace of the legendary queen of Sheba.

But the strike, it turned out, had also killed the province’s deputy governor, a respected local leader who Yemeni officials said had been trying to talk Qaeda members into giving up their fight. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, accepted responsibility for the death and paid blood money to the offended tribes.

The strike, though, was not the work of Mr. Saleh’s decrepit Soviet-era air force. It was a secret mission by the United States military, according to American officials, at least the fourth such assault on Al Qaeda in the arid mountains and deserts of Yemen since December.

The attack offered a glimpse of the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

RTFA. Long. In depth. Just the beginning of coverage of the war our government wishes to keep secret.

Plus, plausible deniability for the White House.

The next time you pull into a parking garage and the attendant gives you the once-over, he or she may be taking note of more than just the shiny rear spoiler on your new car. As part of a new government initiative, parking lot attendants and other transportation workers are being trained as the next line of defense in the fight against terrorism.

The First Observer program was introduced to parking lot professionals at a Las Vegas, Nevada, convention in May, days after a vendor in New York’s Times Square spotted a suspicious vehicle and helped thwart what could have been a deadly terrorist attack…

“No matter how banal it seems, if something seems different to you or suspicious, we want you to report it,” said Jeff Beatty, a former CIA and FBI agent.

And our government will tell you what is suspicious!

Beatty led the First Observer program’s pilot training session Monday in Atlanta, Georgia. He and a team of Transportation Security Administration officials trained some 60 parking lot officials and representatives on how to spot suspicious vehicles carrying hazardous materials or other activity that may signal the planning phases of a terrorist attack…

The training is part of a $15.5 million program funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and administered by the Transportation Security Administration…

“We like who you are as parking lot professionals. We want you to ‘observe, assess and report.’ “

Har!

What stinks is when paranoia becomes institutionalized. When peering under your bed at night becomes part of education, law and policing.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The prime ministers of India and Pakistan agreed today to resume peace talks between their top diplomats and work toward rebuilding trust shattered by the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks that New Delhi blamed on Pakistani militants.

Officials said India’s Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart, Yousuf Raza Gilani, agreed on the need to normalise relations dogged by more than six decades of hostility since both gained independence from Britain. They deputed their foreign ministers to meet at a later date to discuss the resumption of a wide-ranging formal dialogue that began in 2004, but was suspended after the Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

The two prime ministers met for more than an hour in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, on the sidelines of a summit of south Asian leaders. It was their first meeting in eight months…

The two prime ministers “agreed that relations between the two countries should be normalised and the channels of contact should work effectively to enlarge the constituency of peace in both countries,” Nirupama Rao told reporters…

India and Pakistan have been under pressure to resume their peace dialogue – which eased historic tensions although it made little headway on the key issue of Kashmir, which they both claim in entirety and have fought two of their three wars over since gaining independence in 1947.

Overdue. I always say that. I always mean it. RTFA.

Indian opposition parties disrupted parliament, asking questions about a report alleging the government secretly tapped the phones of top politicians. Both the upper and lower houses were adjourned amid angry scenes. India’s home minister denies the allegations.

But senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader LK Advani has called for a response from the the prime minister.

Outlook magazine reported that the mobile phones of politicians, including a federal minister, were being tapped. It claimed that the phones were tapped by the government using equipment from a federal intelligence agency…

The opposition is also calling for a joint parliamentary committee probe into the matter…

“In the garb of tracking terror, the government is tracking politicians and even their cabinet ministers,” senior BJP leader Rajiv Pratap Rudy said before the session began…

Outlook magazine said that the phones of a federal minister, Sharad Pawar, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, Communist leader Prakash Karat and a senior politician of the ruling Congress party Digvijay Singh had been tapped.

Has someone in the Indian bureaucracy gone completely bonkers and hired Dick Cheney to guide security policy? Or has the “American” disease of fear and terror simply continued its path of infection around the world?

According to figures made available to DawnNews by senior Pakistani military officials, at least 30 thousand Pakistanis have lost their lives or were injured since 2003.

More Pakistanis have lost their life in the ongoing war against terror compared to two full scale wars against India in 1965 and 1971.

The casualties include death or injures to at least 22 thousand civilians and policemen in various acts of terror or suicide bombings.

Pakistan’s military, which launched operations against the militants in the tribal areas, suffered at least 8 thousand casualties, including at least 23 hundred officers and soldiers who lost their lives.

What is there to say?

Ralph D. Fertig, a 79-year-old civil rights lawyer, says he would like to help a militant Kurdish group in Turkey find peaceful ways to achieve its goals. But he fears prosecution under a law banning even benign assistance to groups said to engage in terrorism.

The Supreme Court will soon hear Mr. Fertig’s challenge to the law, in a case that pits First Amendment freedoms against the government’s efforts to combat terrorism. The case represents the court’s first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks — and its first chance to test the constitutionality of a provision of the USA Patriot Act.

Opponents of the law, which bans providing “material support” to terrorist organizations, say it violates American values in ways that would have made Senator Joseph R. McCarthy blush during the witch hunts of the cold war.

The government defends the law, under which it has secured many of its terrorism convictions in the last decade, as an important tool that takes account of the slippery nature of the nation’s modern enemies.

The law takes a comprehensive approach to its ban on aid to terrorist groups, prohibiting not only providing cash, weapons and the like but also four more ambiguous sorts of help — “training,” “personnel,” “expert advice or assistance” and “service…”

Douglas N. Letter, a Justice Department lawyer, said in a 2007 appeals court argument in the case…it would be a crime for a lawyer to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a designated organization in Mr. Fertig’s case or “to be assisting terrorist organizations in making presentations to the U.N., to television, to a newspaper.”

Speech, the Press, thought must all be evaluated according to some sacrosanct standard of patriotism before it is to be “free” in the home of the unbrave. These are the same sort of rules a small band of rebels opposed in 1775. And won.

Most predictably, looking around the blogosphere, today – rightwing nutballs, religious reactionaries, all are pissed off about the Times covering Fertig’s defense of the Bill of Rights. They have become so sucked up by their fear of terrorists, their usual blather about liberty has been completely cast off.