A turbaned Hassan Turabi sinks back into a large, plush sitting-room sofa, his stockinged feet barely touching the floor.
Itâs hard to comprehend that this aging former law professor with a chipmunk grin is the same man condemned by Western leaders as a terrorism-loving extremist and jailed repeatedly by Sudanese dictators he once helped empower.
"Iâm an old man," the white-bearded Turabi, fresh out of his latest stint in prison, says with unconvincing modesty.
But behind the glinting teeth and rectangular spectacles is one of Africaâs most influential Islamists, a man who has arguably had more impact on Sudan than anyone else.
Nicknamed "The Fox" at home and "The Pope of Terrorism" abroad, Turabi is climbing his way back onto Sudanâs political stage, forging an opposition alliance, preparing candidates for the next election and criticizing the recently formed unity government as a failure.
Insiders in the Sudanese capital predict, some with a touch of dread, that even at 73, Turabi may have one more act to play out in his career.
"Heâs trying to make a comeback," said Edward Ladu Terso, an editor at the Khartoum Monitor, one of Sudanâs few independent newspapers. "Turabi is addicted to power."
Since jumping into politics in the 1960s, Turabi has either been whispering in the ear of the president or languishing in a prison cell on charges of treason.
In the 1980s, Turabi helped ignite a 20-year civil war by trying to impose Islamic Sharia law on animists and Christians in southern Sudan. He was a founder of the National Islamic Front, which joined the government of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who seized power in a 1989 coup. As the power behind the throne, Turabi turned Sudan into a haven for militants, opening borders to terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal.
Turabiâs hand is even seen in the conflict in the western region of Darfur, where the Muslim scholar has long enjoyed support. A disciple of Turabiâs heads one of the main rebel armies there, the Justice and Equality Movement.
"If you trace everything back, you find Hassan Turabi," said Eltayeb Hag Ateya, director of the Peace Studies Institute at the University of Khartoum. "Turabi is a very dangerous person. Iâm sure the government is worried. Sudan is in a very precarious transition right now. People should expect just about anything."
Sudanese officials are watching Turabiâs latest moves with a mixture of amusement and alarm. One bureaucrat joked privately that he was happy that elections wouldnât take place for four more years because "maybe Turabi will be dead by then."
In a 90-minute interview, Turabi said he was not slowing down. Heâs drafting a new manifesto for his opposition alliance, which includes his once-banned Popular Congress party and former Prime Minister Sadek Mahdiâs Umma Party. The alliance, which is also reaching out to communists and southern rebel parties, is to hold its first conference in Khartoum, the capital, this month.
Repeated prison sentences - Turabi spent 11 of the last 36 years in jail - have done little to silence him. Upon his release in June, Turabi immediately began denouncing the new constitution, which brought some former southern rebels into a coalition government in Khartoum. Heâs once again a regular face on Arab channels, though TV hosts have had a hard time finding guests willing to face off against the sharp-tongued scholar.
Turabi is a master of telling an audience what it wants to hear. During a recent interview with the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al Awsat, Turabi lambasted Americans as the "worldâs ignoramuses." Speaking to U.S. media a few days later, he stressed democracy, womenâs rights and Americansâ "generosity."
Turabi denies any desire to hold office again and sees his role as guiding an Islamic revolution in Sudan and around the world.
"There is an awakening everywhere, even in America," Turabi told The Times. "Muslims are all awakening to their identity. Spirituality produces energy, and if it is not misguided, itâs like a flood."
Turabi said the Islamic movement he helped create in the 1980s was hijacked and betrayed by military leaders such as Bashir, and politicians such as Second Vice President Ali Osman Mohammed Taha, whom Turabi mentored.
Growing political and economic frustration makes Sudan ripe for dramatic change, he said, adding, "I always prefer evolutions to revolutions."
Born in eastern Sudan in 1932, Turabi got his first taste of revolution in France in the 1960s, where he studied law at the Sorbonne during student protests.
Turabi returned to Khartoum and promptly became spokesman of a rising Islamic tide, which started as an offshoot of Egyptâs Muslim Brotherhood but eventually splintered off under his guidance.
When Gen. Jaafar Numeiri seized power in 1969, Turabi was jailed for seven years. Later Numeiri appointed him attorney general, only to fire him.
In 1986, Turabi joined the democratically elected government of Mahdi, his brother-in-law. But many believe he worked covertly to support the 1989 coup led by Bashir and Taha.
During the peak of Turabiâs power in the 1990s, his hard-core Islamic programs turned Sudan into a global outcast. Al Qaeda moved into Sudan and Bin Laden became one of Turabiâs neighbors; the U.S. added the nation to its list of states that sponsor terrorism. Sudanâs East African neighbors, including Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda, accused it of fostering radical Islam in their backyards, and it was also accused of orchestrating a failed 1995 assassination attempt in Ethiopia against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
In 1999, Bashir fired Turabi from his post as parliament speaker, hoping to repair relations with the United States. "Power corrupts people," Turabi said. Bashir "wanted to be âthe Manâ of Sudan."
Turabi launched his Popular Congress party and made one of his many political U-turns, forming a surprising alliance with southern rebel leader John Garangâs Sudan Peopleâs Liberation Army. Alarmed by the partnership, Bashir had Turabi arrested in 2001.
The crackdown helped ignite a crisis in Darfur, where Turabi is widely admired for welcoming the long-marginalized western tribes into government, particularly as soldiers. When Turabi was jettisoned, thousands of Darfurian soldiers were also ejected from their jobs.
It was a move reminiscent of the dismissal of the Iraqi army after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. "The soldiers went home frustrated and joined the militias," said Ateya of the Peace Studies Institute in Khartoum.
Turabi, who had been released in 2003 but was jailed again in March 2004, is critical of U.S. policy, saying U.S. presidents are ill-informed. President Reagan, he said, once mistook him for a South American, and President Clinton ordered missile strikes against a Khartoum factory that Sudanese officials insist made only aspirin. President Bush, Turabi said, has galvanized Muslims worldwide with the U.S. war on terrorism.
"People from a distance think all Americans are anti-Islamic," Turabi said. "Believe me, almost every single Muslim in the world, though they may not say it, is anti-American."
The struggle, Turabi predicted, would come to a head in Sudan. He said he wouldnât be surprised to find himself behind bars again.
"The government is a little bit frightened to let Turabi go," he said. "If someone is dangerous, you either co-opt him or destroy him."
And despite his insistence that a new crop of Islamic leaders should take over, Turabi leaves the window open for a possible return.
What if followers nominated him as the candidate who could lead them into the future?
"Well," he said, with a smile, "health-wise, I am all right."
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
12/10/2005 01:03 ||
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Hundreds of Muslims in Bangladesh have protested against recent suicide bombings blamed on Islamic militants. The protests were organised by the country's leading Muslim clerics, who have denounced the attacks as against the tenets of Islam. It comes a day after a suicide bomb attack killed at least six people in northern Bangladesh.
At least 25 people have been killed in a series of bombings across Bangladesh this year.
The main demonstration took place at the Baitul Mukarram national mosque in Dhaka after Friday prayers. "Islam prohibits suicide bombings. These bombers are enemies of Islam," the chief cleric, Obaidul Haq, told worshippers. "It is a duty for all Muslims to stand up against those who are killing people in the name of Islam," he said.
So the 'Muslim Street' is rising up against the boomers?
He also urged clerics in the hundreds of thousands of mosques across Bangladesh to mobilise public opinion against the bombers.
Similar protests took place in towns and cities around Bangladesh.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/10/2005 00:00 ||
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So the 'Muslim Street' is rising up against the boomers?
No the mullahs have been given their orders- suppress the internal bombings - suicide attacks against the infidels in their own countries are ok) or face the full wrath of the security apparatus.
Posted by: john ||
12/10/2005 11:56 Comments ||
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DHAKA - Moderate clerics in about half a million mosques across Bangladesh on Friday addressed worshippers by decrying a wave of bomb attacks carried out by suspected Islamic militants that left 23 people dead and 150 injured in less than two weeks, officials said. âThose who are shedding blood of innocent people in the name of establishing Islamic rule are actually bringing shame on Islam,â said Maulana Obaidul Huq, the Khatib (chief cleric) of Baitul Mukarram mosque, the biggest national mosque at the heart of the capital Dhaka.
Riding the tiger isn't as much fun as it looked, huh?
Huq told about eight thousand worshippers, gathered at the mosque for sabbatical Jumma prayers, to help the security forces capture the fugitive leaders of the militants.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/10/2005 00:00 ||
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LONDON - British police involved in the fatal shooting of an innocent Brazilian man, gunned down in July by officers who thought he was a suicide bomber, might face criminal action, an independent watchdog said on Friday.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission said it was likely a report would be sent to Britainâs prosecution service when they complete their investigation into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at a London underground train station. The report is expected to be finished by mid-January.
âWe think we will probably send a report to the Crown Prosecution Service,â an IPCC spokesman told Reuters.
Great thing about liberals and progressives: they're experts at everything after the fact.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/10/2005 00:00 ||
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I'm sure the cops have nothing to worry about. The Crown Prosecutor will go through the motions, of course, for public consumption. OTOH, hopefully this isn't one of those cases where someone has to "take one for the team."
Posted by: Rafael ||
12/10/2005 2:51 Comments ||
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MEXICO CITY - Mexican authorities seized an arsenal of guns and small explosives in a house in the violence-plagued border city of Nuevo Laredo across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas, officials said Friday. Authorities, who had obtained a search warrant, also found a small bag of marijuana, fake Mexican army and federal police uniforms, radio equipment, tear gas, night-vision goggles, military-style boots and helmets, handcuffs, and a baseball cap with the DEA emblazoned across the front, Mexico's Attorney General's office said in a news release.
The Gulf and Sinaloa drug cartels have been waging war in Nuevo Laredo over control of billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States, authorities say. So far this year, 166 people have been killed in the city of 300,000.
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Just reinforces the fact of how important it is to close our border.
And these are only the ones they've caught.
Posted by: Jan ||
12/10/2005 0:30 Comments ||
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[version, unfortunately it's been shortened ]
Mexico said on Thursday it had arrested 10 people, including eight federal agents, in the kidnapping of four suspected drug gang hitmen and the filmed execution of at least one of them.
The case has thrown the spotlight on the often cosy relations between Mexican authorities and organised crime. Drug gangs routinely bribe police, officials and judges to protect them or carry out their dirty work.
Four men, beaten and bruised, were shown on a homemade DVD confessing to being members of the infamous Gulf Cartel of drug traffickers. One of them was then shot in the head.
The Mexican Federales just on the other side of the border are part of the largest gangs in Mexico. They play an important role for the largest drug Cartels, protecting drug smuggling, immigrant smuggling, gun running, document fraud, and if this werenât dangerous enough, they are helping ME types slip into our country.
Check this out, see what mexican police do to their competition. http://tinyurl.com/dc3kt
look for the Mexican Federales link.
Posted by: Red Dog ||
12/10/2005 1:03 Comments ||
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the vid has been shortened
Posted by: Red Dog ||
12/10/2005 1:19 Comments ||
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Thanks RD. Makes me not want to travel outside the USA.
Posted by: Jan ||
12/10/2005 8:39 Comments ||
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I live in Arizona. I have family members and friends who travel to Rocky Point for entertainmnet. They are always trying to get me to go. The last trip I made to Mexico was in the 80's. Why would I want to support the behavior of that country. A wall would suit me just fine. Every day we hear of crimes in Phoenix and guess where the most common name orginates? A rhetorical question.
Posted by: Art ||
12/10/2005 13:07 Comments ||
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another partial vid.
http://tinyurl.com/debsb
Posted by: Red Dog ||
12/10/2005 18:19 Comments ||
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the interior of Mexico, particularly Yucatan - I've found gracious and friendly, with no problems. The peoples of teh border region are there to make money - hustlers of honest and dishonest methods. I have no use for Tijuana (although frequented in my teen and college days), even Ensenada has lost some charm. The tough towns on TX and AZ borders are no place for innocents. I miss traveling in Baja - the place is beautiful, people off the Frontera region, nice, and the dollar is always welcome...just not worth it right now.
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/10/2005 19:31 Comments ||
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SEOUL A long-running disagreement between the United States and South Korea over how to deal with North Korea widened publicly Thursday, when international human rights advocates gathered for a high-profile conference here and called for the overthrow of the North Korean government.
The rights conference, which Washington supports enthusiastically and Seoul has snubbed, has dramatically underscored what appears to be a worsening policy gap between the two governments, even as they proceed with six-party talks with the North. Washington dispatched its special envoy on North Korean human rights and its ambassador to Seoul to attend the three-day forum. But the South Korean foreign minister and its human rights ambassador turned down invitations, offering instead to send a mid-level official only to a conference dinner.
The U.S. enthusiasm for the conference and South Korean coolness followed a sharp and direct exchange between officials of the two governments. On Wednesday, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, Alexander Vershbow, called North Korea a "very repressive" and "criminal regime" that trades in illicit drugs and runs "concentration camps for political prisoners." These charges have been repeatedly stressed recently among hawks in Washington who favor a tough, confrontational policy toward North Korea.
In an unusually quick response, South Korea, which favors a conciliatory approach to the North, articulated what amounted to a public rebuke, apparently fearing that Vershbow's comments might derail the multinational talks on ending the North Korean nuclear weapons program. "Countries need the wisdom to control themselves when making comments on dialogue partners," Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon of South Korea said. His was one of several such comments by officials here.
So Mr. Moon: what exactly do you think the North is like? Are they just wayward cousins or are they running a genocidal, beastly country?
The discord evident here this week indicates further strains in the U.S.-South Korean relationship despite the two governments' repeated official pronouncements of a strong alliance.
The unease stems partly from what experts call a two-track U.S. policy. On one hand, Washington says it remains committed to a negotiated end to the North Korean nuclear weapons programs, while embracing the concerns of South Korea and China, which oppose provoking North Korea. On the other hand, Washington has recently begun stepping up a crackdown on illegal North Korean activities, like drug trafficking, counterfeiting U.S. dollars and proliferating technology for weapons of mass destruction.
To South Korean officials and many experts, Vershbow's statement and an increasingly vocal U.S. criticism of North Korea on human rights are signs that proponents of a tough approach may be gaining an upper hand in Washington.
Good thing, too. The Soviet Union began to fall apart right about the time Ronnie Reagan correctly labeled it an 'evil empire'. George Bush is doing the same thing to the NKors with the same expectation.
Upon arriving for the human rights conference, Jay Lefkowitz, the Bush administration's special envoy on human rights in North Korea, met officials from the South Korean Foreign Ministry and urged them to "link economic aid to improvements in human rights" saying that such a link would help North Korea to open up, the ministry said.
Lefkowitz spoke only two days after President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea called for a "more comprehensive and bigger frame" in addressing the North Korean issue. By that, Roh probably meant that although Seoul is gravely concerned about human rights abuses in the North, antagonizing the North would only hamper negotiations on the more pressing issue of a nuclear threat, make the impoverished country crawl deeper into isolation and worsen the lives of North Koreans. "Openly demanding that North Korea improve its human rights can spawn instability on the Korean Peninsula because the North considers it an attempt to topple its government," said the South Korean vice unification minister, Rhee Bong Jo. "We cannot but give priority to peace and stability."
The current SKor gov't is living in a dream world, the kind inhibited by clueless lefties: the notion that evil people and evil countries will respond to civility, decency and kindness is not just idiocy, but potentially suicidal idiocy.
Given the North Korean track record of reneging on promises, the idea that the United States and South Korea can make a nuclear deal with North Korea and then expect it to improve its human rights record is deeply flawed, forum participants said.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/10/2005 00:00 ||
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Given the North Korean track record of reneging on promises, the idea that the United States and South Korea can make a nuclear deal with North Korea and then expect it to improve its human rights record is deeply flawed, forum participants said.
Flawed? How about unrealistic? Mistaken?
After all, they failed to abide by the previous agreement...
Poland's prime minister announced Saturday he was ordering a "detailed" probe into allegations that the CIA ran secret prisons for terrorist suspects on Polish territory. "I am commissioning a detailed check in all places possible to precisely check if there is any proof that such an event took place in our country," Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said in remarks shown on Poland's TVN24 television channel. "It is necessary to finally close the issue because it could be dangerous to Poland," he said.
Marcinkiewicz's spokesman, Konrad Ciesiolkiewicz, said he didn't know who would carry out the check and had no details of how the government planned to look into the allegations. More than a half-dozen investigations are under way into whether European countries may have hosted secret U.S.-run prisons in which prisoners were tortured, and whether European airports and airspace were used for alleged CIA flights transporting prisoners to countries where torture is practiced. Polish officials have repeatedly denied that their territory was used in this way.
However, Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in remarks published Friday that Poland was the chief CIA detention site in Europe, part of a system of clandestine prisons for interrogating al-Qaida suspects. "Poland was the main base of interrogating prisoners and Romania was more of a hub," Garlasco was quoted as saying in Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. "This is what our sources from the CIA tell us and what is shown from the documents we gathered." Poland's outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski reiterated this week that "there are no such prisons or such prisoners on Polish territory." On November 28, he went further, saying, "there never have been" such jails. The Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog, has also launched an investigation. EU leaders say any member states found to have been involved in such prisons could have their voting rights suspended. In an interview for a Polish newspaper, ex-CIA analyst and State Dept. counterterrorism official Larry Johnson has a theory that after Abu Ghraib, CIA agents do not trust the Bush administration to protect people who simply carry out orders. Hence they are raising alarms about these secret prisons to avoid becoming scapegoats.
Posted by: Rafael ||
12/10/2005 14:33 ||
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Larry Johnson should stay off crack. At Abu Ghraib, they were disobeying orders -- despite their claims to have been ordered, they were unable to produce the names of anyone who gave them orders.
And, honestly, anyone whose resume includes the CIA and State is about as trustworthy as Saddam himself.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
12/10/2005 17:06 Comments ||
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Valerie Plame was an undercover operations officer until outed in the press by Robert Novak. Novak's column was not an isolated attack. It was in fact part of a coordinated, orchestrated smear that we now know includes at least Karl Rove.
The German Foreign Ministry said on Friday it had summoned Iran's ambassador to protest against suggestions by Iran's president that the Holocaust might not have happened and that Israel should be moved to Europe. Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said at a government news conference the decision to deliver a formal protest to Iran's envoy in Berlin was meant to show that Berlin was taking the president's comments very seriously.
The remarks by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at a news conference in the Saudia Arabian city of Mecca, follow his call in October for Israel to be "wiped off the map", which sparked widespread international condemnation. German Jewish leaders called for political sanctions against the Islamic republic over Ahmadinejad's remarks. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.
Hundreds of objectively pro-fascist anti-war protesters, including American Mother Cindy Sheehan, attended an international peace conference in London on Saturday to condemn the Iraq conflict.
Tony Benn, a veteran leftist politician in the governing Labour Party, opened the one-day meeting by calling the war "illegal, immoral and unwinnable."
He said the peace movement wants to see coalition troops withdrawn from Iraq, justice for Palestinians and a ban on any Western military attacks on Iran or Syria. Justice for the Paleos? That pretty much means lots of them killed.
Benn said anti-war sentiment was growing in the United States and Britain, whose armed forces dominate the coalition's military presence in Iraq. Up to 1,500 anti-war protesters and activists gathered for the 10-hour conference, which was organized by the Stop our side of the War Coalition.
The scheduled speakers included Sheehan, who has become a focus of anti-war sentiment in the United States by camping outside the Texas ranch of President George W. Bush; Hasan Zergani Hashim, a spokesperson for Iraq's radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr; and leftist British legislator George Galloway.
In an interview with Sky TV, Galloway urged British forces to leave Iraq. "The only thing the Iraqis want from the British government is to see the backs of their heads as they leave the country," he said. "If occupation is ugly, then resistance will hardly be pretty," he said, in an apparent reference to the deadly attacks that are being conducted by terrorist insurgent groups in Iraq.
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I note with no surprise the kind of company this pathetic nutbag has sunk to keeping. She has gone from pathetic but grieving to self-absorbed jackass to borderline treason, and a disgrace to her son. Yet, someone still pays the bills for her travel......hmmmmmm
Posted by: Just About Enough! ||
12/10/2005 22:39 Comments ||
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The media campaign against U.S. prisons at Guantanamo Bay has expanded to the entertainment industry, as the myth of terrorists being tortured at the facilities there was repeated on an episode of âLaw and Order: Criminal Intent.â Torture of detainees has never been tolerated, and in fact, the Department of Defense has come up with new directives concerning the treatment of prisoners taken during the war on terror.
The accusations have been around ever since some of the first prisoners, including dirty bomb suspect Jose Padilla, were taken into custody. One of the early lessons was that treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue often gave al-Qaeda information on how the United States gathered intelligence, and the terrorist organization adapted well enough to get four suicide teams into the United States to hijack airliners and turn them into weapons.
The attacks have come on two fronts. The first front is a media offensive (of which the âLaw and Order: Criminal Intentâ episode is the latest shot). The second is lawfare (suits filed by the ACLU and other human-rights groups, who seem more concerned with the human rights of al-Qaeda than the human rights of their victims and intended victims).
The first front has involved numerous allegations. Earlier this year, most of the allegations raised against Guantanamo Bay (some of which were repeated on the Senate floor) were found to be unfounded or not inhumane. Investigators found that the protocol used on Mohammed al-Kahtani did not cross the threshold into inhumane treatment or torture. In at least one other instance, one of the incidents occurred after an interrogator was spit on by a detainee (the interrogator proceeded to smear red ink on the detainee). In the three cases where the lines were crossed (out of numerous allegations), corrective action was taken. In one case, where a threat was communicated in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the matter was referred for discipline. In the case of al-Kahtani, the special interrogation plan used extracted valuable intelligence after he resisted the normal interrogation practices. What is also worth noting is that al-Qaeda manuals instruct members to falsely claim torture if they are captured.
The second front is arguably the more dangerous. Whereas the first front has little immediate effect on the battlefield, the second opens the door to blowing methods of gathering intelligence and sources. Giving detainees access to the federal court system opens up the same risks that were shown in the 1990s â al-Qaeda will find out how the United States acquires the intelligence used to prevent attacks. This is a good way to not only get sources killed, but to enable a successful attack that gets innocent people killed.
Like other media outlets, the âLaw and Order: Criminal Intentâ episode also failed to mention what some of the al-Qaeda detainees were up to. For instance, al-Kahtani was slated to be one of the hijackers on September 11, 2001. Another detainee traveled to Pakistan with an Iraqi intelligence agent in an attempt to launch a chemical mortar attack on the American and British embassies in that country. At least a dozen detainees have rejoined the fight (including a Russian detainee responsible for attacks in the Northern Caucasus that killed 45 people in addition to the 94 attackers). Such information gets in the way of portraying the terrorists as torture victims. Ultimately, it will create a hate-hate relationship between the military and Hollywood.
Posted by: ed ||
12/10/2005 19:24 ||
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Ed,
Your last comment is dead on. From what I've been reading the U.S. military now in Iraq generally despises the few "embeds" that have been willing to go out with them due to the left-wing anti-US slant they put on everything they write. It's a really, really, really bad sign when the people who defend a society begin to hold great segments of it in contempt.
As for lawfare, chalk that one up as another pernicious effect of multiculturalism. As I recently read, nothing in a multiculti society can be "left unsaid" because there is no common societal background that imparts the same values and behaviors to all segments. In a multiculti society varying ethnic and religious groups have nothing more than a legal relationship with one another and everything has to be spelled out. Consequently, laws that were passed prior to the multiculti infection can be and are being used to the great detriment of the country as a whole. My opinion is that this will get worse before it gets better and that part of the cure will be the violent suppression of the ACLU.
As I've written here before, I remember hearing that one of the signs that American culture has irretrievably fractured is when an ACLU office somewhere gets firebombed and the local fire department refuses to respond. I really don't think we're too far from that point right now.
There was a book twenty or so years ago that asked what one would say or do if one happened to see police raiding the NYT and hauling editors and writers off to jail. At the time I read the book I thought I would be very alarmed at seeing such a thing. Now, were I to see such an act, I'd fervently cheer the police on in hopes that the NYT staff were finally going to face the charges of treason I believe they fully merit. I'd personally love to see Pinch, Bob Herbert, MoDo, and the rest of their US-hating ilk doing a perp walk to the Black Marias on 42nd St.
Posted by: mac ||
12/10/2005 22:00 Comments ||
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I saw that episode of L&O CI. It sucked and swallowed! Moreso then Usureal. Never again.
The United States told Saudi Arabia more than three years before the September 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden might be targeting civilian airplanes, according to a newly declassified State Department cable.
The June 1998 cable, obtained by George Washington University's National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act, said the United States had no specific information that al Qaeda was planning such an attack, and did not say it might fly planes into buildings.
A copy of the cable, first reported by The New York Times on Friday, was obtained by Reuters. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001, were Saudi nationals.
The cable, from the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh to U.S. government officials, said concerns were based on threats bin Laden had recently made against military aircraft in an interview with U.S. network ABC.
"We could not rule out that a terrorist might take the course of least resistance and turn to a civilian target," the cable said, noting bin Laden had said his group did not differentiate between civilians and the military.
The cable said three U.S. officials had met with Saudi officials at Riyadh's King Khaled International Airport on June 16, 1998, "to discuss the Osama bin Laden threat, and press for enhanced vigilance by Saudi security screeners and police patrols around the airport."
"We noted that while we have no specific information that indicates bin Laden is targeting civilian aircraft, he made a threat during the June 11 ABC News interview against 'military passenger aircraft' in the next 'few weeks,"' the cable said.
The cable is the latest of several signs made public that U.S. officials had concerns, long before the 2001 hijacked airplane attacks on New York and Washington, that al Qaeda might be targeting aircraft.
Others include a highly classified President's Daily Brief report to former President Bill Clinton dated December 4, 1998, which was titled "Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks."
The CIA has also said it had told the Federal Aviation Administration in 1999 that "Osama bin Laden remains interested in targeting U.S. interests including on U.S. territory. He is well prepared to consider kidnappings and hijackings as well as bombings."
On August 6, 2001, President George W. Bush's daily intelligence brief said the FBI had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
It did not warn of an airplane attack on buildings, but said the FBI was conducting about 70 investigations throughout the United States that it considered were related to bin Laden.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
12/10/2005 01:07 ||
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Well then, its a good thing that the Gore commission in 1996 correctly identified the security threat to our nation's airlines and took appropriate and effective counter measures to heighten security.
{Heightened campaign contributions from the airlines in return for doing nothing.}
Five years ago, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman was one of President Bush's arch political rivals. Now many in his party complain that he sounds more like Bush's running mate.
The Connecticut Democrat's strong public defense of Bush's handling of the Iraq war has provided the White House with an invaluable rejoinder to intensifying criticism from other Democrats. In public statements and a newspaper column, Lieberman has argued that Bush has a strategy for victory in Iraq, has dismissed calls for the president to set a timetable for troop withdrawal, and has warned that it would be a "colossal mistake" for the Democratic leadership to "lose its will" at this critical point in the war.
Lieberman's contrarian behavior is not out of character -- he is far more hawkish than the majority of Democrats, and he has vigorously backed invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein from the beginning. But the latest defense of Bush and his stinging salvos at some in his own party have infuriated Democrats, who say he is undercutting their effort to forge a consensus on the war and draw clear distinctions with Republicans before the 2006 election.
Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is troubled by Lieberman's comments, Reid's aides said. "I've talked to Senator Lieberman, and unfortunately he is at a different place on Iraq than the majority of the American people," Reid said yesterday.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters this week that "I completely disagree" with Lieberman. She added: "I believe that we have a responsibility to speak out if we think that the course of action that our country is on is not making the American people safer, making our military stronger and making the region more stable."
No one's stopping you from speaking out, it's the 'responsibility' part that makes us laugh at you.
Liberal political groups, including Democracy for America and MoveOn.org, are considering ways to retaliate, including backing a challenge to Lieberman in next year's Democratic primary. Former Connecticut governor Lowell P. Weicker Jr., an opponent of the war, has vowed to run as an independent, absent a strong Democratic or Republican challenge to Lieberman.
If Lieberman were to lose (it could happen), Bush would have a job somewhere for him the next day.
The administration, on the other hand, can't stop gushing over Lieberman. Vice President Cheney called him "a fine U.S. senator," and Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman contrasted him with his "retreat and defeat" Democratic colleagues. White House spokesman Scott McClellan cited Lieberman, the Democrats' 2000 vice presidential nominee, as an exception in a party otherwise "trying to score political points off the situation."
There have even been rumors that Lieberman is being considered as a replacement for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, if the embattled Pentagon boss retires. Lieberman dismisses the speculation as a "Washington fantasy." But he caused tongues to wag when he had breakfast with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon on Thursday.
Lieberman shrugs off the criticism by fellow Democrats and seems perfectly comfortable with the compliments he has received from Republicans about his views on Iraq. "They're not misquoting me," he said in an interview this week. "I've had this position for a long time -- that we need to finish the job."
But Lieberman, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, acknowledged that his words in support of the administration's war policy carry a different weight. "Somehow it gets more notice when it's coming from a member of the other party," he said.
Lieberman, 63, a former Connecticut attorney general, has long been admired within his party for his independence of thought and his civility, although he is more conservative than most Democrats on cultural issues and foreign policy. He played a leading role in helping pass the Persian Gulf War resolution in January 1991, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and he called for a "final victory" over Hussein.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Lieberman strongly backed Bush's call for a war against terrorism in Afghanistan. Later that year, he was one of 10 lawmakers who signed a letter urging Bush to target Iraq next.
And it wasn't even on Halliburton letterhead. Imagine.
Lieberman reached the peak of his popularity as Al Gore's running mate in 2000. But his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 flopped, in part because he was out of step with most party politicians on the war.
The latest flap began after Lieberman traveled to Iraq last month. He returned to write a Nov. 29 Wall Street Journal column in which he contradicted a core Democratic criticism -- that the administration has no strategy for victory in Iraq. "Yes, we do," Lieberman wrote, brushing aside calls from Democrats and some Republicans for Bush to set a timetable for bringing troops home. "What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory," Lieberman wrote. Bush repeated the statement in a speech meant to bolster sagging public support for the war.
Then, at a Tuesday news conference on Iraq, Lieberman gave his party a tongue-lashing for pressing Bush too forcefully. "History will judge us harshly if we do not stretch across the divide of distrust to join together to complete our mission successfully in Iraq," Lieberman said. "It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."
Many Democrats were appalled by Lieberman's comments, although few were willing to reprimand him publicly. "Senator Lieberman is past the point of being taken seriously in the caucus because everything he does is seen as advancing the national interest his own self-interest, instead of the Democratic interest," said a senior Senate Democratic aide who wouldn't be named because he'd be dead meat if he was, who described discontent in that chamber as "widespread."
The liberal antiwar group MoveOn.org is weighing whether to back a challenger to Lieberman. MoveOn Washington director Tom Matzzie called Weicker "a very attractive candidate" but added that "the easiest way to take out Joe Lieberman would be in a Democratic primary."
Weicker was a Republican when Lieberman ousted him from the Senate in 1988. Weicker is facing some pressure to enter the race as a Democrat but says he is not much happier with that party on Iraq. "The Democratic silence has been deafening on this for the past two years," Weicker said in an interview. "I have no more respect for them." But if Lieberman doesn't begin to distance himself from Bush's war policies, he said, "that's it -- we go to the mat."
Lieberman said the backlash against him deepens a concern that he has harbored for much of his political career: the lack of civility in Washington. In war matters in particular, he said, "politics should stop at the water's edge."
Joe is a Democrat I can respect. Wish I could say that about more Democrats.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/10/2005 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[5 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
"There have even been rumors that Lieberman is being considered as a replacement for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld"
I was thinking this too, but he wouldn't leave his safe position.
Posted by: Jan ||
12/10/2005 0:46 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Weicker has a lot of baggage and Connecticut has a long memory.
#3
Maybe Lieberman should form a new Democratic Party in an attempt to save the Democrats from drowning themselves in complete irrelevance. He could steal the old Firesign Theatre campaign slogan "Not Insane".
#4
"I believe that we have a responsibility to speak out if we think that the course of action that our country is on is not making the American people safer, making our military stronger and making the region more stable."
Note the 'if' above in Nancy P.'s statement. She still doesn't know what she believes about the war in Iraq. No doubt she's gettting recalibrated by here DNC poll watchers.
#8
"There have even been rumors that Lieberman is being considered as a replacement for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld"
NB: the only people passing those rumors around have been Democrats. They want to remove Rumsfeld and Lieberman, in order to weaken the president and, well, Lieberman.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
12/10/2005 10:15 Comments ||
Top||
#9
from Firesign's Star Trip:
"Cap'n, Cap'n, all the stars have gone out!"
"You've pressed the view screen button, Lt. Uhuru."
Later: "Cap'n, Cap'n, all the stars have gone out again!"
"Lt. Uhuru, if you press that button again I'll have you ejected into hyperspace though the garbage chute."
Later, as Capt. Quirk searches for his communicator, finds it missing and grabs for Lt. U's:
#11
" '...unfortunately he is at a different place on Iraq than the majority of the American people,' Reid said yesterday."
Be careful on extrapolating on that one, Mr Reid. Americans do believe military action is sometimes necessary, even if they disagree with the Iraq War. Most Democrats seem committed to the notion that military action (violence) is never justified. Their parents and grandparents who won WWII with blood and pain must be mortified.
#12
And meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee is going ballistic over that "White Flag Democrats" ad the GOP released yesterday, and fortifying their anti-war stance. John Hinderaker over at powerlineblog shows an e-mail he got from the DNC...
Posted by: Dave D. ||
12/10/2005 12:31 Comments ||
Top||
#13
Further polarizing puts the DNC even further from mainstream votes -- I hope Reid and Dean and their ilk keep spouting off for at least three more years. And I'll take Lieberman over sKerry, Gorey, or Hillary any day of the week for anything -- at least he's got a brain and a clue.
North Dakota Rep. Earl Pomeroy is accusing Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean of overstepping his bounds, saying the former presidential candidate should not give up on the war in Iraq. "My words to Howard Dean are simple - shut up," Pomeroy told WDAY Radio in North Dakota on Thursday.
Pomeroy later told the Associated Press that he is tired "of the overblown rhetoric on both sides. We have young men and women with their lives on the line," he added. "The debate has fallen far short of what they deserve."
Pomeroy said Dean wasn't representing Democrats like him when he discussed the war. "He is not hired to make major policy announcements on behalf of all the Democrats," Pomeroy said. "As our party chairman I believe he needs to focus on the nuts and bolts of winning elections."
A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee declined to comment on Pomeroy's remarks.
Pomeroy, who has visited Iraq three times, said he believes the United States must stay in the country for now to achieve progress on national security, the creation of a stable government and the establishment of a functioning economy. Can we have 1968 again? (Though without the assassinations.)
In the spring of 2000, a year and a half before the 9/11 attacks, Erik Kleinsmith made a decision that history may judge as a colossal mistake.
Then a 35-year-old Army major assigned to a little-known intelligence organization at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, Kleinsmith had compiled an enormous cache of information -- most of it electronically stored -- about the Al Qaeda terrorist network. It described the group's presence in countries around the world, including the United States.
It was of great interest to military planners eager to strike the terrorists' weak spots. And it may have contained the names of some of the 9/11 hijackers, including the ringleader, Mohamed Atta.
The intelligence data totaled 2.5 terabytes, equal to about 12 percent of all printed pages held by the Library of Congress. Neither the FBI nor the CIA had ever seen the information. And that spring, Kleinsmith destroyed every bit of it.
Why did he do that? And how did a midlevel officer in a minor intelligence outfit obtain that information in the first place? Those questions lie behind the latest phase of a simmering controversy in Washington: whether something could have been done to prevent the terror attacks of September 11.
Kleinsmith worked for an Army project code-named "Able Danger." This past summer, a number of former project members -- none of whom had worked for Kleinsmith -- came forward to say that Able Danger had identified Atta and linked him to a convicted terrorist who is still serving time in federal prison for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
The Able Danger members recalled charts showing names and pictures of suspects, and their links to each other. Rep. Curt Weldon, an outspoken Pennsylvania Republican and longtime supporter of intelligence reform, has demanded to know why the charts were never shared with an agency positioned to halt the attacks.
He also points out that the 9/11 commission failed to include any mention of Able Danger in its final report, which is regarded as an authoritative history of the attacks. The Pentagon searched more than 80,000 documents and found no chart with the name "Mohamed Atta." Weldon has accused the government of a cover-up and called for a criminal investigation.
But Able Danger, for all its intrigue, is just one piece of the unusual intelligence practices that Kleinsmith was engaged in, years before 9/11. In the late 1990s, Kleinsmith was the chief of intelligence for the Army's Land Information Warfare Activity, a support unit assigned to the Intelligence and Security Command. LIWA had broad authority to assist the Army and all military commands in conducting "information operations," a broad discipline that includes information warfare, public deception in combat, and intelligence analysis.
The Army's hub in this effort was the aptly named Information Dominance Center, based at Fort Belvoir. Since the late 1990s, the IDC has been home to some of the most innovative, unconventional, and controversial minds in the intelligence business. In its futuristic-style building -- its interior spaces designed by a Hollywood set artist to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise, complete with a large captain's chair in the center of the main room -- the IDC covered a range of topics.
Analysts tracked computer hackers who were targeting military networks, watched for potential avenues of Chinese government espionage, and charted the working relationships among foreign terrorists. To do this, the IDC relied heavily on a novel technique called "data mining."
On a recent afternoon at a coffee shop in Springfield, Va., not far from the IDC, Kleinsmith explained how data mining works. Putting pen to paper, Kleinsmith sketched clumps of circles, then surrounded some with concentric, wavy perimeters, until he'd drawn a crude version of a topographical map.
In data mining, he explained, a powerful search engine is used to "harvest" tens of thousands of Web pages that contain key words of interest -- "Al Qaeda" and "bin Laden," for instance. Another tool, called a data visualization program, then creates a three-dimensional map showing which words appear most often and how they relate.
The features and contours of the map tell an analyst about the underlying information's significance, Kleinsmith said. High peaks represent words that appear frequently. Peaks close together signal words that share some context. The analysts can click on a peak and pull up the information that helped create it. With data mining, analysts don't just read information, they "see" it. Kleinsmith called this kind of data mining "intelligence on steroids," and it was the IDC's hallmark.
Data mining works best with large sets of information, so it's particularly useful for Internet searches. At the IDC, Kleinsmith and three colleagues mapped Al Qaeda for Able Danger by mining open sources and fusing their results with classified government intelligence. But in addition to the mass of information they returned on suspected terrorists, they collected thousands of names of U.S. citizens.
People's names and personal information litter the Internet. Data harvesting, by its very nature, is indiscriminate and sweeping. Unavoidably, along with "Osama Bin Laden," an often-mentioned name like "Bill Clinton" will be harvested. That says a lot about the power, and the limits, of data mining, and why Kleinsmith destroyed what he had; the military is not supposed to be gathering information on U.S. citizens.
From its earliest days, the IDC was a haven for renegades who wanted to use technology to step outside traditional intelligence-gathering, which relies heavily on classified sources and labor-intensive analysis. The center had high-level champions, including Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, who from 2000 to 2003 directed the Intelligence and Security Command, the IDC's parent. Alexander now heads the National Security Agency, which operates the most-sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices in the world.
Alexander also worked closely with James Heath, who headed the IDC in the late 1990s and whom former employees recall as a mix of driven genius and mad scientist. According to one such former employee of the center, Heath saw the IDC as "an experimentation table" on which to try out all kinds of new tools, depending on what the Army wanted at the time. Analysts and technicians worked together, "speaking the same language" and building useful data-mining tools. This dynamic didn't exist in other intelligence agencies, the former employee noted.
The IDC earned a reputation for innovation, but it also stepped over the bounds of traditional military intelligence. One of its first outside fans was Curt Weldon. Rep. Weldon had been advocating a "national collaborative center" to fuse law enforcement and intelligence units, and their information, from across the government.
In 1997, as the U.S. intervened in the Balkan War, senior Russian officials wanted Weldon (who had had good and long-standing contacts with the Russians) to meet in Belgrade with Yugoslavia's then-president, Slobodan Milosevic, to negotiate a peace settlement.
As Weldon stated on the House floor in 2002, the Russians offered to arrange a meeting between Weldon and Dragomir Karic, a rich Serb closely tied to Milosevic. Perhaps, the Russians said, Karic could act as a go-between with the Serbian president. But according to Weldon, State Department officials said they'd never heard of Karic, and thought the meeting was a ploy to manipulate the congressman.
Weldon met with Karic on neutral territory, in Vienna. But before leaving the States, he asked then-CIA Director George Tenet for background on the Serb. Tenet "called me back the next day and gave me two or three sentences ... and said they thought he was tied in with the corruption in Russia, but did not know much else about him," Weldon said.
Unsatisfied, Weldon contacted his "friends at the Information Dominance Center," which he considered a model for his own intelligence collaboration venture. The IDC "came back to me with eight pages about this man," who the analysts said "was very close to Milosevic personally." Former IDC employees confirmed that they provided Weldon with detailed information on Karic.
The talks with Karic bore no fruit. But when Weldon returned to Washington, he said, the FBI and CIA asked to debrief him on what he knew about Karic. Weldon delivered a thorough dossier.
"I told them that there were four Karic brothers; that they were the owners of the largest banking system in the former Yugoslavia; that they employed some 60,000 people; that their bank had tried to finance the sale of an SA-10 [missile system] from Russia to Milosevic; that their bank had been involved in a $4 billion German bond scam; that one of the brothers had financed Milosevic's election; that the house Milosevic lived in was really their house; that, in fact, the Karic brothers' wives were best of friends with Milosevic's wife; and that they were the closest people to this leader."
Surprised to hear such details on a man they barely knew of, the agents presumed Weldon got the information from the Russians. When he told them that the facts came from the Army's Information Dominance Center, Weldon recalls, the agents replied, "What ... is the Information Dominance Center?"
The event convinced Weldon that the CIA and the FBI didn't "get it," and that the IDC was the wave of the future. He became its biggest proponent in Congress, and sang its praises to the highest levels of the Defense Department.
After Weldon submitted the Karic dossier, word of the IDC's work spread outside the Army realm, Kleinsmith said. He had put just two analysts on the Weldon project, and they had taken only a day to generate the Karic profile. It "shocked me that we were outdoing these other organizations," namely the CIA, Kleinsmith said.
Intrigued with the Karic work, senior Pentagon officials decided to see if the tiny band of analysts could prove their mettle on a bigger problem. Officials were concerned about the possible leakage of U.S. military technology abroad, through unauthorized exports or through espionage. In the spring of 1999, the Pentagon "initiated a onetime project, to use data-correlation tools to decide if we could use those methods as a superior approach for counterintelligence," said John Hamre, the deputy Defense secretary at the time. "It was an experiment."
The people involved said the experiment looked specifically at technology transfers to China, whose military posed the gravest post-Cold War threat to the United States. Kleinsmith says the particular technology the IDC researched was arbitrary. "I think we flipped a coin" to decide. The point was to show the Pentagon that data mining could identify front companies, potential leaks of technology, and other vulnerabilities. "What we found was absolutely enormous," Kleinsmith said.
Former IDC employees and others familiar with the work say the China research exposed a variety of avenues through which military technology designs could end up in Chinese government hands. The IDC created a diagram showing how organizations and people in the United States were connected to the Chinese. Hamre had visited the center, and according to Weldon, reported back, "It is amazing what they are doing there."
The experiment "went well," the former IDC employee said. "Unfortunately, it went too well." During construction of those link diagrams, the names of a number of U.S. citizens popped up, including some very prominent figures. Condoleezza Rice, then the provost at Stanford University, appeared in one of the harvests, the by-product of a presumably innocuous connection between other subjects and the university, which hosts notable Chinese scholars.
William Cohen, then the secretary of Defense, also appeared. As one former senior Defense official explained, the IDC's results "raised eyebrows," and leaders in the Pentagon grew nervous about the political implications of turning up such high-profile names, or those of any American citizens who were not the subject of a legally authorized intelligence investigation. Rumors still abound about other notable figures caught up in the IDC's harvest. "I heard they turned up Hillary Clinton," the official said. The experiment was not continued.
"We determined that there were significant methodological problems," Hamre said of the IDC's techniques. Data-correlation analyses on raw information "produce impossibly large numbers of potential correlations. The numbers are too large to be operationally helpful."
But it appears not everyone in the military establishment agreed. Over the next several months, Kleinsmith estimated he gave more than 200 briefings on the IDC to members of Congress, generals, and senior government officials. "I could tell in three to four minutes if someone 'got it,' " Kleinsmith said. Hamre got it, he noted. And so, it seems, did officials with the Army's Special Operations Command, who, despite the unease over the China experiment, came to the IDC asking for information about a then-shadowy organization called Al Qaeda.
In the fall of 1999, top officials in the Special Operations Command were looking for a way to take the nascent fight on terrorism to its source. Al Qaeda had recently destroyed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Special Operations' top officers, including the commander, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, "wanted the mission of 'putting boots on the ground' to get at [Osama] bin Laden and Al Qaeda," according to the 9/11 commission report.
But the military leadership believed that without concrete intelligence about Al Qaeda, a strike on the group was doomed to fail. President Clinton told the 9/11 commission, "If we had really good intelligence about ... where [bin Laden] was, I would have done it." Plans were already under way to attack Al Qaeda using AC-130 gunships. What was lacking was actionable intelligence to tell the military whom to hit and where.
Kleinsmith said that a pair of Special Operations officials visited him at the IDC in December 1999. At the instruction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the officials wanted as much intelligence on Al Qaeda and other transnational terrorists that could be mustered. They called the project Able Danger. (The word "able" has been commonly used for military exercises for more than two decades.)
The officials asked Kleinsmith about the technologies the IDC was using. "They didn't talk specifics," Kleinsmith said, but it was clear that "we had something they could really use." Later, he offered to "run some data" and produce a preliminary analysis. Within 90 minutes, Kleinsmith said, his analysts found evidence that Al Qaeda had a "worldwide footprint," including "a surprising presence in the U.S. That's when we started losing sleep."
In January 2000, Special Operations gave Kleinsmith and his team the green light to find as much information as they could. "They told us, 'Start with the words "Al Qaeda," and go,' " he said. A month later, the IDC conducted the first Able Danger harvest. The initial results, while impressive, were hardly what Special Operations forces needed to put boots on the ground.
The harvest "was a mile wide and an inch deep," Kleinsmith said. It included more than two terabytes of information, too vast an amount to provide specific targets. The IDC analysts could see the broad outlines of Al Qaeda, particularly its transformation from an idealistic movement into an operational network that could possibly inflict damage. Names, locations, and capabilities, and even the group's financial sources, were "coming together," Kleinsmith said. But the data set was still too big.
That didn't stop the analysts from trying to pare the information down. The former IDC employee said analysts played what they called "the Kevin Bacon game," referring to the popular notion that the prolific film actor can be linked to any other actor through no more than five people. (The game is based on the "six degrees of separation" theory that anyone on Earth can be linked to anyone else through five intermediaries.)
"Let's say you had a bad guy at each end of a string," the employee said. The analysts looked for the people between them, and then those people's ties to each other and to still others, asking whether any of the links came back to the initial bad guys. The analysts played this game routinely to firm up the connections in the large data sets. Eventually, they were able to isolate some 20 people about whom Special Operations wanted further, deeper analysis, Kleinsmith said.
The team developed charts to serve as "simplified explanations" of what they found. But those charts, now famously alluded to by Weldon and others as having named Mohamed Atta, sometimes measured 20 feet in length and were covered with small type, the former IDC employee said. The charts were so big, in fact, that analysts had to hang them on walls just to read them. The former employee doesn't remember seeing Atta's picture.
The IDC might have followed Atta's trail if it had been told to do so, the former employee said. But just pulling names at random from the chart was pointless. And a simple connection between two people on a chart was not evidence of any criminality or pending attack. "Do you have any idea how many people on the planet would go to jail just because they knew somebody bad?" the former employee asked.
The IDC produced an impressive array of intelligence, but it also came dangerously close to an important legal line. The basic harvesting methodology guaranteed that the names of U.S. citizens would appear. "You'll pull in 16,000 people in a harvest," Kleinsmith said. It's "100 percent likely" that an American will be there. And sometimes the names themselves seemed meaningless.
If an analyst found "Clinton," Kleinsmith noted, that could mean George Clinton, the funk musician, or the town of Clinton, Md. Was the collection accidental or intentional? Regulations that restrict domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens don't necessarily apply to names that are swept up inadvertently in a data harvest. The IDC team pulled in hundreds of names every hour, Kleinsmith said. When asked which prominent Americans were included, he replied, "Everybody was coming up."
As quickly as the IDC garnered powerful fans, it also earned some enemies. The center was not a chartered member of the formal intelligence community -- the 14 agencies that in 1999 officially constituted the country's spy apparatus. For a support organization, buried several layers deep in the Army, to tread on territory normally reserved for big-name agencies like the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, and to present intelligence gleaned from the Internet, of all places, was simply anathema to people steeped in decades of intelligence rules and culture. The IDC analysts were mavericks.
In particular, the Defense Intelligence Agency questioned the analysts' results on a number of projects, not just Able Danger, the former IDC employee said. "We'd show them our stuff, and they'd say, 'Show us the math.' " But the answers didn't always add up so neatly. The combination of data mining and hunches sometimes produced results that the bigger intelligence agencies viewed as murky, even if military commanders found them compelling.
At a Pentagon briefing on Able Danger in September of this year, Thomas Gandy, the Army's director of counterintelligence and human intelligence, cautioned reporters about inferring too much information from the "links" the IDC established, particularly because its data-mining tools were far less sophisticated than the ones used today. "Just that there are links established doesn't really mean anything," Gandy said. "In the primacy of this technology, you get some very goofy links that require research."
Kleinsmith and the former employee, as well as others who worked tangentially to the IDC over the years, insisted that the IDC analysts were senior and seasoned, and that they recognized the fact that simple links required further investigation. Yet the analysts' enthusiasm for a less tidy sort of inquiry, which often raised more questions than answers, divided intelligence professionals. Some former government officials, who declined to be named, derided the IDC analysts as "zealots" and said their work never produced the eureka-like results that some, particularly former Able Danger members, now claim.
One senior IDC analyst, Eileen Preisser, who worked with Kleinsmith on Able Danger and other projects, was characterized by a former Defense official as "an uncontrolled flake." Kleinsmith, who called Preisser an "analytical genius," admitted that she "has constant trouble in working with others in the community." Preisser has worked in several intelligence jobs, inside and outside the government, and those who know her see her as the prototypical IDC believer.
She "is especially critical of those folks who she feels did not, or do not, 'get' the technology," Kleinsmith said. "Instead of working within the system, maneuvering around the tough spots, negotiating and dealing, she tends to burn her way through an issue to get where she needs to go." Preisser now works for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. A spokeswoman there said Preisser declined all requests for interviews.
In early 2000, in the midst of Able Danger, a lawyer with the Army's general counsel visited Kleinsmith. As Kleinsmith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, the lawyer reminded him that under Army regulations, any data the IDC collected on U.S. persons -- even inadvertently -- had to be destroyed within 90 days. If analysts could establish a legitimate reason to investigate a person further, they could keep the corresponding data.
But with potentially tens of thousands of names, checking each one would have been impossible, Kleinsmith said. In the Pentagon briefing, Gandy concurred: "I don't think they had the capability to scrub it in the fashion that the oversight rules could live with."
By the spring of 2000, Kleinsmith said, the IDC had the list of 20 individuals whom Special Operations wanted investigated further under Able Danger. But in March, Kleinsmith was ordered to cease all work on the project. He believes the order came from outside the IDC's command. From May to June, Kleinsmith and his team destroyed the information, and possibly the linkages between Mohamed Atta, Al Qaeda, and convicted terrorists already sitting in U.S. prisons.
"It was terrible," Kleinsmith said.
After the data purge, the heartbeat of the IDC slowed. In late September 2000, the center was authorized to begin new work on Able Danger, Kleinsmith said. A data harvest would take no time to replicate, but the analysis on people and locations was much harder to reproduce.
But Able Danger never ramped up a second time. On October 12, while the USS Cole was docked in Yemen's port city of Aden, Al Qaeda suicide bombers rammed the destroyer with a small explosive-laden boat, killing 17 U.S. sailors and wounding 39. From then on, U.S. Central Command, responsible for the Middle East, became the IDC's primary customer, Kleinsmith said. Special Operations Command, unhappy because the IDC's attention had shifted, moved Able Danger to a private intelligence research center run by Raytheon in Garland, Texas, Kleinsmith said.
A Raytheon spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. But Eileen Preisser, the IDC analyst who had worked on Able Danger with Kleinsmith, was working for Raytheon after the September 11 attacks. In a 2001 interview with National Journal, she spoke of projects she was involved with that were essentially the same as those at the IDC.
After the Cole bombing, the IDC concentrated on projects not related to Al Qaeda. "We went on to do some other things, other projects," the former IDC employee said. Less than a year later, the 9/11 attackers struck. Looking back, Kleinsmith doesn't claim that he saw the attacks coming. Rather, he felt resigned. "I wasn't surprised," he said. He had studied Al Qaeda's evolution and believed he knew its capabilities. "I thought, 'So it begins.'
The 9/11 attacks breathed some new life into the Information Dominance Center. In late 2001, retired Navy Adm. John Poindexter, who had served as President Reagan's national security adviser, met with the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where Poindexter was soon to be employed. Poindexter was looking for a site to test new technologies under his Total Information Awareness program, which, not unlike the IDC, aimed to use open-source data and government information to understand terrorism.
TIA also looked at tools to examine commercial databases containing information on U.S. citizens, within the context of privacy regulations.
Poindexter wanted a proving ground staffed by seasoned, technology-inclined analysts, a "Manhattan Project" for counterterrorism, he said. The DARPA director, Tony Tether, told him to consider the IDC. After meeting with Gen. Alexander, the Army commander overseeing the center, Poindexter agreed to test some of the TIA tools at the IDC.
"TIA was a very good concept," the former IDC employee said. The center offered TIA "a high-speed testing bed" for its new technologies. "Some of the tools sucked, and some of them were good ideas," the employee said. The frustration came from officials' reluctance to use the tools for active intelligence projects. Poindexter emphasized that TIA was a research project and wasn't using data mining as part of any real intelligence operations. TIA was an experiment.
But the experiment was short-lived. In late 2002, Poindexter's role in TIA was revealed in the press. The controversial retired admiral's past caught up with him -- Poindexter was the central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, which diverted the profits from covert arms sales to Iran to anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua.
Members of Congress derided TIA as an Orwellian excess of the post-9/11 era. The funding was pulled. Kleinsmith, who had left the Army by the time TIA arrived, seemed perplexed by lawmakers' concerns. "We've had this capability for years," he remembered thinking. "Who cares?"
TIA's detractors declared a victory for privacy protection when they killed the project. Poindexter was forced to resign in August 2003. But research on TIA tools has hardly ceased.
Rather, it has moved into the intelligence agencies, where the work and the budgets for it are classified, Poindexter said, noting that now Congress has more-limited oversight and should be more concerned about privacy infringements. The former IDC employee concurred, saying "The [TIA] concept hasn't died off. It continues. And it continues elsewhere now, and I can't talk about that. The tools are continuing to be developed."
Five years after Able Danger, Erik Kleinsmith seems oddly at ease for a key figure in a brewing political controversy. Inevitably, Kleinsmith would be a major witness in any investigation of the project. No one has suggested he did anything other than follow Army regulations in destroying the Able Danger documents.
Kleinsmith remains unconvinced that, despite the IDC's innovations, the 9/11 attacks were foreseeable. But "I do go to bed every night ... [thinking] that if we had not been shut down, we would have at least been able to prevent something or assist the United States in some way," Kleinsmith told the Senate Judiciary Committee during September's hearing. "Could we have prevented 9/11?" He paused, and then said: "I don't think I can ever speculate to that extent, that we could have done that."
Today, Kleinsmith is an employee with Lockheed Martin, working as a contractor to the Army's Information Operations Center, an IDC spin-off that is chartered to support the global war on terrorism. He oversees an intelligence training team of about 28 instructors, five of whom are working in Iraq to train U.S. analysts in data mining.
"One of the most amazing aspects of the Able Danger team is that, for a time, you had what I believe was the perfect combination of technology, data, and expert analysts that combined to create analysis that was above and beyond what the intelligence community was producing," Kleinsmith said. The results of the China experiment brought Special Operations Command to the IDC. That's proof enough for Kleinsmith that his group was providing what no one else could.
"I have been asked by several folks on Capitol Hill, members and staffers alike, whether the capability still exists to do what we did," Kleinsmith said. "My answer is, 'yes and no.' " Paradoxically, analysts are being trained to rely on the technological tools -- what Kleinsmith called "buttonology" -- too much, instead of thinking creatively on their own, he explained.
The technology is powerful, but needs to augment the analyst's work, he said. "There are still those who want to train analysts on how the engine of the car works instead of how to drive the car."
Kleinsmith recognized that the IDC's methods caused some consternation, but he takes pride in his former work and looks at the controversy pragmatically. "We understood that [there were objections], but we also understood that a lot of our customers didn't care."
Today, Kleinsmith is still struggling with the same puzzles. And, to hear him tell it, apart from the advancements in technology, little has changed. So much is still unknown, and undone, about the terrorist threat to the United States, he said. He can simply watch television to know that law enforcement isn't rounding up the terrorist cells he believes his team identified in the United States five years ago.
Ultimately, Kleinsmith sounds less like a man burdened by his past than one nervous about the future. No one seems to be acting on the information the IDC found that terrorists had taken up residence in the United States, far from New York, he said. And, as if they were listening, waiting for him to tip his hand, Kleinsmith cautiously added, "I'd just prefer not to say where they are."
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
12/10/2005 01:18 ||
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#1
"There are still those who want to train analysts on how the engine of the car works instead of how to drive the car."
Yep!
A good article only slightly spoiled by the fact the writer has no clue how data mining works, but then he's probably pretty vague on how his car works as well.
I'm curious to see if this has legs. Since Able Danger could clearly have stopped 9/11 and could be used to identify terrorists currently in the USA and other places.
The experiment "went well," the former IDC employee said. "Unfortunately, it went too well." During construction of those link diagrams, the names of a number of U.S. citizens popped up, including some very prominent figures.
I'm not one to know, but this line of reasoning strikes me as utter BS. Do we not pick up names of US citizens in ANY intelligence we receive? Are you telling me that when intelligence reports are written today - it scrubs any mention of a visit by Rice or 7 steps to Clinton?
I think if you dig a bit further, what we will find is that the information about US information transfers to China got too close to some very prominent US citizens and so now we get the watered down example that it also pulled up Condi and Hillary. Yeah, ok. But somehow I think traditional intelligence does the same thing. IMHO, Condi and Hillary are just red herrings to ignore the fact that their connections pulled up some real and significant information regarding US citizens who were spying on the US....which created the problem that the military had been spying on US citizens.
Concern is mounting over the connections between a Boston Islamic group and a high-profile Muslim activist, Abdurahman Alamoudi, after a recent statement by the federal government that Mr. Alamoudi had a "close relationship" with Al Qaeda and that he raised money for Al Qaeda in America.
Alamoudi - who is serving a 23-year sentence in federal prison after having pleaded guilty in 2004 to participating in a Libyan plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah - is also a founder of the Islamic Society of Boston. The society is now embroiled in a bitter legal dispute over the society's efforts to build a mosque with the aid of public subsidies.
That lawsuit, according to journalists and terrorism investigators, is part of a larger trend of litigation by Muslim groups that, they say, is having a "chilling effect" on the ability to report domestic ties to terrorism.
In July, Alamoudi was cited in a Treasury Department press release designating the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a U.K.-based Saudi oppositionist organization, led by Saad al-Faqih, as providing material support for Al Qaeda. MIRA "received approximately $1 million in funding through Abdulrahman Alamoudi," the statement said.
"According to information available to the U.S.Government," the statement continues, "the September 2003 arrest of Alamoudi was a severe blow to Al Qaeda, as Alamoudi had a close relationship with Al Qaeda and had raised money for Al Qaeda in the United States." The Treasury Department has declined to provide further information, saying the material is classified.
Alamoudi, an Eritrean-born naturalized American citizen, was arrested in 2003 on charges of having participated in a Libyan assassination plot against Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah, an allegation to which he admitted in the 2004 plea agreement with federal prosecutors. He was also stripped of his American citizenship after admitting to having obtained it fraudulently.
A lawyer for Alamoudi, James McLoughlin Jr., told the Sun that his client "vigorously denies ever having raised money for Al Qaeda." The Treasury had refused requests to review its information.
Before his arrest, Alamoudi enjoyed extensive connections to Washington lawmakers as the founder and president of the American Muslim Council. During the Clinton administration, according to press accounts, Alamoudi often visited the White House to meet with and advise President Clinton, now-Senator Clinton, and Vice President Gore. In 2001, Alamoudi appeared with President Bush at a prayer vigil for victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks just days after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon.
Alamoudi was also one of the founders of the Islamic Society of Boston, which is engaged in a dispute over its plans to build a $22 million mosque and cultural center on 1.9 acres of land next to Roxbury Community College. Valued at $400,000 by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the lot was sold to the ISB for $175,000 in a deal supported by Boston's Democratic mayor, Thomas Menino. The city said the sale price had been lowered in exchange for an ISB promise to provide 5,000 books about Islam to Roxbury Community College; to provide the college with a lecture series about Islam; and to raise money for the college.
The land exchange prompted a lawsuit by a Roxbury resident, James Policastro, challenging its constitutionality as a subsidy for the Muslim religion. Last month, a motion by the ISB to have the Policastro suit dismissed was denied.
The land deal also prompted a series of investigative reports by the Boston Herald and Fox TV Channel 25, probing the alleged connections between several ISB leaders, including Alamoudi, and radical Islam. In turn, the ISB has filed a defamation lawsuit claiming that the reports were part of a conspiracy to prevent the mosque's being built.
The reports alleged that one former ISB trustee, the Egypt-based Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was barred from entering America by the Clinton State Department in 1999 after openly supporting the Palestinian Arab terrorist organization Hamas.
The ISB denies that Mr.Qaradawi was a trustee of the group. He is listed as a trustee on the ISB's IRS 990 forms for 1998, 1999, and 2000. The ISB has described this as an "administrative oversight."
And the Anti-Defamation League recently denounced as anti-Semitic writings by another ISB trustee, Walid Ahmad Fitaihi, that appeared in foreign newspapers. In the articles, Mr. Fitaihi said Jews "perpetrated the worst of evils," "brought the worst corruption to the earth," and "killed prophets," according to press accounts. The ISB responded on its Web site that "the articles were intended to condemn particular individuals ... not meant to incite hatred of an entire faith or people." The ISB denies any connection to radical Islam.
After the Herald and Fox filed reports raising questions about the ties between Messrs. Qaradawi, Alamoudi, Fitaihi, et al. and the ISB, the society and two of its trustees, Yousef Abou-Allaban and Osama Kandil, filed defamation suits against the Herald and Fox last year. The suits allege, among other charges, that the Herald and Fox reports - abetted by the other investigators and journalists named in an expanded lawsuit filed last month - have prevented the ISB from raising the money required to build the mosque.
According to a report in the Boston Globe, the ISB has raised $14 million so far, mostly from other countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.
As evidence for the conspiracy, the ISB's complaint includes e-mails exchanged between Herald reporters and members of the investigative groups, including the Washington-based Investigative Project and its president, Steven Emerson, and the Boston-based David Project, a 501(c)(3) Jewish educational organization.
Representatives of the David Project and other groups say the reports and inquiries were meant to raise serious questions about the ISB's potential links to terrorism in the hopes of getting more information out of the organization. A lawyer for the David Project, Jeffrey Robbins, said: "It's outrageous that at a time when all Americans are trying to have information on this topic, that those who asked the questions would be sued for having asked them."
A lawyer for the ISB, Howard Cooper, told the Sun earlier this week: "The ISB has had nothing to do with Alamoudi for a long time, and before those questions were asked by the people who were sued they knew that was the case."
Questioning whether Alamoudi's identification by the federal government as an Al Qaeda fund-raiser in America might have implications for the Islamic Society of Boston, Mr. Cooper added, "is just such classic overreaching and guilt by fabricated association as part of an intolerant attitude toward Muslims that it is perfectly illustrative of why this lawsuit has been brought."
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
12/10/2005 01:14 ||
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#1
Islamic Center of Boston - sheeesh! Thank you, Mayor 'Mumbles' Menino!
(goofing on the Mayor's inability to speak can be heard here).
#2
That lawsuit, according to journalists and terrorism investigators, is part of a larger trend of litigation by Muslim groups that, they say, is having a "chilling effect" on the ability to report domestic ties to terrorism.
Yeah, ok. Good point.
Is it me, or sounds like the annoying type of logic that Aris likes to employ. Nobody is fooled by it, but it allows the arguer to keep claiming the moral high ground, long after the battle is over.
Why? There is a traditional festival in the Indian subcontinent called Basant. One popular activity is kite flying. This is viewed by Paki authorities as a sign of degenerate hindu culture and therefore something to be stamped out if pure islam is to florish
The Supreme Court on Friday extended ban on kite flying as well as its buying, selling and manufacturing along with all types of twine till January 26, 2006.
The bench, comprising Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Ch, Justice Khalilur Rehman Ramday, Justice Faqir Muhammad Khokhar, Justice Ch Ijaz Ahmad and Justice Karamat Nazir Bhandari, directed chief secretaries and IGPs of all the four provinces to ensure strict compliance of court orders during this period.
The court also appreciated the efforts of government in implementation of court orders regarding ban. The chief justice announced the order while women kept on raising hue and cry in the courtroom.
Malik Qayyum, counsel of Kite Flying Association, requested the court to lift the ban for a short period and if incidents occurred during this period then court can impose ban again. However, the court observed that they would look into this request on the next date of hearing. During the hearing, a large number of women were present in the court.
Posted by: john ||
12/10/2005 00:00 ||
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UN Secretary General Kofi Annan strongly defended the Canadian United Nations human rights chief Louise Arbour on Thursday against criticism she had no business second-guessing U.S. practices in pursuing terrorists. In a rare rebuke of a UN envoy, Annan plans to take up the issue as soon as possible with U.S. Ambassador John Bolton. The secretary general, in fact, echoed Arbour's argument that torture must never be used to fight terrorism.
Arbour warned Wednesday the global ban on torture is becoming a casualty of the "war on terror," singling out reported U.S. practices of sending terrorist suspects to other countries and holding prisoners in secret detention. Her comments sparked an immediate rebuke from Bolton, who said it was "inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we're engaged in in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers."
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric left no doubt about the secretary general's support for Arbour when asked if Annan believed the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was out of line for criticizing practices reported used by the United States. Arbour has a mandate from the UN General Assembly "to speak on human rights on a global scale and the secretary general is confident that she will carry out her work without being impressed or intimidated by what happened yesterday," he said.
"The secretary general has absolutely no disagreement with the statement made by the high commissioner...and I think I would reiterate that he has absolute full confidence in Ms. Arbour," Dujarric added. He said Annan decided to raise the issue with Bolton as soon as possible.
Arbour said she chose the theme of "terrorists and torturers" to mark Saturday's annual Human Rights Day commemoration of the UN's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 because of concerns the absolute ban on torture, once considered unassailable, is under attack. Bolton said it would be far more appropriate if Arbour had used Human Rights Day to talk about "the real human rights problems that exist in the world today." He did not elaborate on the problems but the United States has long criticized Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Myanmar and others as human rights abusers.
Arbour called on the United States and other countries to state clearly and in detail what practices they accept and don't accept in the interrogation of suspects and whether they operate secret detention centres at home or abroad. She urged U.S. authorities to grant all detainees the right to legal counsel of their choice, "access without impediments or restraints to national courts" and international scrutiny of U.S. facilities including access to detainees.
#4
Since we don't have OWG and Kofi isn't President of The World, someone needs to remind him that he's just the fucking hired help. He's a bureaucrat for a consortium, paid to do a job - which he's failed at consistently and spectacularly, and nothing more. Bolton is the designated representative of one of his bosses - and should be addressed, referred to, and respected as such. Everything in the organization is dysfunctional to some degree - most of it is well beyond that description and unsalvageable, IMHO. Either a major smackdown with total overhaul - or surgically removing this tumor permanently - is long overdue. I'm for the cut it out before it kills the host option, myself.
Fuck Kofi, his entire crew, and their hyperinflated delusions of grandeur.
#5
We need to do to the UN what my Surgeon did to a cancerous organ of mine. Cut it out. It was painful and plenty scary. I healed up and I have adjusted to living without it. If It had remaind in it would have eventually killed me, we had to part ways so I could survive. We need to do the same thing with the UN for the same reasons.
#7
Amen, .com. Maybe it's time we all wrote to him to convey just what we think about our tax dollars going to support his corrupt, ineffective and hostile organization.
Posted by: too true ||
12/10/2005 9:29 Comments ||
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Annan plans to take up the issue as soon as possible with U.S. Ambassador John Bolton.
"I know he's only a few doors down the hall, but that Bolten guy is scary! He says the truth and looks me right in the eye! I think I'll let this Canadian woman fight my fight instead. trhen I can stand safely in the back of the crowd and yell,"What she said!"
But here again is is another case of the press reports being the truth without any real documented support. Although she did get some good sound bits for the home politics. Cut Annan out like the cancer he is, and cheer every time Bolten Bitch Slaps some UN Official!
Posted by: 49 pan ||
12/10/2005 9:40 Comments ||
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#9
Louise Arbour is a UN-slut.
I don't mean she sleeps around, I mean she metaphorically spreads her legs anytime she can do anything that weakens real freedom in exchange for strengthening tyranny.
See, she recently promised the OIS her office would look into the "human rights violations" that occured when -- whisper this -- some newspaper published cartoons that said nasty things about the prophet Mohammed (piss on his grave). Even assigned two staffers to the job, apparently.
Someone with a real grasp on human rights would have responded to the request with, "Sorry, there's no right to not be offended, and there IS a right to free speech. Learn to be adults and get used to being criticized." Instead, she's acting as if the sharia provisions for kissing the dead pedophile's ass are international law.
Bolton should head-butt the bitch next time he sees her.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
12/10/2005 10:21 Comments ||
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Bolton has proven himself. This is a minor task on his "To Do" list -- somewhere down around "clean out litter box".
WASHINGTON: The United States and China are eyeing possible cooperation on such diverse issues as Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea, the State Department said after talks among senior officials.
Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who led the US side, said they discussed "how China could work with the United States and others on challenges such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea." They dwelt on "overlapping interests" in fighting terrorism, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, building energy security, and reducing the risks of pandemic disease. Zoellick said the two-day discussions were "constructive" in helping to enhance bilateral cooperation "for a more secure and prosperous world that respects human rights and the rule of law."
Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo led Chinaâs delegation at the meeting, following up on the inaugural strategic talks launched in August in Beijing. The dialogue arose from a suggestion by Chinese President Hu Jintao to President George W Bush a year ago amid US suspicion over Chinaâs rising military might and economic clout, and fierce competition among the two powers for depleting natural resources.
China, Russia and, for a while, India have been cool to US moves to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions for its nuclear programme. "But I think it was notable that the goals were similar and that China wants to be seen as acting responsibly with regard to the important issue of nuclear proliferation," the official said.
Zoellick also said that recent discussions on how the two sides could cooperate in Africa, and "on the dangerous mix of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," would be expanded to cover other regions â Latin America and South and Central Asia.
Bush visited Hu last month and held wide-ranging discussions, after which the two leaders took pains to emphasize the importance of US-China relations, pledging to work through what the Chinese President described as "inevitable" tensions. US concerns include the lack of transparency in Chinaâs military budget and its weapons acquisitions, currency inflexibility, copyright piracy and alleged neo-mercantilist approach to obtaining energy supplies.
Some groups have accused China of not doing enough to prod North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. The latest round of six-party talks among China, the United States, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas aimed at ending Pyongyangâs nuclear ambitions ended in a stalemate three weeks ago. North Korea has threatened to boycott the talks after the United States imposed financial sanctions on it for counterfeiting.
#1
It worries me how China has been buying our debt. I hope this all shakes out in a favorable light.
Posted by: Jan ||
12/10/2005 1:03 Comments ||
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The fact that China is buying our debt can be looked at a number of different ways.
Example, as a sign of deep distrust in the other coubtries ability to pay.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
12/10/2005 8:27 Comments ||
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I just hope that when America gets to a point where we "owe" China, that we aren't forced into any "imperial entanglements" so to speak. (As Obi Wan once said).
There is so much that I need to catch up on here.
Posted by: Jan ||
12/10/2005 9:14 Comments ||
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Cold War MAD gets new meaning: Mutually Assured Dependency. Chinese and American economies have become vitally dependent on each other, so military war becomes prohibitively (one hopes) expensive.
#6
economies have become vitally dependent on each other, so military war becomes prohibitively (one hopes) expensive
Sorry, but someone has to make this point-- The same idea was mooted about 1910-13 (Dreadnought, Massey). It also should be pointed out that the current bunch of thugs running china's economy are kind of fuzzy on the whole concept of fiduciary responsibility.
These clowns will go to war in a heart beat if they think their rule is seriously threatened, regardless of the consequences. (see Tienamen Sq., 1989) The only reason they haven't invaded Tiwan yet is that doing so would probably weaken their grip on power more than leaving it be--for now.
As for co-operation, we can expect only enough to keep the US from looking at Beijing as a potential target for a democratic revolution. Not a shred more.
China, and by extention other Tyranies and would be tyranies (France, Much of europe) ruled by small, semi-closed elites are in a mild panic now that the US has gotten into the exporting revolution and destabilization game. Or at least that is my opinion as to why parts of the world are so torqued about Iraq and the war on terror. They see that the fit at least part of the target description.
Sorry about the rant, but hey...
Posted by: N guard ||
12/10/2005 12:43 Comments ||
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yup - that's my diagnosis too, Nguard.
Posted by: too true ||
12/10/2005 13:04 Comments ||
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Fine rant NG, especially the part about exporting revolution game. :>
#9
Sounds good to me, too, NGuard. Also, that China holds U.S. debt means that in extremis the U.S. could refuse to pay upon demand, which makes China's financial risk actually greater than ours... The cost in lost goodwill with the rest of the world would be ugly, but not so much as the actual financial cost to China, I imagine.
After decades of being forced to celebrate a deeply corrupt regime, national officials have declared a new national observance: National Integrity Day.
As the name suggests, the holiday, set for Dec. 9, celebrates integrity but also the achievements of the Iraq Commission on Public Integrity, an independent government organization that seeks out and investigates government corruption.
National officials ushered in the new holiday Thursday with a lively celebration at the Baghdad Convention Center, a place once off-limits to all but Saddam Husseinâs closest cronies.
The commissioner, Judge Radhi Hamza Al-Radhi, said the organization has investigated about 2,000 cases of corruption, big and small, since its inception in mid-2004. One ministry was found to have misused $1.3 billion in funds, he said. A slew of elected officials have been found to have taken bribes, and 600 such cases have been referred to the Central Criminal Court of Iraq for prosecution, Radhi said.
The commission also educates schoolchildren on integrity, requires government employees to sign a code of conduct, and works in conjunction with two other Iraqi government entities to investigate and audit government departments.
#2
Good for them! If the Middle East is ever really going to change, this is one of the customs that absolutely must be inculcated into the new government. Successful governments have honest civil services and the rule of law. Unsuccessful ones don't. It's that simple.
Posted by: mac ||
12/10/2005 22:29 Comments ||
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JERUSALEM: Israel called Iranâs President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad âvery dangerousâ on Friday after he expressed doubt that the Holocaust occurred and suggested the Jewish state be moved to Europe.
This sounds like they're setting the stage.
âThis was not a misstatement or a passing remark,â Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told Israel Radio. âIt is a systematic way of thinking which is intended to bring about the annihilation of the state of Israel.â Ahmadinejadâs comments drew quick international condemnation, as did his call in October for Israel to be âwiped off the mapâ.
Asked whether Ahmadinejad could be compared to Libyaâs Muammar Gaddafi, once among Israelâs most implacable foes, Shalom said: âI would not take him lightly. Such a statement ... displays a way of thinking which shows he is very dangerous.â
Elaborating on Israelâs concerns, Shalom said âIran is now developing missiles which can reach the capitals of Europeâ and urged that the matter be referred to the UN Security Council. Israel has accused Iran of trying to build nuclear weapons.
Iranâs official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying on Thursday: âSome European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces ... Although we donât accept this claim.â
âIf the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe ... to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe,â he said.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Thursday expressed shock over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejadâs remarks questioning the Holocaust and suggesting that the state of Israel be moved to Europe. âThe Secretary General was shocked to see the remarks attributed to the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in which he reportedly cast doubt on the truth of the Holocaust and suggested that the State of Israel should be moved from the Middle East to Europe,â a UN statement said.
Of course, that doesn't mean he'll do anything about it.
Annan noted that only last month the UN General Assembly passed a resolution which ârejects any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full or in partâ. The UN chief called on all member states âto combat such denial, and to educate their populations about the well established historical facts of the Holocaust, in which one third of the Jewish people were murdered, along with countless members of other minorities.â
Annan also recalled that last October he had reminded all member states that Israel is a âlong-standing UN member with the same rights and obligations as every other memberâ, and that, under the UN Charter, âall members have pledged to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.â
There, that ought to do it.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/10/2005 00:00 ||
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#1
Is declaring Ahamdinejad dengerous prelude to declaring him radioactive?
Biodefense leaps ahead of one vaccine for one germ approach. Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with a national team have developed a biodefense cocktail which activates the immune system against a broad range of viruses and bacteria. The new treatment boosts the body's response against common characteristics of germs. It is expected to be deployed to our troops within the next five years. Using a nasal spray, the cocktail of drugs will trigger immune activation in the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts, the most likely routes of attack...
...According to Dr. Whelan, "This will revolutionize our defense against germ warfare, as well as the treatment of infectious diseases in our population, as a whole. It is possible to include agents which inhibit molecular events leading to septic shock, as well. This new technology confers broad spectrum, short term, immunity against unknown biothreat agents for war fighters sent into harm's way."
Caution: the article in question (free abstract of the article here) is a review article, not an original publication. There's no new ground broken here, just a summary of recent efforts. Toll-like receptors, referenced in the article, are a class of receptors on the surface of certain immune cells that recognize bacteria and viruses. These then activate certain inflammatory and immunologic cascades via a series of proteins called cytokines (the interferons are a class of cytokines) and chemokines. These act to switch on signals within inflammatory cells, and to call additional inflammatory cells to the scene. The hope is that if you can stimulate these with drugs, you can heighten the initial response to an agent (e.g., anthrax, hemorrhagic fever) and provide extra defense against the offending agent. Great idea; I know people who are working on this and they have interesting data. Ready for clinical use in five year? Maybe, but it's going to take a lot more work.
#1
Saw the headline, thought it was another of those "North Korea's scientists invent rocks" articles. So their serious? What about people whose immune system is too damn active (i.e., allergies) already?
The First Phase of `Those in Love with Velayat' Joint military maneuver started on Friday morning in waters of Oman Sea with the announcement of the maneuver's secret password in this phase, "O Seyed ul-Shohada!" Not as catchy as "Tora! Tora! Tora!"...
The order for beginning the war massive games was issued by Emir Rear Admiral Sajjad Kouchaki and the commander of Karbala headquarters, following which various units of the Islamic Republic Army, Islamic Republic Guard Corps (IRGC), Islamic Republic Police Force (IRPF) and Basij (mobilization) voluntary forces started a phase of the most massive war games of the country's entire armed forces.
The spokesman for the maneuver told IRNA, "The maneuver plans have been devised by the commanders in a way to provide sufficient technical and military information for participant units that come from beyond the war game's regions to put on display their capabilities for fighting real wars, resorting to strategies of non-classical combats."
Admiral Sayyari emphasized, "The strategic war game, closest possible version of a military maneuver to a real war, extends from the strategic Hormoz Strait to Guatr Port of Chabahar that is the south-most border point of the country in the north of the Indian Ocean at a 33 nautical mile area. Powerful locally manufactured submarines would launch their depth against surface and in-depth operations in deep parts of Oman Sea and the Indian Ocean."
The spokesman for `Those in Love with Velayat' maneuver reiterated helicopters equipped with sonar devices (capable of detecting passage of submarines) play an important role in detecting and destroying the enemy's submarines."
He added, "Hovercrafts, small navy ships capable of launching missile attacks, tactical ship breaker warships, frogmen, commandoes, and musketeers from both the navy and the IRGC will then take position in the maneuver zone and begin their mission in the massive war game. In this maneuver the Islamic Republic Army's Air Force, too, would support all participating units, taking advantage of reconnaissance planes, its sea patrol planes and its bomber jets."
He announced, "According to military experts, the country's most expert military, police, and Basiji forces will take part in the maneuver, being fully equipped and quite ready, taking advantage of the country's missile sites for defensive and offensive operations, and for countering the sea, undersea, and air attacks of the enemies' forces in five `national reconciliation' phases, aimed at defending Islamic Iran." Chabahar Port City, the country's farthest southeast point, is on the coast of Oman Sea.
#4
Send in our oldest sub to sink their subs, our oldest B52 with our most outdated nuke to get the troops and a Huey for the air to air fights. These guys are reminiscent of the Monty Pithon Black Knights. If they want their asses kicked lets give them what they ask for. Screw world opinion.
Posted by: 49 pan ||
12/10/2005 11:43 Comments ||
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#5
LOL Tu! I hope they're not aware of Operation Amy certain discreet dance steps.
Local-made subs, eh? My first guess, these would be the indigenous Camel class boats, so named because they are filled with Arab seamen. (note: yeah, I know the Iranians are Persians, but then the joke doesn't work. Sue me.)
According to Andrew Toppan's authoritive hazegray.org, they have three Russian export Kilo class boats. In Mr. Toppan words, "These boats are reported to have serious operational difficulties." Heh. Sounds fear inspiring, at least for the crew. Anyone for submersible martyrdom?
#7
Great! We get to see what their operational doctrine looks like, if we didn't already. I wonder if they realize how much info they'll be giving away for free?
#8
The Iranian Navy Kilo battery problems (Russian batteries were designed for cold waters and don't work well in Indian ocean conditions) were reportedly solved when Iran (and Algeria) purchased batteries from Standard Batteries of Mumbai. The Swedish designed, Indian built batteries seem to work well: the Kilos have performed well in Indian Navy service.
Posted by: john ||
12/10/2005 18:34 Comments ||
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#9
think the Iranian Navy is top notch? I'd assume a land-oriented army military would make as much use of their navy as Mohammed did...
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/10/2005 19:36 Comments ||
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The British government has revealed that a consignment of zirconium silicate was wrongfully stopped being exported to Iran, according to IRNA [Islamic Republic News Agency]. Minister for Europe Douglas Alexander said that a truck traveling from the UK was stopped by authorities in Bulgaria on August 31 and that the British Embassy in Sofia informed relevant authorities in London a week later.
Minister for Europe Douglas Alexander said that a truck traveling from the UK was stopped by authorities in Bulgaria on August 31 and that the British Embassy in Sofia informed relevant authorities in London a week later.
"We arranged for the carrying out of necessary checks and confirmed on 28 October that the cargo was legitimate. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office therefore had no further involvement," Alexander said in a written reply to parliament published Thursday.
Zirconium silicate is used as a white emulsifier for tiles, tableware and ceramics. But the metal itself is also employed in tubes for cladding uranium oxide fuel as a corrosion resistant in nuclear reactors. It was reported that the truck was stopped in Bulgaria because it was emitting an alleged high radiation level when it crossed the border.
But the Department of Trade and Industry in London said they were aware of the background about the export and that the case was "no cause for concern."
Six people have been arrested in connection with ecoterrorism attacks in Oregon and Washington dating back to 1998, including the destruction of a Bonneville Power Administration tower near Bend, Ore., on the eve of the millennium, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
The arrests were made Wednesday in New York, Virginia, Oregon and Arizona, and each of the defendants has been indicted in Oregon or Washington. Besides the tower's destruction, the attacks included three arsons in Oregon and one in Olympia.
One of the fires caused more than $500,000 in damage, and the other three caused more than $1 million, investigators said. The Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front claimed responsibility for most of the acts.
Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, 28, of Portland, Ore., was charged with conspiring to destroy an energy facility and destruction of an energy facility in the attack on the transmission tower. She faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
Two of the defendants â Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, 28, and Daniel Gerard McGowan, 31 â face up to life in prison if convicted of setting fires Jan. 2, 2001, at the Superior Lumber Co. in Glendale, Ore., and May 21, 2001, at the Jefferson Poplar Farm in Clatskanie, Ore. Damage from each fire exceeded $1 million.
Meyerhoff was arrested in Charlottesville, Va., where he was attending Piedmont Community College. McGowan was arrested in New York City.
Kevin M. Tubbs, 36, and William C. Rodgers, 40, face up to 20 years each if convicted of a June 21, 1998, arson at the Animal and Plant and Health Inspection Services facility in Olympia, which caused $1.2 million in damage. Tubbs was arrested in Springfield, Ore., and Rodgers was arrested in Prescott, Ariz.
Sarah Kendall Harvey, a 28-year-old student at Northern Arizona University, was arrested in Flagstaff after being charged with a Dec. 27, 1998, fire at U.S. Forest Industries in Medford, Ore. That fire caused an estimated $500,000 in damage.
The defendants were scheduled to make initial appearances in federal court in the districts where they were arrested.
The U.S. Attorney's office in Seattle said the investigation is continuing.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
DHAKA - Moderate clerics in about half a million mosques across Bangladesh on Friday addressed worshippers by decrying a wave of bomb attacks carried out by suspected Islamic militants that left 23 people dead and 150 injured in less than two weeks, officials said. âThose who are shedding blood of innocent people in the name of establishing Islamic rule are actually bringing shame on Islam,â said Maulana Obaidul Huq, the Khatib (chief cleric) of Baitul Mukarram mosque, the biggest national mosque at the heart of the capital Dhaka.
LONDON - British police involved in the fatal shooting of an innocent Brazilian man, gunned down in July by officers who thought he was a suicide bomber, might face criminal action, an independent watchdog said on Friday.
MEXICO CITY - Mexican authorities seized an arsenal of guns and small explosives in a house in the violence-plagued border city of Nuevo Laredo across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas, officials said Friday. Authorities, who had obtained a search warrant, also found a small bag of marijuana, fake Mexican army and federal police uniforms, radio equipment, tear gas, night-vision goggles, military-style boots and helmets, handcuffs, and a baseball cap with the DEA emblazoned across the front, Mexico's Attorney General's office said in a news release.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan strongly defended the Canadian United Nations human rights chief Louise Arbour on Thursday against criticism she had no business second-guessing U.S. practices in pursuing terrorists. In a rare rebuke of a UN envoy, Annan plans to take up the issue as soon as possible with U.S. Ambassador John Bolton. The secretary general, in fact, echoed Arbour's argument that torture must never be used to fight terrorism.
JERUSALEM: Israel called Iranâs President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad âvery dangerousâ on Friday after he expressed doubt that the Holocaust occurred and suggested the Jewish state be moved to Europe. 
Biodefense leaps ahead of one vaccine for one germ approach. Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with a national team have developed a biodefense cocktail which activates the immune system against a broad range of viruses and bacteria. The new treatment boosts the body's response against common characteristics of germs. It is expected to be deployed to our troops within the next five years. Using a nasal spray, the cocktail of drugs will trigger immune activation in the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts, the most likely routes of attack...
The First Phase of `Those in Love with Velayat' Joint military maneuver started on Friday morning in waters of Oman Sea with the announcement of the maneuver's secret password in this phase, "O Seyed ul-Shohada!" 
