Both McCain, Obama Exaggerating Iran's Nuclear Program

By Jonathan S. Landay / McClatchy Newspapers

The presumptive Republican nominee for president and the leading contender for the Democratic nomination are exaggerating what's known about Iran's nuclear program as they duel over how best to deal with Tehran.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., say that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

The U.S. intelligence community, however, thinks that Iran halted an effort to build a nuclear warhead in mid-2003, and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, which is investigating the program, has found no evidence to date of an active Iranian nuclear-weapons project.

The candidates' comments raise questions about how carefully the two have studied the public record on what's become a major campaign issue and is one of the most difficult foreign-policy challenges likely to confront the next president.

The issue is also significant because the Bush administration inflated assessments of the Iraqi nuclear threat and the possibility that former dictator Saddam Hussein could pass nuclear weapons to terrorists as it sought to whip up public support for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Iran has been expanding an industrial-scale uranium enrichment program in defiance of U.N. Security Council demands that it be suspended. Enrichment is the process that produces low-enriched uranium fuel for nuclear generating stations and highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

Iran, whose known enrichment facilities are under IAEA monitoring, says it's making low-enriched uranium reactor fuel and has no intention of developing weapons.

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Newest McCain official: President has "near dictatorial powers"

Bill Kristol today proudly announces that one of his Weekly Standard staff members, Michael Goldfarb, was just named the Deputy Communications Director of the McCain campaign. Last April, this newest McCain official participated in a conference call with former Senator George Mitchell, during which Mitchell advocated a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Afterwards, this is what Goldfarb wrote about what he thinks are the powers the President possesses in our country:

Mitchell's less than persuasive answer [to whether withdrawal timetables "somehow infringe on the president's powers as commander in chief?"]: "Congress is a coequal branch of government...the framers did not want to have one branch in charge of the government."

True enough, but they sought an energetic executive with near dictatorial power in pursuing foreign policy and war. So no, the Constitution does not put Congress on an equal footing with the executive in matters of national security.

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Matrix of Lies: The Fallout From the Fallout 3 Revelations!

by Omar al-Byg Daddi

As you have noted, the Telegraph newspaper article that ridiculed the SITE Intelligence Group's latest offering – the image of a nuclear-devastated Washington, D.C., turned out to be an image snatched from a new computer game called Fallout 3.

As at least one website operater reported, 30 minutes after this article was posted onto his and other websites, the link went dead, and even the Google cache memory of the article was wiped out.

SITE defended itself by contacting the Telegraph and informing them that they weren't red-faced about anything, and that they never claimed that the image was an original, only that some jihadi bad guys had inserted this image into a video posted onto one or two of the top terrorist,Al-Qaeda affiliated websites, or web forums.

Now this is where the plot thickens, for there is more – a great deal more to this story than has been presented so far.

It is exceedingly rare for a news article to actually name the supposed jihadi or terrorist website. The actual url of this site is virtually NEVER given. I have always found this to be quite suspicious.

However, in the Telegraph article, the supposedly top two terrorist websites in the world are named – Al Ekhlass and Al Hesbah, and both are said to be password protected.

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U.S. Accused of Holding Terror Suspects on Prison Ships

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu.

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With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state!!

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as "Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald's Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world's attention at Tiananmen Square.

Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie.

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Leading Americans Ask U.S. Military to Refuse Orders to Attack Iran

Country music legend Willie Nelson, literary icon Gore Vidal, Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, author and radio host Thom Hartmann, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Rabbi Steven Jacobs, and dozens of other prominent Americans have signed a letter asking the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all U.S. military personnel to refuse orders to launch an aggressive war on Iran.

The letter has been posted as a petition for others to sign at http://www.dontattackiran.org

The text of the letter follows:

ATTENTION: Joint Chiefs of Staff and all U.S. Military Personnel:

Do not attack Iran.
Any preemptive U.S. attack on Iran would be illegal.
Any preemptive U.S. attack on Iran would be criminal.

We, the citizens of the United States, respectfully urge you, courageous men and women of our military, to refuse any order to preemptively attack Iran, a nation that represents no serious or immediate threat to the United States. To attack Iran, a sovereign nation of 70-million people, would be a crime of the highest magnitude.

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U.S. Paying Allies to Fight War in Iraq

The tale of massive fraud and embezzlement of millions of dollars by the US military in its operations in Iraq continues. Testifying before the US Congress Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on 22 May, Mary Ugone, deputy inspector general of accounts in the Pentagon said that an audit of $8.2 billion spending related to the Iraq war showed that $7.8 billion had been improperly spent.

Over 180,000 payments, mostly since the war started in 2003, were made by the defense department to contractors for everything from bottled water to vehicles to transportation services.

In her testimony, Ugone also revealed that $135 million were given to forces from three countries UK, South Korea and Poland to facilitate their participation in the war. This is the first time that the US has officially admitted paying its allies in the so-called Coalition of the Willing that invaded Iraq in March 2003.

In his opening statement, Henry Waxman, chairman of the committee, said that wounded soldiers are getting notices from the Pentagon to return signing bonuses with interest since they had not completed the full term. "There is something very wrong when our wounded troops have to fill out forms in triplicate for meal money while billions of dollars in cash are handed out in Iraq with no accountability," he said.

In an earlier report released in November 2007, the Inspector General had concluded that the Defense Department couldn't properly account for over $5 billion in taxpayer funds spent in support of the Iraq Security Forces.

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Bush Replays Iraq Games on Iran

By Ray McGovern

Not since John Dean told the truth about President Richard Nixon’s crimes have we had an account by a very close aide to a sitting president charging him with crimes of the most serious kind.

McClellan writes that George W. Bush abandoned “candor and honesty” to wage a “political campaign” that led the nation into an “unnecessary war.”

The chief U.S. prosecutor of senior Nazi officials at the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, labeled such action – more correctly termed a war of aggression – the “supreme international crime.”

In other words, President Bush used propaganda and deception to lead the United States into what an earlier generation of American leaders judged not just a war crime, but the “supreme” war crime.

And, in all this, Bush had an eager cast aiding and abetting – from careerists in the U.S. intelligence community to the fawning corporate media (FCM) whom McClellan referred to as “deferential, complicit enablers.”

As for the role of intelligence, McClellan tells of “shading the truth.” In the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the president used “innuendo and implication” and intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary.”

Water over the dam, you say? No way.

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McClellan: Bush should have fired Karl Rove!

President Bush broke his promise to the country by refusing to fire aide Karl Rove for leaking a CIA agent's identity, said Scott McClellan, the president's chief spokesman for almost three years.

"I think the president should have stood by his word and that meant Karl should have left," McClellan said Sunday in a broadcast interview about his new tell-all book, a scathing rebuke of the White House under Bush's leadership.

McClellan now acknowledges he felt burned by Rove, Bush's top political adviser, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. He said Rove and Libby assured him they were not involved in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, and he repeated those assurances to reporters.

In fact, Rove and Libby did help leak Plame's identity, as confirmed in a later criminal investigation. Libby had resigned by then, but Rove remained in office and eventually stepped down on his terms in August 2007.

"I think the president should have stood by the word that we said, which was that if you were involved in this in any way, then you would no longer be in this administration. And Karl was involved in it," McClellan said.

Rove was never charged with a crime! The White House had said in 2003 that anyone who leaked classified information in the case would be dismissed. Bush reiterated that promise in June 2004.

By July 2005, Bush qualified his position, saying he would fire anyone for leaking classified information if that person had "committed a crime."

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Nuclear Destruction Image of U.S. Capitol Building From Computer Game

This image of Washington after a nuclear holocaust, which a US intelligence group claimed showed the ambition of Islamic extremist terrorists, was actually lifted from a computer game.

The SITE Intelligence Group said that the image, showing a ruined Capitol Building in Washington, was created by extremists as part of discussions about the feasibility of nuclear strikes against the US and Britain.

The images appeared in a video, called Nuclear Jihad: The Ultimate Terror, posted on two password-protected websites, al-Ekhlass and al-Hesbah, believed to be affiliated with al-Qa’eda.

SITE also released translated several chatroom threads from al-Ekhlass and al-Hesbah, discussing the possibility of nuclear attacks on the West.

However, it has transpired that far from being a detailed simulation created by terrorist masterminds, the apocalyptic vision is in fact lifted from the computer game Fallout 3, by US game designers Bethesda Softworks.

The game bills itself as “America’s first choice in post-nuclear simulation”, with players roaming a ruined landscape some time after a nuclear war in 2077.

Source: London Telegraph

Robert Fisk: So Al-Qa'ida's defeated, eh? Go tell it to the marines!

So al-Qa'ida is "almost defeated", is it? Major gains against al-Qa'ida. Essentially defeated. "On balance, we are doing pretty well," the CIA's boss, Michael Hayden, tells The Washington Post. "Near strategic defeat of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qa'ida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qa'ida globally – and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam." Well, you could have fooled me.

Six thousand dead in Afghanistan, tens of thousands dead in Iraq, a suicide bombing a day in Mesopotamia, the highest level of suicides ever in the US military – the Arab press wisely ran this story head to head with Hayden's boasts – and permanent US bases in Iraq after 31 December. And we've won?

Less than two years ago, we had an equally insane assessment of the war when General Peter Pace, the weird (and now mercifully retired) chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning but we are not losing". At which point, George Bush's Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, said he agreed with Pace that "we are not winning but we are not losing".

James Baker, who had just produced his own messy report on Iraq then said – reader, please do not laugh or cry – "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token, I'm not sure we're winning." Then Bush himself proclaimed, "We're not winning; we're not losing." Pity about the Iraqis. But anyway, now we really, really are winning. Or at least al-Qa'ida is "almost" – note the "almost", folks – defeated. So Mike Hayden tells us.

Am I alone in finding this stuff infantile to the point of madness?

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Tzipi Livni: Ex-Mossad Agent & Daughter of Terrorists Tipped to Lead Israel

The frontrunner to become Israel’s next prime minister, Tzipi Livni, was a Paris agent for Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence agency, in the early 1980s when it ran a series of missions to kill Palestinian terrorists in European capitals, according to former colleagues.

They say Livni, now foreign minister, was on active service when Mamoun Meraish, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was shot dead by a Mossad hit squad in Athens on August 21, 1983. She was not directly involved in the killing, in which two young men on a motorcycle drew alongside Meraish’s car and opened fire, but her role in Mossad remains secret.

Shortly afterwards Livni resigned and returned to Israel to complete her law studies, citing the pressures of the job.

A quarter of a century later, Livni, 49, is poised to become prime minister amid accusations that Ehud Olmert, who has led Israel for the past 2½ years, accepted bribes from an American businessman.

An opinion poll on Friday showed that Livni had more than twice as much support inside the ruling Kadima party as Shaul Mofaz, a former defence minister who is her chief rival. Political commentators believe that Olmert will resign soon.

Livni joined Mossad after leaving the army with the rank of lieutenant and completing a year at law school. From her base in Paris she travelled throughout Europe in pursuit of Arab terrorists.

“Tzipi was not an office girl,” said an acquaintance. “She was a clever woman with an IQ of 150. She blended in well in European capitals, working with male agents, most of them ex-commandos, taking out Arab terrorists.”

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American Workers Lose As Ford Invests $3 Billion in Mexico

President Felipe Calderón announced that Ford will build its new fuel-efficient Fiesta "global car" in suburban Mexico City and upgrade two plants here as part of a $3 billion investment, the largest in Mexican history by a foreign manufacturer.

The decision is a major setback for the United Auto Workers union, which has pushed Ford and other manufacturers to invest in U.S. plants. But it was a coup for the Mexican economy after years of losing manufacturing jobs to China and other Asian countries.

Industry analysts have long predicted that Ford would unveil a global car -- a subcompact designed to be easily built and marketed anywhere in the world -- but it was unclear until Friday which country would win the lucrative manufacturing deal. A UAW spokesman did not return calls seeking comment.

In an appearance Friday at Mexico's presidential palace, Los Pinos, Ford chief executive Alan R. Mulally said the decision to build the Fiesta is part of a plan to realign the company's manufacturing toward smaller cars and crossovers -- models between small cars and SUVs.

As gas prices have skyrocketed, Ford has suffered in particular because it relies strongly on sales of trucks and SUVs. Through April, light vehicles accounted for just 36 percent of Ford's sales, compared with about 60 percent at Toyota and Honda, David Whiston, an auto analyst at Morningstar, said in an interview.

"What this shows about Ford is that it has realized it needs to improve its vehicle mix to be much more skewed to fuel-efficient cars than trucks and SUVs," he said.

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CIA Director: Intel Realignment Could Create Confusion

A Bush administration plan to issue new orders realigning the chain of command over U.S. spy services has triggered turf-related skirmishes across the intelligence community.

The changes could erode the CIA's standing as the nation's lead spy service abroad by requiring agency station chiefs in certain countries to cede authority to officials from other U.S. spy agencies, officials said.

The revisions would also give the nation's intelligence chief greater power over individual spy services that traditionally have been dominated by the Department of Defense, including the National Security Agency, officials said.

The proposals have met stiff resistance from the CIA and other agencies still settling into roles that were dramatically redefined by legislation four years ago.

The latest revisions are designed to bolster the authority of the director of national intelligence, a position created after the Sept. 11 attacks to compel better cooperation within the often fractious intelligence community.

Officials described the pending changes on condition of anonymity because they are not final. White House National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said a review process to update rules was in progress.

Some U.S. intelligence officials have warned that the changes could create confusion over who is in charge of running spy operations and managing the United States' relationships with foreign intelligence services.

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Gitmo Judge Forced Out by U.S. Govt Because He Wanted Justice for Detainee!!!

By Carol J. Williams / L.A. Times

A judge hearing the war-crimes case at Guantanamo Bay who publicly expressed frustration with military prosecutors' refusal to give evidence to the defense has been dismissed, tribunal officials confirmed Friday.

Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III was presiding over the case of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr. Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, in his role as chief judge at Guantanamo, ordered the dismissal without explanation and announced his replacement in an e-mail to lawyers in Khadr's case this week.

In another indication of the Pentagon's drive to step up the pace at Guantanamo, charges were drafted against three more terror suspects, bringing to 17 the number accused of war crimes. Charges of conspiracy and supporting terrorism were prepared for Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi, a Saudi; fellow Saudi Jabran Said bin al-Qahtani; and Algerian Sufyian Barhoumi. The three are alleged to have attended al-Qaida training camps and studied bomb-making.

Brownback had threatened to suspend the proceedings against Khadr unless prosecutors handed over Khadr's medical and interrogation records since his July 2002 capture in Afghanistan.

Khadr's Navy lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler, had asked for the records months ago, and Brownback had ordered the government to produce them.

The lead prosecutor in the Khadr case, Marine Maj. Jeff Groharing, this week reiterated to Brownback his view that the defense wasn't entitled to the records. He urged the judge to set a trial date.

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A.Q. Khan Says President Musharraf Forced Nuke Confession

For four years Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, has lived in the shadows, confined to his Islamabad home since a tearful televised confession in which he admitted selling nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. But yesterday the 76-year-old scientist returned to the spotlight with a bold new twist: that he had not meant a word of his earlier admission.

In his first western media interview since 2004, Khan said the confession had been forced upon him by President Pervez Musharraf. "It was not of my own free will. It was handed into my hand," he told the Guardian. More worryingly, he swore never to cooperate with investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite persistent fears that nuclear technology traded by his accomplices could fall into terrorist hands.

"Why should I talk to them?" he said. "I am under no obligation. We are not a signatory to the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty]. I have not violated international laws." He said details of his clandestine nuclear supply network were "my internal affair and my country's affair".

Despite numerous requests from the IAEA and the US government, Pakistan has refused access to Khan, who is still considered a national hero. A spokesman at the UN watchdog's headquarters in Vienna declined to respond to his comments.

Until this week Khan had been unseen and largely unheard since his February 2004 appearance on state television, in which he said he had hawked the country's nuclear know-how abroad.

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Intelligence Official Sees Little Progress Before Bush Exits

By Karen DeYoung

Previewing the world for the next U.S. president, a top U.S. intelligence official this week predicted that the Bush administration would make little progress before leaving office on top national security priorities including an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, political reconciliation in Iraq and keeping Iran from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

A regenerated al-Qaeda will remain the leading terrorism threat, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Donald M. Kerr said. Pakistan's "inward" political focus and failure to control the tribal territories where al-Qaeda maintains a haven, he said, is "the number one thing we worry about."

Kerr's analysis, in a speech Thursday evening that he posited as a presidential intelligence briefing delivered on Jan. 21, 2009, contrasted with more optimistic administration forecasts of rapprochement among Iraq's political forces and a possible Middle East peace agreement in the next eight months. It also seemed at odds with CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's judgment that al-Qaeda is now on the defensive throughout the world, including along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Senate intelligence committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) yesterday said Hayden's assessment, in an interview this week with The Washington Post, was inconsistent with recent intelligence reports to Capitol Hill. In a letter to Hayden, Rockefeller said that he was "surprised and troubled by your comments" and asked for "a full explanation of both the rationale for, and the substance of" the interview.

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Air Force Unit's Nuclear Weapons Security Is 'Unacceptable'

By Walter Pincus / Washington Post

The same Air Force unit at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota that was responsible for mishandling six nuclear cruise missiles last August failed key parts of a nuclear safety inspection this past weekend, according to a Defense Department report.

The 5th Bomb Wing was given an "unacceptable" grade in security of nuclear weapons, according to the review by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. In another category, management and administration, it received a grade of "marginal," based on deficiencies in recording changes that affected the operational status of nuclear cruise missiles and gravity bombs.

Those are two areas where failures last summer allowed a B-52 at Minot to be loaded with six air-launched cruise missiles and flown to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana without the pilots, air or ground crews knowing they contained nuclear warheads.

Among the problems found during last week's inspection: Internal security forces did not go to assigned defensive areas during an exercise that involved an attempt to steal a nuclear weapon; security guards failed to search an emergency vehicle that entered and left the nuclear storage area during that exercise; a security guard used his cellphone to play video games while on duty; and guards were unarmed at traffic control points along the route where nuclear weapons were to travel.

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U.S. Issues Thinly Veiled Warnings to China

Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a set of thinly veiled warnings to China on Saturday, cautioning that it could risk its share of further gains in Asia's economic prosperity if it bullied its neighbors over natural resources in contested areas like the South China Sea.

Three years ago at the same lectern here, Gates's predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, bluntly criticized China's swift military buildup. Last year Gates struck a more conciliatory tone, saying Beijing and Washington had a chance to "build trust over time."

Gates seemed to take a third approach in his remarks to a major regional Asia security conference here, seeking to lay down clear markers of continued U.S. commitments to the region while also obliquely criticizing China.

He said that in his four trips to Asia since becoming defense secretary 18 months ago, several countries had expressed concern about "the security implications of rising demand for resources" (translation: China's voracious quest for new sources of energy and raw materials) and about "coercive diplomacy" (translation: China's contested claims of resource-rich territorial waters).

Gates said there were rewards for playing by an international set of rules in a transparent way. "We should not forget that globalization has permitted our shared rise in wealth over recent decades," he said. "This achievement rests above all on openness: openness of trade, openness of ideas, and openness of what I would call the 'common areas,' whether in the maritime, space or cyber domains."

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Inspector General Is Named To Scrutinize Afghan Efforts

The White House named a special inspector general to search for possible fraud and abuse in the funding of Afghanistan's reconstruction yesterday, three months after a congressional deadline for the appointment.

Retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Fields was appointed to head the office, which is modeled on a similar congressionally mandated effort in Iraq. Although the war in Afghanistan is overshadowed by the larger and much more expensive U.S. effort in Iraq, reconstruction and development assistance there has totaled nearly $23 billion.

Establishment of the office was included in the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill, approved in January, which directed the White House to fill the job within 30 days.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who sponsored the measure in the Senate, said yesterday that there is "too little oversight" of money spent in Afghanistan.

Earlier this month, Lautenberg and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) wrote President Bush to ask why the job had not been filled.

The Pentagon and the U.S. Agency for International Development had opposed the measure last fall on the grounds that it would overlap with existing Defense and State department audit mechanisms.

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