The Gates of Hell

U.S. and Mexico align against brutal narcotics trade

joshuah — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:31:15 +0000

To avenge the arrest of their leader, Mexican drug cartel commandos went on a rampage this summer across the lawless state of Michoacan, seizing 12 Mexican police officers and dumping their bound and stripped corpses in a pile beside a busy highway.

The slaughtered federal agents, it later emerged, had something in common: All had been vetted and trained by the U.S. government to work alongside its anti-narcotics agents. Officials said the American connection made them high-value targets for the cartels, which are lashing back ruthlessly against a military crackdown involving unprecedented cooperation between the two countries.

After decades of mistrust and sometimes betrayal, Mexican and U.S. authorities are increasingly setting aside their differences to unite against a common enemy. According to interviews in Washington and Mexico City, the two countries are sharing sensitive intelligence and computer technology, military hardware and, perhaps most importantly, U.S. know-how to train and vet Mexican agents. Police and soldiers secretly on the cartels’ payroll have long poisoned efforts at cross-border cooperation against some of the world’s most dangerous criminal organizations.

Source/Full Story: msnbc.com

Large Hadron Collider back online

joshuah — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:23 +0000

Great, one step closer to ripping open the ripening belly of hell.

“The LHC is back,” the European Organization for Nuclear Research announced triumphantly Friday, as the world’s largest particle accelerator resumed operation more than a year after an electrical failure shut it down.

Restarting the Large Hadron Collider — the $10 billion research tool’s full name — has been “a herculean effort,” CERN’s director for accelerators, Steve Myers, said in a statement announcing the success.

Experiments at the LHC may help answer fundamental questions such as why Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — which describes the world on a large scale — doesn’t jibe with quantum mechanics, which deals with matter far too small to see.

Physicists established a circulating proton beam in the LHC’s 17-mile tunnel at 10 p.m. (4 p.m. ET) Friday, CERN said, a critical step towards getting results from the accelerator.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

Source/Full Story: CNN.com
Technorati Tags: LHC

Secret CCTV cameras fitted INSIDE people’s homes to spy on neighbours

joshuah — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:50:55 +0000

CCTV cameras are being fitted inside family homes by council ’snoopers’ to spy on neighbours in the street outside, it was revealed today.

The £1,000 security cameras have been placed inside properties but are trained on the streets to gather evidence of anti-social behaviour.

Each device is linked to a laptop computer and accessible online by police and council officials 24 hours a day.

But the trial inside two homes by Croydon council in south London has sparked new fears about invasion of privacy and Britain’s ‘surveillance society’.

Source/Full Story: Mail Online

CIA Secret Prison Found Outside Vilnius, Lithuania

joshuah — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:43:56 +0000

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time. A full report on the can be seen on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson tonight.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”

Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the “black site” in 2004.

Source/Full Story: ABC News

Leaders meet to elect EU president

joshuah — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:19:40 +0000

Experts have said the president should be a technocrat who can provide unity and build consensus among the EU’s main institutions – the council of nations for the 27 member states, the European Commission and the European parliament.

Glyn Ford, a former Labour MEP, told Al Jazeera that building a political presence in Europe was one of the challenges a new president would face.

“Europe is bigger than the United States, its richer than the United States, it gives more to the developing world than the United States by far. But we don’t actually have the political presence,” he said.

“Now how do you develop that political presence?”

European leaders will also be seeking a name for a foreign-policy supremo for the bloc.

Source/Full Story: Al Jazeera English

Military advising Salinas CA. police on counterinsurgency strategy to stem gang problem

joshuah — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:53:45 +0000

…
In the space of 11 days this year, seven people were murdered in Salinas. Each killing, like the record 25 homicides the previous year, spilled from the gang warfare that this summer pushed the homicide rate in the city of 140,000 to three times that of Los Angeles. Residents retreated indoors at night, and Mayor Dennis Donohue affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the U.S. military.

Since February, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency strategy, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city.

“This is our surge,” said Donohue, who solicited the assistance from the elite Naval Postgraduate School, 20 miles and a world away in Monterey. “When the public heard about this, they thought we were going to send the Navy SEALs into Salinas.”

In fact, the cavalry arrived in civvies, carrying laptops rather than M-16s and software instead of mortars. In this case, the most valuable military asset turned out to be an idea: Change the dynamic in the community and victory can follow.

“It’s a little laboratory,” said retired Col. Hy Rothstein, the former Army career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students, mostly naval officers taking time between deployments to pick up a master’s degree. Their effort in Salinas counts as extracurricular and is necessarily voluntary, given the constitutional bar on the military operating within U.S. borders.

“Obviously, there are restrictions,” said Salinas Deputy Police Chief Kelly McMillin. “Not only the constitutional part of it, but just the idea we are going to have choppers fast-roping onto Alisal Street.”

‘Occupying force’

The reality turns out to be less dramatic: The thrust of the plan relies on winning the trust of people. In Salinas, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the uniformed forces patrolling “are still viewed as an occupying force,” said Police Chief Louis Fetherolf.

Source/Full Story: washingtonpost.com
Technorati Tags: Hy Rothstein

‘Something may come through’ dimensional ‘doors’ at Large Hadron Collider

joshuah — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:42:17 +0000

A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or “unknown unknowns” – for instance “an extra dimension”.

“Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it,” said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier this week.

Source/Full Story:: The Register
Technorati Tags: Large Hadron Collider

Netanyahu Threatens to Retaliate if Palestinians Declare Statehood

joshuah — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:11:31 +0000

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to retaliate if Palestinians declare a unilateral state, saying such a move would unravel existing agreements with the Israelis.

Netanyahu’s stern comments come the same day that a senior Palestinian official told Fox News they are considering a U.N. resolution to declare a Palestinian state. Palestinian officials had said Sunday they were preparing to ask the United Nations to endorse an independent state without Israel’s consent because they were losing faith in the peace talks.

But Netanyahu, speaking at the Saban Forum in Jerusalem, said there is “no substitute” for negotiations.

“Any unilateral action would only unravel the framework of agreements between us and can only lead to one-sided steps on the part of Israel,” he said. He did not elaborate further.

The statehood idea appeared to be largely symbolic. The U.S., Israel’s closest ally, would likely veto any initiative at the United Nations, and Israel controls the areas where the Palestinians want to establish their homeland. Nonetheless, the move reflected growing Palestinian frustration with the deadlock in peace efforts.

The Palestinians are upset over continued Israeli expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and claim that the U.S. has not put sufficient pressure on Israel to halt the construction. The lack of progress has led Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to threaten to quit politics.

Source/Full Story: FOXNews.com
Technorati Tags: Benjamin Netanyahu

How to DDOS a federal wiretap

joshuah — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:37:09 +0000

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say they’ve discovered a way to circumvent the networking technology used by law enforcement to tap phone lines in the U.S.

The flaws they’ve found “represent a serious threat to the accuracy and completeness of wiretap records used for both criminal investigation and as evidence in trial,” the researchers say in their paper, set to be presented Thursday at a computer security conference in Chicago.

Following up on earlier work on evading analog wiretap devices called loop extenders, the Penn researchers took a deep look at the newer technical standards used to enable wiretapping on telecommunication switches. They found that while these newer devices probably don’t suffer from many of the bugs they’d found in the loop extender world, they do introduce new flaws. In fact, wiretaps could probably be rendered useless if the connection between the switches and law enforcement are overwhelmed with useless data, something known as a denial of service (DOS) attack.

Source/Full Story:: Network World
Technorati Tags: wiretaps, DDOS

CIA Wins Epic Turf Battle With Intelligence Czar

joshuah — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:36:01 +0000

The CIA has decisively won a long-running turf fight with the director of national intelligence, the CIA’s ostensible boss, over who will be the top U.S. intelligence representatives in foreign countries, NEWSWEEK has learned. According to a White House ruling, in every country where U.S. intelligence agencies operate, the CIA’s station chief will continue to be the most senior U.S. intelligence officer, intelligence officials told NEWSWEEK.

The ruling represents a big victory for CIA Director Leon Panetta and a setback for the national-intelligence czar, retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair. Blair had argued in high-level meetings for months that as the nation’s intelligence overlord, he should have the power, in special circumstances, to name an officer from an agency other than the CIA as his “DNI representative” in countries where U.S. intelligence officers are stationed. That would theoretically make such a person superior to the local CIA chief. The issue was presented for resolution several weeks ago to Vice President Joe Biden.

Source/Full Story: Declassified Blog

U.S. to Seize Mosques, Skyscraper Linked to Iran

joshuah — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:31:41 +0000

Federal prosecutors have taken steps to seize four U.S. mosques and a Manhattan skyscraper owned by a nonprofit Muslim organization long suspected of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government.

In what could prove to be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in U.S. history, prosecutors filed a civil complaint Thursday in federal court against the Alavi Foundation, seeking the forfeiture of more than $500 million in assets.

The assets include bank accounts; Islamic centers consisting of schools and mosques in New York City, Maryland, California and Houston; more than 100 acres in Virginia; and a 36-story glass office tower in New York.

Confiscating the properties would be a sharp blow against Iran, which has been accused by the U.S. government of bankrolling terrorism and trying to build a nuclear bomb.

Source/Full Story: FOXNews.com

Jewish terrorist suspect on murder charges

joshuah — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:30:37 +0000

I don’t see the need to put Jewish Terrorist in quotes like CNN.

An American-born Israeli man, called a terrorist by Israeli police, was indicted Thursday on murder charges despite his attorney’s concerns about his mental stability.

Yaakov “Jack” Teitel, a West Bank settler, was indicted on two murder charges, four attempted murder charges and several lesser charges, including carrying and manufacturing weapons, Israeli court authorities said.

Teitel, 37, was arrested last month in connection with a string of attacks and murder plots over the past 12 years against Arabs, homosexuals, leftists, messianic Jews and police, according to Israeli police and security forces.

Attorney Adi Keidar has said that his client is mentally unstable and needs psychiatric help.

Source/Full Story: CNN.com

Confidential plans for 1.2 billion ID cards: Creating a Unique ID for every resident in India

joshuah — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:18:25 +0000

Grab the PDF @ Wikileaks

This confidential working paper (49 pp) presents the current plan for India’s Unique ID Databse Project. Numerous RTI (Right to Information ) petitions failed to obtain this document about the world’s biggest citizen identification scheme.

Because the project will likely become a model for many countries the document is of global interest

Nidal Malik Hasan Tried to Contact al Qaeda, U.S. intelligence knew, refused Congressional Request for Info

joshuah — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:34:22 +0000

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

According to the officials, the Army was informed of Hasan’s contact, but it is unclear what, if anything, the Army did in response.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said that he requested the CIA and other intelligence agencies brief the committee on what was known, if anything, about Hasan by the U.S. intelligence community, only to be refused.

In response, Hoekstra issued a document preservation request to four intelligence agencies. The letter, dated November 7th, was sent to directors Dennis Blair (DNI), Robert Mueller (FBI), Lt. Gen Keith Alexander (NSA) and Leon Panetta (CIA).

Hoekstra said he is “absolutely furious” that the house intel committee has been refused an intelligence briefing by the DNI or CIA on Hasan’s attempt to reach out to al Qaeda, as first reported by ABC News.

“This is a law enforcement investigation, in which other agencies—not the CIA—have the lead,” CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said in a response to ABC News. ” Any suggestion that the CIA refused to brief Congress is incorrect.”

Investigators want to know if Hasan maintained contact with a radical mosque leader from Virginia, Anwar al Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen and runs a web site that promotes jihad around the world against the U.S.

In a blog posting early Monday titled “Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing,” Awlaki calls Hasan a “hero” and a “man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

According to his site, Awlaki served as an imam in Denver, San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia.

Source/Full Story:: ABC News

Our government trying to hush the media: Justice Dept. Asked For News Site’s Visitor Lists

joshuah — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:18:39 +0000

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site “not to disclose the existence of this request” unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department’s subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward “promoting social and economic justice” and “social change.”)

The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to “include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information,” including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

“I didn’t think anything we were doing was worthy of any (federal) attention,” Clair said in a telephone interview with CBSNews.com on Monday. After talking to other Indymedia volunteers, Clair ended up calling the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which represented her at no cost.

Source/Full Story:: CBS News

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