t r u t h o u t - Jason Leopold on Yoo, Walker, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency, representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and judge advocate generals (JAGs) from all four branches of the military and the process of justifying degrading interrogation tactics in clear violation of the Geneva Convention.

Tourism Stats

The U.S. Department of Commerce announced that 3.8 million international visitors traveled to the United States in March 2009, a decrease of 20 percent compared to March 2008. Total visitation in the first quarter 2009 was down 14 percent from the first quarter 2008. International visitors spent $9.9 billion during the month, 16 percent less than visitors spent in March 2008. March 2009 marks the fifth consecutive month of decreases in international visitors spending.

June 23

CBC - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security launched another unmanned surveillance aircraft over the Canadian border on Monday, this time in the Great Lakes area, to try to stem the flow of drugs, migrants and terrorists into the country, U.S. officials told CBC News.

The U.S. has been using the Predator B drone aircraft to patrol its border with Mexico.

The Predator is the unarmed version of the drone plane that the U.S. uses to conduct air strikes in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. The aircraft is able to fly at an altitude of 6,000 metres and can remain in the air for 20 hours.

The plane is equipped with 3,000 sensors and cameras capable of detecting a moving person from 10 kilometres away.

The planes will gather information along the border and transmit it to operators who will in turn contact border agents. The drones will not carry weapons and the U.S. will need permission to send them into in Canadian airspace.

Josh Meyer | Washington | June 23

LA Times - The Bush administration plan to use satellites for domestic surveillance is reportedly axed after state and local officials say they have higher priorities.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has decided to kill a controversial Bush administration program to use U.S. spy satellites to collect domestic intelligence for counter-terrorism, law enforcement and security, a senior Homeland Security official said Monday evening.

The National Applications Office program was established in 2007 to provide up-to-the-minute electronic intelligence to local and state law enforcement. But it has been delayed due to concerns by privacy and civil liberties advocates -- and by some lawmakers -- that it would intrude on Americans' lives.

The senior Homeland Security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the program is classified, said Napolitano had decided to nix it after consulting with state and local law enforcement officials and learning that they had far more pressing priorities than using satellites to collect information and eavesdrop on people.

June 19

BBC - The US is "in a good position" to protect its territory from a potential North Korean missile strike, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said.

His comments came in response to a report that North Korea was considering launching a missile towards Hawaii.

"We do have some concerns if they were to launch a missile to the West, in the direction of Hawaii," Mr Gates said.

The US has approved the deployment of missiles and radar to "provide support" in the event of an attack, he added.

NSA Secret Database Ensnared President Clinton's Private Email
Wednesday 17 June 2009
by: Kim Zetter | Visit article original @ Wired

A secret NSA surveillance database containing millions of intercepted foreign and domestic e-mails includes the personal correspondence of former President Bill Clinton, according to The New York Times.

    An NSA intelligence analyst was apparently investigated after accessing Clinton's personal correspondence in the database, the paper reports, though it didn't say how many of Clinton's e-mails were captured or when the interception occurred.

Jim Wolf | Washington | June 17

Reuters - U.S. ground-based interceptor missiles stand a better-than-90-percent chance of thwarting a "rogue nation" ballistic missile attack on the United States in the next five years, the second highest-ranking military officer told Congress on Tuesday.

Giving the most bullish military assessment to date on the Boeing Co-managed system's capabilities, Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replied "ninety percent plus" when asked the odds of defeating a long-range missile that could be fired by North Korea.

Lisbeth Gronlund, an expert on missile defense at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dismissed his estimate as "irresponsible and based on wishful thinking," not facts.

Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Alan Elsner | Washington | June 14

Reuters - CIA director Leon Panetta says it's almost as if former vice president Dick Cheney would like to see another attack on the United States to prove he is right in criticizing President Barack Obama for abandoning the "harsh interrogation" of terrorism suspects.

"I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue," Panetta said in an interview published in The New Yorker magazine's June 22 issue.

"It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point."

John Schwartz | San Francisco | June 13

NYT - The decision issued late Friday by a judge in San Francisco allowing a civil lawsuit to go forward against a former Bush administration official, John C. Yoo, might seem like little more than the removal of a procedural roadblock.

But lawyers for the man suing Mr. Yoo, Jose Padilla, say it provides substantive interpretation of constitutional issues for all detainees and could have a broad impact.

Daniel Tencer | Jan 13

Raw Story -

You’ve got to hand it to the U.S. Government Accountability Office — they’ve got initiative.

When the government agency — which has for years been holding successive administrations’ feet to the fire over deficit spending and other management issues — was tasked with investigating how secure America’s sensitive technologies are, it set up a dummy corporation to buy American weapons and see if it could ship them to countries known as transit points for smuggling weapons.

What they managed to smuggle out of the United States was astounding: Triggers for nuclear bombs; microchips for smart missiles; components for improvised explosives; even current-issue U.S. Army body armor.

And the method they used to do it was brilliant in its simplicity: To avoid export restrictions, they set up their dummy corporation inside the United States. Then, once in possession of the equipment, they shipped it overseas.

Spencer S. Hsu | June 8

WaPo - President Obama's contingency plan to help finance production of a swine flu vaccine with funds set aside to develop defenses against biological attacks would weaken the nation's preparedness for terrorism, the leaders of a bipartisan commission on weapons of mass destruction said yesterday.

The White House asked Congress on Tuesday for authority to spend up to $9 billion more for an H1N1 flu vaccine and other preparations against the novel flu strain that first appeared in April.

Of the total, the administration asked Congress to provide $2 billion in "contingent" funding. Another $3 billion could come from the Project BioShield Special Reserve Fund, created in 2004 to field countermeasures against nuclear, biological or chemical threats; $3.1 billion from stimulus funds appropriated to spur economic recovery; and $800 million from the Department of Health and Human Services.

"Using BioShield funds for flu preparedness will severely diminish the nation's efforts to prepare for WMD events and will leave the nation less, not more, prepared," the commission's chairman, former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), and vice chairman, former senator James M. Talent (R-Mo.), wrote to Obama in a letter sent yesterday and in another dated Wednesday to his budget director, Peter Orszag.

Raiding BioShield would weaken the ability of private firms to raise credit and sustain long-term research and development on drugs to respond to bioterror threats, for which there is no private market, industry officials said. The former lawmakers said the H1N1 influenza virus poses a public health threat that merits its own funding.

Eric Lichtblau | Washington | June 4

NYT - A federal judge on Wednesday threw out more than three dozen lawsuits claiming that the nation’s major telecommunications companies had illegally assisted in the wiretapping without warrants program approved by President George W. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker of Federal District Court in Northern California said that although consumer and privacy groups raised important constitutional issues in their claims, Congress had left no doubt about its “unequivocal intention” when it passed a measure last summer giving immunity to phone carriers in the wiretapping program.

The ruling represents a major victory not only for AT&T and other carriers, which faced potential damages of billions of dollars if they lost the cases, but also for intelligence officials in Washington who had fought assertively in their defense. Officials from both the Bush and the Obama administrations maintained that the cooperation of the phone companies has been vital to national security and that penalizing them for their participation would jeopardize important surveillance operations.

Washington | May 26

AFP - US President Barack Obama on Tuesday ended the divide between national security and homeland security staff in the White House, arguing the move would make Americans safer.

Obama shook up the security structure of his teams of advisors after examining the results of a study he ordered into how best to handle homeland security and counter-terrorism efforts.

"I have carefully reviewed the findings and recommendations of that study, and am announcing a new approach which will strengthen our security and the safety of our citizens," Obama said in a statement.

"These decisions reflect the fundamental truth that the challenges of the 21st Century are increasingly unconventional and transnational, and therefore demand a response that effectively integrates all aspects of American power."

The move will see the full integration of the White House National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council to support all policy on international, transnational and homeland security issues.

Ginger Thompson | Washington | May 23

NYT - After years of delay and hundreds of millions of dollars in preparations, Customs and Border Protection officials said new security measures would go into effect on June 1, requiring Americans entering the country by land or sea to show government-approved identification.

Currently, Americans crossing borders or arriving on cruise ships can prove their nationality by showing thousands of other forms of identification. But after the start of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, Americans will be required to present a passport or one of five other secure identification cards.

Coming as the summer vacation season starts, the measure is expected to lengthen lines at least temporarily at border crossings and seaports. But the biggest impact is expected along the nearly 4,000-mile border that the United States shares with Canada, which both countries once boasted was the world’s longest undefended frontier.

May 23

DPA -
The US government could build a new high security prison to house some of the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.

Gates defended President Barack Obama's decision to close Guantanamo and dismissed congressional opposition to bring some of the detainees to prisons on US soil as 'fear-mongering.'

Gates said that federal maximum security prisons - known as 'supermax' facilities - are capable of safely housing some of the 240 detainees currently locked up at Guantanamo.

'The truth is there's a lot of fear-mongering about this,' Gates said in an interview in NBC television. 'We've never had an escape from a super-max prison. And that's where these guys will go. And if not one of the existing ones, we'll create a new one.'

- The Washington Post, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with President Obama's speech at the National Archives yesterday where he defended his antiterrorism policies. The setting was particularly symbolic. By giving his address where the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are kept, Obama meant to underscore the idea that Americans don't have to compromise their values in order to protect the nation's security. As soon as he was done speaking, former Vice President Dick Cheney gave his own speech at a conservative think tank, where he defended the previous administration's policies toward terrorism and harshly criticized Obama. The "contentious tit for tat," as the WSJ puts it, that captivated Washington yesterday was made up of "an extraordinary set of speeches" that "gave the country the national security debate it never had during last year's campaign," notes the Post. The NYT says the competing views amounted to "the debate Americans might have witnessed had Mr. Cheney run for president."

WaPo - President Obama acknowledged publicly for the first time yesterday that some detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have to be held without trial indefinitely, siding with conservative national security advocates on one of the most contentious issues raised by the closing of the military prison in Cuba.

Ian says it best:

In other words, people who have committed no crime which can be proved in a court of law, including the crime of conspiracy, will be held indefinitely without a trial. Note that Obama wants to use military commissions to try some detainees, which means that these detainees can’t be found guilty of anything even under military law.

This is punishment for a thought crime. It is also exactly the same rationale used by the Bush administration.

Obama also said something else which is a continuation of Bush administration excuses:

Transcript of Obama's speech can be read here

Washington | May 18

Reuters - The former U.S. attorney general and the FBI director cannot be subjected to a lawsuit by a Pakistani man claiming abuse while imprisoned in New York after the September 11, 2001, attacks the Supreme Court ruled on Monday.

The nation's high court overturned a ruling that Javaid Iqbal, who was held more than a year after the attacks, can proceed with his lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Iqbal, a Muslim, said in the lawsuit that he had suffered verbal and physical abuse, including unnecessary strip searches and brutal beatings by guards. He said he had been singled out because of unlawful ethnic and religious discrimination.

Bob Drogin | May 10

LA Times - The administration says security should be as stringent as on the Mexican frontier. Border residents and Canadian officials disagree, saying the terrorism threat is exaggerated.

High above the rugged border, an unmanned Predator B drone equipped with night-vision cameras and cloud-piercing radar has scanned the landscape for signs of smugglers, illegal immigrants or terrorists.

Armed agents checked the identification of border crossers while radiation sensors and other devices monitored vehicles entering by road. Soon, a network of telescopic and infrared video cameras mounted atop 80-foot metal towers will rise above key locations.

The beefed-up border security is not taking place along America's chaotic southern border -- riven by drug smuggling, gun running and illegal immigration -- but rather, its traditionally boring northern boundary with Canada.

The changes have jarred communities along the 3,987-mile frontier, the longest undefended border in the world.

"Those of us who grew up here never considered it to be a border," said Bernadette Secco, a communications consultant on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls who sometimes dines or shops in the U.S. three times a day. "We're neighbors, not terrorists."

The U.S. has increased security along the Canadian border since the Sept. 11 attacks. But changes are coming more quickly now, driven by fears of terrorists exploiting the relative quiet of the northern border and complaints that the U.S. has been disproportionately soft on Canada.

Audrey Hudson | May 5

Washington Times - Pts 1 and 2. The following excerpt is from Pt 2

The 11-page lexicon document lists terms from A through W, beginning with "aboveground," which is defined as extremist groups or people who "operate overtly and portray themselves as law-abiding," and ending with "white supremacist movement." The listing notes six categories of white supremacists: Neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan, Christian identity, racist skinhead, Nordic mysticism and Aryan prison gangs.

A "left-wing extremist" is described as someone who opposes war or is dedicated to environmental and animal rights causes, while a "right-wing extremist" is someone who is against abortion or for border enforcement.

But the rest of the world certainly does, since its newspapers actually take note of these events. And we wonder why we're not loved and respected? See full article here:

The criminalization of journalism

Air France Flight 438, from Paris, was to land at Mexico City at 6 p.m. on Saturday, April 18. Five hours before landing, the captain's voice announced that U.S. authorities had prohibited the plane from flying over U.S. territory. The explanation: among the passengers aboard was a person who was not welcome in the United States for reasons of national security.

Mary Beth Sheridan, Spencer S. Hsu & Steve Fainaru | Washington | April 25

WaPo - $350 Million Effort Aimed at Drug War

The Pentagon and Homeland Security Department are developing contingency plans to send National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexican border under a $350 million initiative that would expand the U.S. military's role in the drug war, according to Obama administration officials.

The circumstances under which the troops could be deployed have not been determined, the officials said. They said the proposal was designed to give President Obama additional flexibility to respond to drug-related violence that has threatened to spill into the United States from Mexico and to curb southbound smuggling of cash and weapons.

Canada | March 23

CTV - The furor began when Napolitano was asked to clarify statements she had made about equal treatment for the Mexican and Canadian borders, despite the fact that a flood of illegal immigrants and a massive drug war are two serious issues on the southern border.

"Yes, Canada is not Mexico, it doesn't have a drug war going on, it didn't have 6,000 homicides that were drug-related last year," she said. "Nonetheless, to the extent that terrorists have come into our country or suspected or known terrorists have entered our country across a border, it's been across the Canadian border. There are real issues there."

Maria Leon | Tucson | Apr 21

Latin America Herald Tribune - Law enforcement agencies in Arizona have reinforced their cooperation to try and halt crimes linked to the drug trafficking and the violence surrounding the trafficking of undocumented immigrants.

“The violence generated by the drug cartels has reached alarming levels on both sides of the border,” said Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) during a meeting with more than 60 local, state and federal law enforcement agencies held on Tuesday in Tucson.

She said that drug-related violence has been the cause of 7,000 deaths in Mexico in the past 14 months and that the violence has overflowed into the United States into states hundreds of miles from the border and even into Canada.

The lawmaker said Arizona is already experiencing repercussions from the Mexican drug war, noting that Phoenix has become the kidnapping capital of the United States, though most observers think those abductions are more likely related to migrant-smuggling than to the illegal drug trade.

According to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the activities of drug traffickers have had a tremendous impact on the crimes being committed in the region.

The city of Tucson has also reported a considerable increase in the number of home invasions, a crime “almost unheard of” in the city five years ago, municipal police department representative Roberto Villaseñor said at Tuesday’s meeting.

Interesting. Tough to watch - the guy is so aggravating. But then, that's partly his point. What do you think?