source: Politico

by James Bamford

Illustration by Matt Mahurin.

Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.

Within weeks of the attacks, the giant ears of the National Security Agency, always pointed outward toward potential enemies, turned inward on the American public itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established 23 years before to ensure that only suspected foreign agents and terrorists were targeted by the NSA, would be bypassed. Telecom companies, required by law to keep the computerized phone records of their customers confidential unless presented with a warrant, would secretly turn them over in bulk to the NSA without ever asking for a warrant.

Around the country, in tall, windowless telecom company buildings known as switches, NSA technicians quietly began installing beam-splitters to redirect duplicate copies of all phone calls and email messages to secret rooms behind electronic cipher locks.

There, NSA software and hardware designed for “deep packet inspection” filtered through the billions of email messages looking for key names, words, phrases and addresses. The equipment also monitored phone conversations and even what pages people view on the Web — the porn sites they visit, the books they buy on Amazon, the social networks they interact with and the text messages they send and receive.

Because the information is collected in real time, attempting to delete history caches from a computer is useless.

At the NSA, thousands of analysts who once eavesdropped on troop movements of enemy soldiers in distant countries were now listening in on the bedroom conversations of innocent Americans in nearby states.

“We were told that we were to listen to all conversations that were intercepted, to include those of Americans,” Adrienne Kinne, a former NSA “voice interceptor,” told me. She was recalled to active duty after Sept. 11.

“Some of those conversations are personal,” she said. “Some even intimate. … I had a real problem with the fact that people were listening to it and that I was listening to it. … When I was on active duty in ’94 to ’98, we would never collect on an American.”

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source: Agence France-Presse (AFP)
via: Raw Story

Art by Gary Varvel (www.garyvarvel.com)

WASHINGTON – US prosecutors compiled lots of evidence against the five men accused of having organized the September 11 attacks on the United States, but not until this week have details been fully revealed.

The indictment charging self-professed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others was unsealed when US Attorney General Eric Holder referred the case to the Defense Department for military trials instead of trials at a US federal court in New York.

Holder said Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustapha Ahmed al-Hawsawi could have been prosecuted in federal court and blamed Congress for imposing measures blocking civilian trials of Guantanamo Bay inmates.

They will be tried in military courts in the US naval base in southeastern Cuba.

The now-public details show that the United States, nearly 10 years after hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, reconstructed step by step the logistics of the five accused men.

They compiled bank transactions, flight records, visa applications, and dozens of telephone conversations to create the most comprehensive account of the chain of events before the attacks.

Implementation of the plan began in 1999, when Sheikh Mohammed (referred to as “KSM” by US officials) proposed to Osama bin Laden to use commercial airliners as missiles against US targets.

Until the last minute, according to the indictment, Sheikh Mohammed controlled the entire operation.

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source: Wall Street Journal

by Evan Perez

Courtroom sketch of bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. European Pressphoto Agency

New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.

The move is one of the Obama administration’s most significant revisions to rules governing the investigation of terror suspects in the U.S. And it potentially opens a new political tussle over national security policy, as the administration marks another step back from pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods.

The Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present for questioning. A 1984 decision amended that by allowing the questioning of suspects for a limited time before issuing the warning in cases where public safety was at issue.

That exception was seen as a limited device to be used only in cases of an imminent safety threat, but the new rules give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum reviewed by The Wall Street Journal says the policy applies to “exceptional cases” where investigators “conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat.” Such action would need prior approval from FBI supervisors and Justice Department lawyers, according to the memo, which was issued in December but not made public.

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source: Crunch Gear

by Nicholas Deleon

The United States government is now in the business of professional trolling. The Guardian has discovered a program referred to as “Online Persona Management,” the goal of which appears to be to manipulate online conversations so that they’re seen as being more “pro-American.” The Pentagon says the program doesn’t have an English language component, and that it merely exists to combat misrepresentations found on Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, and Urdu language Web sites.

The program’s contract, which set back the U.S. taxpayer a cool $2.76m, is part of the larger, $200m Operation Earnest Voice program. (Operation Earnest Voice was described [PDF] by the inspector general as “an operation to influence regional and international audiences to achieve U.S. Central Command strategic objectives.”)The contract was awarded to a California company by the name of Ntrepid Corporation.

Ntrepid’s Web site has a solitary e-mail contact. There’s no whois information either, as the site is registered to Domains By Proxy, Inc., whose slogan is: “Remember, your identity is nobody’s business but ours.”

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source: Raw Story

President Obama Seeks Longer PATRIOT Act Extension Than Republicans

by Stephen C. Webster

Faced with a looming vote on a planned one-year extension of special powers authorized in the USA PATRIOT Act, the Obama White House did not object or propose reforms, as the president vowed to do as a candidate.

The Obama administration instead asked Congress to grant those powers for an additional three years.

As a US Senator and candidate for the presidency, Barack Obama never actually argued for a repeal of the Bush administration’s security initiatives. Instead, he’s consistently argued for enhanced judicial oversight and a pullback on the most extreme elements of the bill, such as the use of National Security Letters to search people’s personal records without a court-issued warrant.

While many in his own party opposed the PATRIOT Act outright, as president Obama has said repeatedly that the emergency measures remain a valuable tool for law enforcement engaged in national security prerogatives.

On Tuesday, ahead of a House vote to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act for another year, the White House did something unexpected: they asked for even more.

A prepared statement issued Tuesday afternoon said that President Obama “would strongly prefer enactment of reauthorizing legislation that would extend these authorities until December 2013.”

The move was likely aimed at avoiding the potential conflation of national security legislation and an election year’s hyper-partisan atmosphere.

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source: Centre for Research on Globalization

by Gareth Porter

Since 2007, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – with the support of the United States, Israel and European allies UK, France and Germany – has been demanding that Iran explain a set of purported internal documents portraying a covert Iranian military program of research and development of nuclear weapons. The “laptop documents,” supposedly obtained from a stolen Iranian computer by an unknown source and given to US intelligence in 2004, include a series of drawings of a missile re-entry vehicle that appears to be an effort to accommodate a nuclear weapon, as well as reports on high explosives testing for what appeared to be a detonator for a nuclear weapon.

In one report after another, the IAEA has suggested that Iran has failed to cooperate with its inquiry into that alleged research, and that the agency, therefore, cannot verify that it has not diverted nuclear material to military purposes.

That issue remains central to US policy toward Iran. The Obama administration says there can be no diplomatic negotiations with Iran unless Iran satisfies the IAEA fully in regard to the allegations derived from the documents that it had covert nuclear weapons program.

That position is based on the premise that the intelligence documents that Iran has been asked to explain are genuine. The evidence now available, however, indicates that they are fabrications.

The drawings of the Iranian missile warhead that were said by the IAEA to show an intent to accommodate a nuclear weapon actually depict a missile design that Iran is now known to have already abandoned in favor of an improved model by the time the technical drawings were allegedly made. And one of the major components of the purported Iranian military research program allegedly included a project labeled with a number that turns out to have been assigned by Iran’s civilian nuclear authority years before the covert program is said to have been initiated.

The former head of the agency’s safeguards department, Olli Heinonen, who shaped its approach to the issue of the intelligence documents from 2005 and 2010, has offered no real explanation for these anomalies in recent interviews with Truthout.

These telltale indicators of fraud bring into question the central pillar of the case against Iran and raise more fundamental questions about the handling of the Iranian nuclear issue by the IAEA, the United States and its key European allies.

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source: Raw Story

Escalation in drone, helicopter attacks ‘setting country on fire,’ says Pakistani high commissioner to UK, European officials doubt terror threat, Guardian reports

This past weekend’s terror alert from Washington — alleging possible Al Qaeda activity and warning travelers to be vigilant when in Europe –was “politically motivated and not based on credible new information,” senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence community insiders have told the Guardian.

The warning, which doesn’t specify countries or targets but speculates about “Mumbai-style” multiple simultaneous attacks, was an attempt to justify the recent escalation of attacks on militant targets inside Pakistan, said Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the Pakistani high commissioner to the UK. Hasan said the bombing campaigns have “set the country on fire.”

Following the death of two Pakistani soldiers in a NATO helicopter raid, Pakistan blocked access to Afghanistan for a NATO convoy running through the Khyber Pass. Although Pakistani diplomats have said the pass would soon be opened again, the “blockade” continues.

Since the United States issued its terror alert on Sunday, Britain, Japan, Sweden and France have issued their own travel warnings.

The Guardian reports that unnamed officials in the British, French and German governments are “dismissing” the terror threat and also pointing the finger at Washington.

“To stitch together [the terror plot claims] in a seamless narrative is nonsensical,” said one official, identified only as being “well-placed.”

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source: Politico

by Joe Gerstein

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence appears to be on the verge of prevailing in an attempt to put some information it receives from other intelligence agencies beyond the reach of Freedom of Information Act requests.

The Intelligence Authorization Act passed by the Senate Monday night contains a FOIA-related provision ODNI sought on the grounds that it would encourage the CIA and other agencies to be more willing to share data with the National Counterterrorism Center.

Section 208 of the bill provides that the so-called operational files exemption which four agencies have for some records (CIA, NSA, NRO and NGA) will protect information those agencies share with ODNI from being provided under FOIA. However, there is an important caveat: U.S. citizens and green card holders can still request information about themselves.

National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter requested the operational files exemption in a classified letter sent to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence earlier this month, an official said. Leiter mentioned the issue in passing at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing last week.

“There are some issues that I have written a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee about regarding FOIA and ways in which FOIA, as currently structured, reduced the incentive for CIA to provide NCTC certain data,” Leiter said.

One official, who asked not to be named, said that with some intelligence agencies there was “an actual or perceived disincentive for sharing” stemming from the concern that “providing information from ops files will cause them to lose their exempt status when provided to NCTC.”

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source: New York Times

by Charlie Savage

WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers.

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source: 911truth.org

by John Albanese

On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced that an estimated $2.3 Trillion in Pentagon spending was missing — and unaccounted for — from the Pentagon. One day later, on 9/11, the story also disappeared, along with any semblances of governmental accountability and journalistic integrity.

In the wake of 9/11 America was a traumatized nation where asking difficult questions was often perceived as unpatriotic and equated with disloyalty.

Forget the fact that $2.3 Trillion equals the GDP of Italy. Forget that the military only spent an estimated $311 billion in the year 2000 – and that approximately 7.5 times that amount had disappeared. We were at war the very next day on 9/11 — and that was all that mattered. Forget that Italy had just disappeared from the map.

That was the power of 9/11.

And in the years that followed it appeared that no lie was too big, no claim too outrageous, no initiative too insane, to trigger an appropriate response from either the media or the public. Accountability was replaced with blind nationalism and comforting platitudes.

“United We Stand.”

“We Will Never Forget.”

Sadly, nine years after 9/11, we neither stand united nor care enough to remember.

Nine years after 9/11 our 9/11 first responders are still denied the critical medical care they need — in plain sight — with nary a peep from a war-weary populace still sporting their fading 9/11 “We Will Never Forget” car magnets on their SUVs.

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