Hillary Clinton's Illness Prompts Conspiracy Theories

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most famous current female political figure, has fallen ill. "In the course of a follow-up exam today, Secretary Clinton's doctors discovered a blood clot had formed, stemming from the concussion she sustained several weeks ago. She is being treated with anti-coagulants and is at New York-Presbyterian Hospital so that they can monitor the medication over the next 48 hours," a spokesman for the former first lady said yesterday in a statement.

Clinton's illness, and the fact that she has not been seen in public in the last three weeks, has prompted a slew of wild conspiracy theories.

"EXCLUSIVE! HILLARY CLINTON BRAIN CRISIS," the National Enquirer headline reads. "Only days after The ENQUIRER exclusively reported that Secretary of State HILLARY CLINTON was at the center of a shocking brain cancer drama and was undergoing extensive secret medical tests, her reps went public with the news on Sunday night Dec. 30 that she was indeed hospitalized in New York City and disclosed that she was battling a blood clot that had formed following her head concussion earlier this month!"

Another report, this one in eutimes.net, shockingly claims, "A new Foreign Military Intelligence (GRU) report circulating in the Kremlin today is saying that United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was injured, and a top US Navy Seal Commander killed when their C-12 Huron military passenger and transport aircraft crash landed nearly 3 weeks ago in the Iranian city of Ahvaz near the Iraqi border."


Before Clinton's admittance into the hospital over the weekend, some speculated that the timing of Clinton's illness was suspicious. After all, she was scheduled to testify in front of Congress about the terror attack on 9/11 in Benghazi, Libya. That testimony was postponed.

Of course, many are still wondering whether Clinton will testify before she steps down as secretary of state, which her office has long claimed she'll do within "days" of President Obama's second inauguration.

Obama has nominated another former Democratic presidential nominee to replace Clinton, Senator John Kerry. So will Clinton be well enough to testify before Kerry can be confirmed? Or will her illness prevent her from answering questions about the terror attack in Benghazi?

All the speculation, however, might not be that surprising. After all, there's a lot of intrigue around Clinton. "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in the national spotlight since her husband ran for president in 1992, has broken the Gallup Poll record books, becoming the most admired woman in history, topping their list for the 17th time, far ahead of first lady Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Queen Elizabeth II," the Washington Examiner reports.
Weekly Standard


Retirement, Chicagoland style

Silent sub: Russian noiseless Borei class nuclear submarine immersed

Super-modern, powerful and almost noiseless Russian nuclear submarine Vladimir Monomakh has been put in water to become the third ship of the Borei project. The cruiser is about to begin sea trials and mooring to become fully operational in 2013.

­Vladimir Monomakh was laid down at Russia’s largest shipbuilding complex Sevmash, located on the shores of the White Sea in the town of Severodvinsk in northern Russia on March 19, 2006 – the 100th anniversary of the Russian submarine fleet.

It belongs to a class of missile strategic submarine cruisers with a new generation of nuclear reactor, which allows the submarine to dive to a depth of 480 meters. It can spend up to three months in autonomous navigation and, thanks to the latest achievements in the reduction of noise, it is almost silent compared to previous generations of submarines.

The submarine is armed with the new missile system, which has from 16 to 20 solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles Bulava (SS-NX-30 by NATO classification). The rocket is able to overcome any prospective missile defense system.

On August 27, 2011, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on a successful test of Bulava to investigate its maximum range. The missile was launched from the White Sea, flew 9,300km in just 33 minutes, and then fell in the specified area in the Pacific Ocean.

All Borei class submarines are equipped with a floating rescue chamber designed to fit in the whole crew.

The Borei family

The first and head submarine of Borei class, Yury Dolgoruky, has already completed the test program and is to be officially adopted by the Russian Navy on Sunday. Construction of the missile carrier is approximately estimated at around US$770 million, while other Borei class submarines are believed to cost less.

“The hoisting of the flag and the signing of the acceptance act is to be adopted at the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk on Sunday, December 30,” the Rubin design bureau that designed the submarine said in a statement on Saturday.

Another missile cruiser of this project, the Aleksandr Nevsky, is undergoing tests, according to Borisov. While a fourth, more advanced submarine, the Knyaz Vladimir, with enhanced technical characteristics and increased ammunition is currently being built.

Over the next eight years Russia plans to have built 10 Borei class submarines altogether, according to the state armaments program of 2011-2020. All Borei class submarines are believed to provide a basis of naval strategic nuclear forces of Russia in the coming decades.
RT

Luckly O will have much more leyway in his dealing with Putin now that he's reelected

Afghans angry at US soldiers who drove away in the night leaving rent unpaid

US forces left behind piles of equipment, an unpaid rent bill and a festering land dispute that threatens to undermine the Afghan government when they moved out of a volatile corner of eastern Kunar province this year, local officials and their former landlords say.

The only clue that a base that dominated Pashengar village for years had been abandoned for good was the midnight rumble of a convoy of trucks. In the morning, locals found guards gone, buildings blown up and, scattered around what had been a forbidding military encampment, piles of detritus from years of western living in a remote, mountainous valley.

Rows of air conditioning units stuck out of a damaged wall, a giant, dilapidated generator was marooned near shipping containers and twisted, dented vehicles remained. But there was no sign of a cheque for a landlord who said years of rent, running to hundreds of thousands of dollars, was owing to him.

"They stayed six years and only paid rent for one year," said Haji Najibullah Khan, who grew up in the Pashengar house that became a US base. He said the departing US commander warned him off pushing for rent money when they met a few weeks before the soldiers drove away in the night.

A few kilometres down the road, in the centre of Naray district, the US departure was neater, with a joint base handed over to full Afghan army control. But, even here, there is anger because the base was built on a muddle of small plots shared out among 90 families from the area.

They are also claiming that years of back rent is owed by the Americans and are worried they may never see their land again now Afghan government troops are firmly entrenched. The simmering dispute threatens to undermine loyalty to troops ostensibly sent to protect the area.

Gul Rahman, the district governor, has attempted to mediate but with little success. "I met the Afghan National Army (ANA) with the elders. Now the army are staying, the people are very angry and asking for the payments they are owed, but no one is listening to them."

Land is one of the most sensitive issues in Afghanistan. During 30 years of war, many legal documents have been destroyed, landowners and their families have been killed or become refugees, and people have settled on to land to which they have no legal claim.

Haji Usman, headmaster of the Naray boys' high school and owner of about two hectares of land that is now part of the base, led a delegation to Kabul that lobbied successfully for an official investigation and recognition of the villagers' claim to the land. The army is ignoring that finding at its own risk, he said.

"The people are very angry that the ANA are not leaving," Usman said. "I don't think most people who have had their land taken would be willing to join the Taliban; this is a village under government control. But there are maybe a few, who live in more remote houses, who will join if this issue is not resolved."

Rahman, the district governor, said security problems had kept him from visiting Pashengar, but he had been looking into Khan's situation and believed a sale of the military detritus could help pay some of the rent.

"I didn't visit the house but I asked some people about it, so I know that some containers, vehicles and generators were left behind. Some were destroyed but some were OK," he told the Guardian by phone from his heavily guarded offices in Naray. "This equipment left by the Americans could make up perhaps half the rent of Haji Najibullah, or at least a quarter."

But Khan said it was mostly worthless in an area of subsistence farmers. "I can't sell any of the equipment because it is not stuff that people in the district use. I just leave it in my yard, because it's quite worthless to me."

Afghanistan's landscape is littered with rusting Soviet tanks and other military junk, a constant reminder of the Soviets' troubled decade in the country, but since 2001, foreign forces have gone to great lengths to leave no trace.

To abandon even non-military equipment is unusual and perhaps a sign of the challenges facing Naray, which lies at Kunar's northern tip. Poor and isolated, it is a place where insurgents can slip easily across the border from Pakistan or down from lawless Nuristan province, where an insurgent vice-and-virtue police holds sway in some villages.

A spokesman for the Afghan army would not comment on the situation in Naray, and the Kunar provincial governor, Fazlullah Wahedi, said he had not heard about the land disputes there.

The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force declined to comment on the situation at either base. "As a matter of policy, Isaf does not publicly discuss information pertaining to potential or pending claims," said spokesman Charlie Stadtlander.
Guardiaan


I guess this is how you lose fight the "right war"

Facebook bans Gandhi quote as part of revisionist history purge

(NaturalNews) The reports are absolutely true. Facebook suspended the Natural News account earlier today after we posted an historical quote from Mohandas Gandhi. The quote reads:

"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest." - Mohandas Gandhi, an Autobiography, page 446.

This historical quote was apparently too much for Facebook's censors to bear. They suspended our account and gave us a "final warning" that one more violation of their so-called "community guidelines" would result in our account being permanently deactivated.

They then demanded we send them a color copy of a "government issued identification" in order to reactivate our account. Our account was removed from suspension just minutes before InfoWars posted its article on this Facebook censorship, and the Facebook page is now functioning at:
www.Facebook.com/NaturalNews

This is a separate account from our primary Facebook account, which has nearly 250,000 followers at:
www.Facebook.com/HealthRanger

Logic is an enemy and history is a menace

That Facebook would choose to disable our account after we posted a Gandhi quote is incredibly shocking. The historical rise of oppressed Indian people against tyrannical British rule is apparently no longer allowed to be discussed on Facebook. The very IDEA of a free people overcoming tyrannical government rule now "violates community guidelines." The removal of this content is akin to online book burning and the destruction of history.

This post was not in any way malicious, nor encouraging violence, nor even describing guns or the Second Amendment. It merely reflected the words of one of our world's most celebrated rebel leaders who helped an entire nation throw off the shackles of oppression and British occupation. That Facebook would find this to "violate community guidelines" is nothing short of absolutely bewildering.

Here is the full image as originally posted on Facebook. Keep in mind that THIS is now considered unacceptable speech across the "Facebook community," where any number of people can openly call for the murder of the NRA president and have absolutely no action taken against them:

InfoWars.com is also now reporting that Facebook is running an across-the-board PURGE of pro-gun accounts. A huge number of accounts are all being systematically disabled or suspended, with all content being wiped clean.

We have entered the era of the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell's 1984 novel. And while Facebook assaults the First Amendment in America, Senator Feinstein is busy assaulting the Second.

Facebook declares war on human history

What's especially alarming about all this is that Gandhi himself was of course a champion of resistance against tyranny. To banish quotes from Gandhi is much like banning quotes of freedom from Martin Luther King (who also openly supported concealed firearms, by the way, and who personally owned an entire "arsenal" of firearms).

What's next? Will Facebook ban quotes by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington? Any and all patriots, founding fathers and liberty lovers throughout history might soon be stricken from the Facebook servers, and any who dare to post historical quotes supporting liberty, the Bill of Rights, or the Second Amendment risk having their accounts terminated and all content deleted.

Collectivist propaganda has now reached a point where you can't even discuss liberty or anything out of history that supported the right to keep and bear arms. You are required to stay focused solely on celebrity gossip, sports stars, fashion distractions and tabloid garbage. Anyone who wishes to discuss actual American history must now go underground and speak softly in dimly-lit rooms, behind secret walls and drawn curtains.

The era of total oppression and collectivist mind control has fully arrived in America. This is not hyperbole... IT IS HERE NOW.

Memorize this quote, because it too shall soon be purged from the internet:

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson.

Dare to post that on Facebook and you risk your account being disabled or deleted.
NaturalNews

P.J. O'Rourke: Dear Mr. President, Zero-Sum Doesn't Add Up

Given that hypocrisy is an important part of diplomacy, and diplomacy is necessary to foreign policy, allow me to congratulate you on winning a second term.

I wish I could also congratulate you on your conduct of international affairs. I do thank you for killing Osama bin Laden. It was a creditable action for which you deserve some of the credit you've been given. Of course the intelligence was gathered, and the mission was undertaken, by men and women who, although they answer to your command, answer to duty first. And it is difficult to imagine any president of the United States who, under the circumstances, wouldn't have ordered the strike against bin Laden. Although there is Jimmy Carter. Thank you for not being Jimmy Carter.


But even though it violates the insincere amity that creates a period of calm following national elections, no thank you for the following, and it is only a partial list:

• Telling the Taliban to play by the rules or you'll take your ball and go home;

• Leaving Iraq in a lurch (and in a hurry);

• Watching the EU go down the sink drain and into the Greece trap and wanting to take America along on the trip;

• Miscalculating human rights and strategic engagement in the Chinese arithmetic of your China policy;

• Being the personification of bad weather during the Arab Spring with your chilly response when you encountered its best aspects and your frozen inaction when you encountered its worst;

• Playing with Russian nesting dolls, opening hollow figurine after hollow figurine hoping to find one that doesn't look like Vladimir Putin;

• Sitting and doing nothing like a couch potato watching a made-for-TV movie as the Castro and Chávez zombies continue their rampage;

• Hugging the door on your date with Israel;

• Putting the raw meat of incentives in your pants pocket when you go to scold the pit bulls of Iran and North Korea;

But the worst thing that you've done internationally is what you've done domestically. You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.

There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney's argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we've got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.

In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.

There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.

Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution. Take from the rich and give to the . . . Well, actually, you didn't mention the poor. What you talked and talked about was the middle class, something most well-off Americans consider themselves to be members of. So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and give to the less rich, more or less. It is as if Robin Hood stole treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the Deputy Sheriff.

But never mind. The evil of zero-sum thinking and redistributive politics has nothing to do with which things are taken or to whom those things are given or what the sum of zero things is supposed to be. The evil lies in denying people the right, the means, and, indeed, the duty to make more things.

Or maybe you just find it easier to pursue a political policy of sneaking in America's back door, swiping a laptop, going around to the front door, ringing the bell, and announcing, "Free computer equipment for all school children!"

However, domestic politics aren't my first concern here. The question is whether you want to convince the international community that zero-sum is the American premise and redistribution is the logical conclusion.

I would argue that the world doesn't need more encouragement to think in zero-sum terms or act in redistributive ways.

Western Europe has done such a good job redistributing its assets that the European Union now has a Spanish economy, a Swedish foreign policy, an Italian army, and Irish gigolos.

Redistributionist political ideologies, in decline since the fall of the Soviet bloc, are on the rise again. Will you help the neo-Marxists of Latin America redistribute stupidity to their continent?

The Janjaweed are trying to redistribute themselves in Darfur. The Serbs would like to do the same in Kosovo. The Chinese have already done it in Tibet. Al Qaeda offshoots are doing their best to redistribute violence to places that didn't have enough.

And Russia and China would like the global balance of power to be redistributed. Since China has plenty of money to lend and Russia has plenty of oil to sell, your debt and energy policies should go a long way toward making the balance of power fairer for the Russians and Chinese.

While redistribution—or "plagiarism," as we writers call it—is a bad idea, zero-sum is even worse. Zero-sum assumptions mean that a country that doesn't pursue a policy of taking things from other countries is letting its citizens down. That's pretty much the story of all recorded history, none of which needs to be repeated. It has taken mankind millennia to learn that trade is more profitable than pillage. And we don't have to carry our plunder home in sacks and saddlebags when we're willing to accept a certified check.

The Chinese don't seem to understand this yet. They think trade is a one-way enterprise, the object of which is for China to have all the world's money. They've got most of ours already. Mr. President, validating China's economic notions isn't a good thing.

A zero-sum faith in getting what's wanted by taking it can extend to faith itself. In some places there is only one religion. If other people have a religion of their own they must be taking away from my religion. Give up that faith, infidels.

Speaking of infidel faiths, Mr. President, please consider the message of this Christmas week—a message of giving, not taking. And consider your prominent position as a messenger of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. When you embrace a belief in the zero-sum nature of what's under the Christmas tree and propose to redistribute everything that's in our Christmas stockings, you're asking the world to go sit on the Grinch's lap instead of Santa's.
WSJ

'Chemical weapons were used on Homs': Syria's military police defector tells of nerve gas attack

The head of Syria’s military police defected to the opposition, accusing the Assad regime of systematic “murder” and claiming that reports of chemical weapons being used against rebels in the restive city of Homs were true.

Maj-Gen Abdul-Aziz Jassim al-Shallal became one of the highest ranking Syrian military officers to throw their support behind the rebels, accusing forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad of turning their weapons on innocent civilians in the now 22-month-long civil war.

“I declare my defection from the army because of its deviation from its fundamental mission to protect the nation and [its] transformation into gangs of

murder and destruction,” he said in a video message posted online, reportedly from the Turkish border.

He accused the military of “destroying cities and villages and committing massacres against our innocent people who came out to demand freedom.” General Shallal suggested in his message that he had been working with the opposition for some time before he formally defected to the rebel cause.

He becomes the latest in a string of leading military advisers to abandon the government and join the disparate rebels. But it is his claim that chemical weapons were used in Homs during a deadly attack on Christmas Eve that is likely to be of greater interest to the Syrian opposition and their foreign backers.

Reports from Homs had suggested that a type of nerve agent was used by the Syrian forces in the attack, a point that General Shallal appeared to verify yesterday. Al Jazeera reported at the time that at least seven people had died after inhaling a poisonous gas “sprayed by government forces in a rebel-held Homs neighbourhood”.

“We don’t know what this gas is but medics are saying it’s something similar to sarin gas,” Raji Rahmet Rabbou, an activist in Homs, told Al Jazeera.

It is not clear that the substance used in Homs was banned by international law, even the though the General yesterday specifically referred to a “chemical weapons” attack. Nonetheless, the use of non-conventional weapons is considered a “red line” by some in the international community who have been reluctant to intervene directly.

The issue of chemical weapons and their security is likely to form the basis of discussions when the UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi visits Moscow on Saturday. Russia has hitherto officially backed the Syrian government, but with recent rebel advances, particularly in Damascus, individual Russian officials have suggested that support for the Assad regime may be waning.

General Shallal said that he had been working with the opposition for some time and that plans for his formal defection had taken weeks to finalise. He suggested that several more leading officials were either working for the rebels from within the regime or wanted to defect. An unnamed Syrian security source confirmed the defection but played down its significance, the Reuters news agency reported. General Shallal was due to retire soon and joined the uprising to “play hero”, the source is quoted as saying.

The defection came as reports emerged of women and children being killed in an attack in the northern Raqqa province. An amateur video showed the bodies of eight children and three women. Activists said the attack was in the village of Qahtaniyeh.
Independent

US Soldier Suicides Outnumber Combat Deaths In 2012

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – American soldier suicides continue to outnumber combat-related deaths in 2012, and the trajectory for soldier suicides continues to get worse.

Statistics released by the Department of the Army show that through November potentially 303 active-duty, Reserve and National Guard soldiers committed suicide. As of Dec. 7, Stars and Stripes reports that 212 soldiers have died in combat-related deaths in Afghanistan.

The Army set a grim new record of 177 potential active-duty cases with 2012 coming to a close on Tuesday – 64 of these cases remain under investigation, 113 have been confirmed.


In June of this year, The Pentagon reported there had been at least 154 suicides among active-duty troops – a rate of nearly one each day. The number of suicides continues to increase despite numerous new training and awareness programs put into effect in the past few years.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stated on Nov. 12 that the Obama administration will cease combat operations by the end of 2014, but it is still refining its timeline for withdrawing the remaining 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“So we’re dealing with broader societal issues,” Panetta said in a June speech. “Substance abuse, financial distress and relationship problems — the risk factors for suicide — also reflect problems … that will endure beyond war.”

A bipartisan group of lawmakers from both the House and the Senate are pushing for new rules that would allow military commanders and mental health specialists to ask unstable troops if they own personal firearms, reports Stars and Stripes.

About 53 percent of those who died by suicide in the military in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, had no history of deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, according to the Defense Department. And nearly 85 percent of military members who took their lives had no direct combat history, meaning they may have been deployed but not seen action.

“As part of the Army’s team-based and holistic approach to suicide prevention and stigma reduction, Army chaplains remain committed to fostering a resilient and ready force by enhancing strength, reducing stigma and encouraging help-seeking behaviors,” the Army’s Maj. Gen. Donald L. Rutherford, Chief of Chaplains, said in the Department of Defense press release “Our soldiers, families and civilians are our most precious resource, and the chaplaincy embodies the best of our Army values when it proclaims hope, embraces community, and stands with those who feel they stand alone.”
CBS

Social Security Ran $47.8B Deficit in FY 2012; Disabled Workers Hit New Record in December: 8,827,795

(CNSNews.com) - The Social Security program ran a $47.8 billion deficit in fiscal 2012 as the program brought in $725.429 billion in cash and paid $773.247 for benefits and overhead expenses, according to official data published by Social Security Administration.

The Social Security Administration also released new data revealing that the number of workers collecting disability benefits hit a record 8,827,795 in December--up from 8,805,353 in November.

The overall number of Social Security program beneficiaries—including retired workers, dependent family members and survivors and disabled workers and their dependent family members—also hit a record in December, climbing from 56,658,978 in November to 56,758,185 in December.

In 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was an average of 112.556 million full-time workers in the United States, of whom 17.806 million worked full-time for local, state or federal government. That left an average of only 94.750 million full-time private sector workers in the country.

That means that for every 1.67 Americans who worked full-time in the private sector in 2011, there is now 1 person collecting benefits from the Social Security administration.

Despite its fiscal 2012 “net cash flow” deficit, as SSA describes it, the agency was able to book an on-paper “increase” of $64.580 billion in the Social Security Trust Funds. That, SSA says, is because the U.S. Treasury “paid” the trust funds $112.398 in “interest” in fiscal 2012 on the historial surpluses in Social Security taxes that the Treasury siphoned off to cover other spending by the federal government.

As of the end of calendar year 2011, according to SSA, the Social Security Trust Fund equaled approximately $2.678 trillion.

The last time the Social Security program ran a “net cash flow” surplus was in fiscal 2009. In that year, Social Security’s revenues exceeded its benefit and overhead payments by $19.358 billion. In fiscal 2010, Social Security ran a $36.8 billion deficit; and, in fiscal 2011, it ran a $47.975 deficit.

There are two Social Security Trust Funds: the Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund. The OASI Trust Fund covers benefits to retired workers and their families and deceased workers families. The DI Trust fund covers benefits to disabled workers and their families. The trust funds are required by law to hand over all surplus revenues to the Treasury and the Treasury then provides “special issue” non-marketable bonds—essentially electronic IOUs—to the trust funds in return for the cash. These "IOUs" become part of the national debt. When the Treasury pays "interest" that increases the value of the Social Security Trust Funds it does so by increasing the number of IOUs it owes the trust funds.

When the Social Security program runs a net cash flow deficit, as it has in the last three fiscal years, the Treasury needs to borrow cash from the “public” to keep the program funded. As of Dec. 21, the federal government’s debt was $16.336 trillion.
CNSNews

Obama Backs Away From al Qaeda “Defeat” Claim

President Obama appears to be backing away from his often-stated claim – a cornerstone of his 2012 campaign – that “al Qaeda is on the path to defeat.”

In a subtle but important shift three days ago during remarks nominating Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to be Secretary of State, Obama revised the assertion, stipulating that “the al Qaeda core is on the path to defeat.”

The addition of one word to Obama’s usual statement may seem a small matter. But the president chooses his words very carefully, particularly in prepared remarks. And the insertion of the word “core” probably represents a major reassessment by the administration of al Qaeda’s overall strength and durability, a change in outlook that could have a significant impact on U.S. anti-terrorism policy going forward.

Use of the word “core” implies that while the administration is having success against the al Qaeda leadership, al Qaeda’s far-flung affiliates – like the ones that carried out the Benghazi attack – are not on the “path to defeat.” And therefore in a larger sense, the claim made during the campaign that al Qaeda itself is on the path to defeat is no longer considered true by the White House.

Such a shift would not have been made without a major change in thinking within the White House itself. It represents an acknowledgement that, with al Qaeda affiliates still able to inflict damage and casualties against the United States, the war against terrorism will be a longer and more difficult road than previously thought.

When the change in thinking occurred – and whether it is mainly a result of the Benghazi attack – is unclear. What is clear is that the White House waited until after the campaign was over to convey its new position to the public.

Even on the very last day of the campaign – nearly two months after the Benghazi attack – Obama was saying, as he did to an audience in Columbus, Ohio, that “al Qaeda is on the path to defeat.”

That phrase, it would appear, is no longer operative.
White House Dossier

Killer gas bombs used in Homs

BEIRUT - Syrian troops have deployed bombs containing a killer gas while fighting rebels in the central city of Homs, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and activists said on Monday.
“Activists in Homs say that six rebels died on Sunday night on the Khaldiyeh-Bayada frontline because they inhaled odourless gas and white smoke,” said the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of activists, lawyers and doctors to document Syria’s raging conflict. “Gas spread in the area after regime troops threw bombs that gave off white smoke as soon as they hit the walls,” said the Observatory, which added that the bombs were deployed during street clashes with the rebels.

“Those who inhaled the gas felt nauseous and suffered severe headaches. Some suffered fits,” it added. “These are not chemical weapons, but we do not know whether they are internationally prohibited,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said. “Activists say it is the first time they have recorded these effects,” he added. “They are not conventional weapons.”

The Observatory called on the International Committee of the Red Cross to urgently send a specialised medical team to Homs, several of whose districts have been besieged by army forces for more than six months.

The Local Coordination Committees also reported the use of “bombs containing gases” in Homs. “These gases lead to muscle relaxation, severe difficulty in breathing and the narrowing of the iris,” said the LCC, a grassroots network of peaceful activists.

Amateur video filmed by activists and distributed online by the LCC showed a man laid out on a stretcher struggling to breathe as an unidentified doctor held an oxygen mask over his face. “It’s definitely a poisonous gas, but we don’t know what type it is,” said a field doctor. “This man has been injured by the gas. We do not know what type of gas it is. It is definitely not sarin,” he added.

US President Barack Obama led international warnings to President Bashar Al Assad over Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal but Damascus has repeatedly insisted it would not use the arms against its own people.
Khaleej Times
Red lines turn the color of shit

Spending to Increase 55 Percent Under Obama's Plan

Spending will increase 55 percent over the next decade, if President Barack Obama's budget plan goes into effect. The finding comes from the Republican-side of the Senate Budget Committee, which notes that Obama's "Proposal Would Spend $880 Billion Over Already Projected Increases."

Here's a chart, detailing how Obama's plan would bring spending from $3.62 trillion in 2013 to $5.63 trillion in 2022:


"The President's last fiscal cliff offer once again increased spending rather than reducing it," writes the minority-side of the Senate Budget Committee. "His plan does claim $800 billion in spending reductions over ten years, but these claims are more than offset by new spending increases: increasing spending above BCA limits ($1,200 billion); paying for the doc fix ($400 billion); new transportation stimulus spending ($50 billion), and; a one-year extension of unemployment insurance ($30 billion). After subtracting the president’s savings from his spending increases, over the next 10 years the President’s proposal actually spends $880 billion more - $44.368 trillion versus $43.488 trillion - than currently projected spending levels. In the next two years alone, the President’s plan would spend $255 billion over current projected spending levels ($156 billion higher in FY13 and $99 billion higher in FY14). Overall, spending would increase 55% under the President’s plan, from $3.6 trillion in FY13 to $ 5.6 trillion in FY22."


On Friday, however, President Obama seemed to suggest he'd be up for a smaller "fiscal cliff" deal. "In the next few days, I've asked leaders of Congress to work towards a package that prevents a tax hike on middle-class Americans, protects unemployment insurance for 2 million Americans, and lays the groundwork for further work on both growth and deficit reduction. That's an achievable goal. That can get done in 10 days. … I want to wish every American a merry Christmas. And because we didn’t get this done, I will see you next week," said Obama.

But, the ranking member, Senator Jeff Sessions, of the Senate Budget Committee contends that nothing has changed.

"President Obama today gave yet another speech about the fiscal cliff," says Sessions. "No plan, nothing that can be scored or analyzed, just another speech. If President Obama wishes to avoid the fiscal cliff then he, with all the power and influence he holds as the leader of this nation, must submit to Congress – in legislative form – a plan that he believes can pass both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support. No more secret meetings and pointless press conferences. Certainly this is not too much to ask. So we await his action: will he move from an unscorable speech to scorable legislation? If he is unwilling to submit such a plan then we may be left with only one persuasive conclusion: that he has used two years of secret meetings with Republican leaders not as an opportunity to achieve fiscal reform, but as a political exercise to defeat his opposition and preserve the expansion of federal spending."
WeeklyStandard

Halloween decorations carry haunting message of forced labor

The letter came in a box of Halloween decorations purchased at Kmart, but for a year Julie Keith never knew. It gathered dust in her storage, a haunting plea for help hidden among artificial skeletons, tombstones and spider webs.
Keith, a 42-year-old vehicle donation manager at a southeast Portland Goodwill, at one point considered donating the unopened $29.99 Kmart graveyard kit. It was one of those accumulated items you never need and easily forget. But on a Sunday afternoon in October, Keith pulled the orange and black box from storage. She intended to decorate her home in Damascus for her daughter's fifth birthday, just days before Halloween.

She ripped open the box and threw aside the cellophane.

That's when Keith found it. Scribbled onto paper and folded into eighths, the letter was tucked between two Styrofoam headstones.

"Sir: "If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever."

The graveyard kit, the letter read, was made in unit 8, department 2 of the Masanjia Labor Camp in Shenyang, China.

Chinese characters broke up choppy English sentences.

"People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement, beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month)."

Ten yuan is equivalent to $1.61.

"People who work here, suffer punishment 1-3 years averagely, but without Court Sentence (unlaw punishment). Many of them are Falun Gong practitioners, who are totally innocent people only because they have different believe to CCPG. They often suffer more punishment than others."

The letter was not signed.

Shocked, Keith sat down as her mind reeled.

Wow, that's daring, she thought. She imagined the desperation the writer must have felt, the courage he or she must have mustered to slip the letter into that box. If caught, what would happen?

Like a message in a bottle, the letter traveled more than 5,000 miles over the Pacific Ocean. It could not be ignored.


Unsure of where to start, Keith turned to Facebook.

"I found this in a box of Halloween decorations" she typed beneath a photo of the letter. She wanted to spread the message.

The Facebook post sparked a slew of responses. Her friends had heard of labor camp horrors. But a letter from one of those camps? Never.

"I'm sure that person feared for his/her life to include that letter in the products, but it was a chance they were obviously willing to take," one friend wrote. "We take our freedom for granted!"

"What's weird to me is someone is actually thinking about, and praying something comes of this ... every day of their life since they sent it out," another wrote. "Makes me sad this even happens"

Some friends offered help, others asked for updates.

The anonymous letter evoked skepticism, too. Written largely in English scrawl, it was almost too bold of an act to seem plausible. Still, U.S. authorities on China took note.

"We're in no position to confirm the veracity or origin of this," said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. "I think it is fair to say the conditions described in the letter certainly conform to what we know about conditions in re-education through labor camps."

China's re-education through labor is a system of punishment that allows for detention without trial. Various reports allege followers of the banned spiritual group, Falun Gong, are sent to the reform camps – claims supported in the letter – but the facts are difficult to confirm.

Masanjia labor camp is located in the industrialized capital of the Liaoning Province in northeast China. A Google search of the camp yields pages of grim results.

"If this thing is the real deal, that's somebody saying please help me, please know about me, please react," Richardson said. "That's our job."

***

If truly created in a forced labor camp, the Halloween graveyard kit from Kmart's "Totally Ghoul" product line could bring a blow to the U.S. chain of discount stores.

Title 19, section 1307 of U.S. Code generally prohibits the importation of all items "mined, produced or manufactured" in any foreign country by convict labor, forced labor and/or indentured labor.

After the Oregonian informed the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the letter, ICE's Homeland Security Investigations began looking into the case, public affairs officer Andrew Munoz confirmed.

Sears Holdings Corporation, which operates Kmart, released a statement on the matter:

"Sears Holdings has a Global Compliance Program which helps to ensure that vendors and factories producing merchandise for our company adhere to specific Program Requirements, and all local laws pertaining to employment standards and workplace practices. Failure to comply with any of the Program Requirements, including the use of forced labor, may result in a loss of business or factory termination. We understand the seriousness of this allegation, and will continue to investigate."

Daniel Ruiz, section chief of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center's commercial fraud unit, said it would be difficult to predict the length of an investigation like this, which would involve American and Chinese authorities. Investigative findings would be released, he said, only if the agency takes action.

***

Julie Keith now checks the label of everything she buys, down to the Gingerbread house she purchased for the holidays. Her friends, she said, do the same.

"If I really don't need it, I won't buy it if it's made in China," she said. "This has really made me more aware. I hope it would make a difference."
Oregon Online

No one will care, they will just keep shoping like if this letter did not exist.

NDAA Indefinite Detention Provision Mysteriously Stripped From Bill

WASHINGTON -- Congress stripped a provision Tuesday from a defense bill that aimed to shield Americans from the possibility of being imprisoned indefinitely without trial by the military. The provision was replaced with a passage that appears to give citizens little protection from indefinite detention.

The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 was added by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), but there was no similar language in the version of the bill that passed the House, and it was dumped from the final bill released Tuesday after a conference committee from both chambers worked out a unified measure.

It declared that "An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or any similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States, unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention."

The provision sparked a heated debate in the Senate, but ultimately passed by a wide majority with both supporters and opponents of U.S. terrorist detention practices voting for it, citing differing interpretations. Feinstein offered the amendment to clarify a part of the 2012 NDAA that for the first time codified the ability of the military and White House to detain terrorism suspects.

Spokespeople for Senate committee leaders did not immediately answer why the amendment was stripped, but pointed to the language that replaced it:

Nothing in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107–40; 50 U.S.C. 1541) or the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (Public Law 112–81) shall be construed to deny the availability of the writ of habeas corpus or to deny any Constitutional rights in a court ordained or established by or under Article III of the Constitution to any person inside the United States who would be entitled to the availability of such writ or to such rights in the absence of such laws.

The new provision appears to do little, because the Supreme Court has already declared that the writ of habeas corpus -- requiring that someone be presented to a judge -- applies to all people. The more difficult part of whether people deserve a trial remains unsettled, and the new provision does not appear to resolve it.

"This language doesn't do anything of substance," said Raha Wala, a lawyer in the law and national security program of Human Rights First. "It doesn't ban indefinite detention within the United States or change anything about existing law."


Feinstein said she was not pleased that her attempt to at least shield citizens and legal residents was stripped.

“I was saddened and disappointed that we could not take a step forward to ensure at the very least American citizens and legal residents could not be held in detention without charge or trial," Feinstein said. "To me that was a no-brainer.”

Nevertheless, many activists who oppose indefinite detention were not all that enamored with her amendment because some felt it asserted that Congress had the right to make laws requiring detention of citizens. Others believed it failed the test of constitutionality because the Constitution specifies its protections extend to all people, not just citizens. It also did not address terror suspects captured overseas.

The White House had threatened to veto both the House and Senate versions over numerous other provisions included in the legislation. Among them were restrictions on the executive's ability to transfer prisoners from the prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The White House did not immediately answer questions about whether the threats stood.

UPDATE: 5:25 p.m. -- Conservative Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R), slammed the change, singling out Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the process.

“The decision by the NDAA conference committee, led by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to strip the National Defense Authorization Act of the amendment that protects American citizens against indefinite detention now renders the entire NDAA unconstitutional,” Sen. Paul said.“I voted against NDAA in 2011 because it did not contain the proper constitutional protections. When my Senate colleagues voted to include those protections in the 2012 NDAA through the Feinstein-Lee Amendment last month, I supported this act,” Sen. Paul continued. “But removing those protections now takes us back to square one and does as much violence to the Constitution as last year’s NDAA. When the government can arrest suspects without a warrant, hold them without trial, deny them access to counsel or admission of bail, we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity.
“Saying that new language somehow ensures the right to habeas corpus – the right to be presented before a judge – is both questionable and not enough. Citizens must not only be formally charged but also receive jury trials and the other protections our Constitution guarantees. Habeas corpus is simply the beginning of due process. It is by no means the whole.
“Our Bill of Rights is not something that can be cherry-picked at legislators’ convenience. When I entered the United States Senate, I took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. It is for this reason that I will strongly oppose passage of the McCain conference report that strips the guarantee to a trial by jury.”
Huffpost

Army rolls out brass to defend anti-IED software

The Army presented two two-star generals and three intelligence specialists Thursday to defend its $2.5 billion battlefield intelligence processor, which has failed operational tests and has been criticized by soldiers as being too slow to analyze the enemy and help find buried bombs in Afghanistan.

In a news conference at the Pentagon, the Army specialists lauded the Defense Common Ground System, an array of computers, servers and programs that is the Army’s principal processor of huge amounts of battlefield data.

The Washington Times first reported in July about an internal battle within the Army. Commanders and intelligence officers in Afghanistan complained in messages to Army headquarters about the Defense Common Ground System.

Some asked for permission to buy Palantir, an off-the-shelf software platform that specializes in linking disparate bits of information to form a clear picture of the battlefield.

In some cases, Army officials involved in shielding the Defense Common Ground System from possible budget cuts viewed Palantir as a competitor and worked to shut off the requests.

Thursday’s news conference offered a different view.

The generals said the Defense Common Ground System, which has been in development for a decade, grew out of a giant gap in intelligence collection: There was no single database to bring together information in Afghanistan and look for links among suspected enemy fighters.

“We had a difficult time [in] what we were collecting and even what it was collecting, when it was collecting and where it was collecting,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, who heads the Army Intelligence and Security Command. He has held senior posts in special operations, Central Command and Afghanistan.

“Data from all that collection resided in different databases that were often incompatible,” Gen. Fogarty said.

A different tale

Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, the Army’s deputy for acquisition and systems management, said the Defense Common Ground System “replaced nine different intelligence systems.”

“This really is a change in methodology,” Gen. Greene said. “It reduces the amount of hardware we have to buy and the footprint on the ground.”

Intelligence processing has become especially important in fighting terrorists such as the Taliban, who wear no uniforms and hide among the population, making them difficult to identify.

“It’s really the Army intelligence-analyst weapon system,” Gen. Fogarty said. “DCGS has been used effectively in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world by both conventional and our special operations forces. We believe it enhances soldiers’ situational awareness and improves commanders’ ability to protect the force.”

The Times has obtained a series of messages from combatants that tell a far different story.

Officers lauded Palantir for its ability to zero in on data that helped soldiers find roadside bombs, the No. 1 killer of troops in Afghanistan. They complained that the Army-issued Defense Common Ground System was too slow.

A November 2011 memo from the 82nd Airborne Division provides an example:

“Solving very hard analytical problems takes several days when using existing tools against these data sources,” the message states. “In our experience in using the Palantir platform against the same problems, we were able to reduce this time to a few hours. This shortfall translates into operational opportunities missed and unnecessary risk to force.”

‘People have preferences’

Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican and a former Marine officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, has accused the Army of fighting requests for Palantir to protect its own system.

Mr. Hunter said of Thursday’s news conference: “The Army’s in damage-control mode. DCGS has underperformed in many areas and created capability gaps that soldiers are looking to fill with alternative solutions.

“The Army can talk about intent all it wants, but there’s a difference between what the program’s intended to do and how it’s actually performing. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been at least 13 separate requests from ground combat units for something different,” said Mr. Hunter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

The generals said nine of those requests were granted, and gave various reasons why the other four were rejected.

“Every intelligence officer wants the best capability available,” Gen. Fogarty said. “People have preferences. We have some very aggressive analysts. Frankly, they drive us to continue to improve the system.”

He asserted that once a brigade opts to use Palantir “that data is not completely available, is not interoperable” with other intelligence systems.

“The ease of use [with Palantir], that has been very important to them,” he said.

An aide for Mr. Hunter said the nine-of-13 statistic does not tell the full story: Commanders went around the Army bureaucracy to get approval from other agencies or waited months for an OK when they needed Palantir right away.

Failing grades

The generals said the Army is conducting an industry competition among Palantir and other software providers to determine whether their link-analysis software can be incorporated into the Defense Common Ground System.

Col. Dave Pendall, a former division intelligence officer in Afghanistan, told reporters that the Defense Common Ground System performed well in his eastern region. He used it to produce daily intelligence reports on data from human sources, intercepts of electronic transmissions, satellite images and other sources.

“In my experience, DCGS has met our requirements,” Col. Pendall said.

Both the Army’s and Pentagon’s chief testers have issued failing grades for the Defense Common Ground System’s latest version.

The Defense Department’s Operational Test and Evaluation office said the system was “not operationally effective, not operationally suitable and not operationally survivable against cyberthreats,” according to a copy of the evaluation obtained by The Times.

Gen. Greene said the tests show “we had some challenges with the work flows” and “some reliability challenges.”

The Pentagon’s top acquisition official last week agreed to let the Army field the latest version of the system, but without software to store top-secret material. That so-called “enclave” was causing systemwide problems. Without it, the newer system should be able to perform as well as the ones now in-country, the Army says.

The Senate Armed Services Committee report on fiscal 2013 defense spending scolded the Army for refusing to approve commercially available systems such as Palantir.

“The Marine Corps and even some Army units in Afghanistan proceeded to deploy commercial products,” the report said, referring to the fact that officers bypassed the Army hierarchy to buy them. “Overall, the feedback from these units and an independent assessment by the deputy secretary of defense-chartered National Assessment Group has been very positive on these commercial products. Unfortunately, the Army’s cloud analyst support appears to continue to lag behind promised performance.”
Washington Times

If the Mayan prophecy is true, just how might it all end on Friday? Scientists foretell the cataclysms that could bring on Doomsday

They say it won't happen, at least not on Friday, but in the event the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world is right, scientists have foretold a raft of bloody and catastrophic fates for us all.

Dark comets, famine, super-volcanoes, catastrophic climate change, and a plague of cancers are just some of the ends that could fulfill the prophecy.

Astrophysicist Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars, believes the most likely disaster that could pencil Doomsday into Friday's diary is a black comet.
Mail online


Obama's reelection is all the doomsday we need. And that has already come true.

A River in Retreat: In Two Weeks, the Mississippi Could Shut Down

ST. LOUIS — The Mississippi as seen from Ed Drager's tug boat is a river in retreat: a giant beached barge is stranded where the water dropped, with sand bars springing into view. The floating barge office where the tugboat captain reports for duty is tilted like a funhouse. One side now rests on the exposed shore. "I've never seen the river this low," Drager said. "It's weird."

The worst drought in half a century has brought water levels in the Mississippi close to historic lows and could shut down all shipping in a matter of weeks – unless Barack Obama takes extraordinary measures.

It's the second extreme event on the river in 18 months, after flooding in the spring of 2011 forced thousands to flee their homes. Without rain, water levels on the Mississippi are projected to reach historic lows this month, the national weather service said in its latest four-week forecast.

"All the ingredients for us getting to an all-time record low are certainly in place," said Mark Fuchs, a hydrologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in St Louis. "I would be very surprised if we didn't set a record this winter."


The drought has created a low-water choke point south of St. Louis, near the town of Thebes, where pinnacles of rock extend upwards from the river bottom making passage treacherous.

Shipping companies are hauling 15 barges at a time instead of a typical string of 25, because the bigger runs are too big for the operating conditions.

Barges are carrying lighter loads, making for more traffic, with more delays and back-ups. Stretches of the river are now reduced to one-way traffic. A long cold spell could make navigation even trickier: shallow, slow-moving water is more likely to get clogged up with ice.

Current projections suggest water levels could drop too low to send barges through Thebes before the new year – unless there is heavy rainfall.

Local television in St. Louis is dispensing doom-laden warnings about rusting metal and hazardous materials exposed by the receding waters.

Shipping companies say the economic consequences of a shutdown on the Mississippi would be devastating. About $7bn in vital commodities – typically grain, coal, heating oil, and cement – moves on the river at this time of year. Cutting off the transport route would have an impact across the mid-west and beyond.


"There are so many issues at stake here," said George Foster, owner of JB Marine Services. "There is so much that moves on the river, not just coal and grain products, but you've got cement, steel for construction, chemicals for manufacturing plants, petroleum plants, heating oil. All those things move on the waterways, so if it shuts down you've got a huge stop of commerce."

Companies which ship their goods on the river are talking about lay-offs, if the Mississippi closes to navigation. Those would be just the first casualties, Foster said. "It is going to affect the people at the grocery store, at the gas pump, with home construction and so forth."

And it's going to fall especially hard on farmers, who took a heavy hit from the drought and who rely on the Mississippi to ship their grain to export markets. Farmers in the area lost up to three-quarters of their corn and soya bean crops to this year's drought. Old-timers say it was the worst year they can remember.

"We have been through some dry times. In 1954 when my dad and grandfather farmed here they pretty much had nothing because it was so dry," said Paul McCormick who farms with his son, Jack, in Ellis Grove, Illinois, south of St Louis. "But I think this was a topper for me this year."

Now, however, farmers are facing the prospect of not being able to sell their grain at all because they can't get it to market. The farmers may also struggle to find other bulk items, such as fertiliser, that are typically shipped by barge.

"Most of the grain produced on our farm ends up bound for export," said Jack McCormick, who raises beef cattle and grain with his father. "It ends up going down the river. That is a very good market for us, and if you can't move it that means a lower price, or you have to figure out a different way to move it. It all ends up as a lower price for the farmers."

The shipping industry in St Louis wants the White House to order the release of more water from the Missouri river, which flows into the Mississippi, to keep waters high enough for the long barges to float down the river to New Orleans.

Foster said the extra water would be for 60 days or so – time for the US army corps of engineers to blast and clear the series of rock pinnacles down river, near the town of Thebes, that threaten barges during this time of low water.

Sending out more water from the Missouri would doom states upstream, such as Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota, which depend on water from the Missouri and are also caught in the drought.

"There are farmers and ranchers up there with livestock that don't have water to stay alive. They don't have enough fodder. They don't have enough irrigation water," said Robert Criss, a hydrologist at Washington University in St Louis, who has spent his career studying the Mississippi. "What a dumb way to use water during a drought."

Elected officials from South Dakota and elsewhere have pushed back strenuously at the idea of sending their water downstream. Foster reckons there is at best a 50-50 chance Obama will agree to open the gates. But such short-term measures ignore an even bigger problem. Scientists believe the Mississippi and other rivers are headed for an era of extremes, because of climate change.

This time last year, the Mississippi around St. Louis was 20ft deeper because of heavy rain. In the spring of 2011, the army engineers blew up two miles of levees to save the town of Cairo, Illinois and Missouri farmland, and deliberately flood parts of rural Louisiana to ensure Baton Rouge and New Orleans stayed dry.

"It has kind of switched on us, and it switched pretty quick," said the coastguard chief Ryan Christiansen. "It wasn't that long ago that you had pretty high flooding, and now we are heading towards record lows."

Others argue that the Mississippi is over-engineered, after a century and a half of tampering with the natural flow.

Over the decades, Congress funded a number of projects to deepen the shipping channel, doubling it in depth to 9ft, and building an elaborate system of locks and dams to keep the river in a confined space.

The engineers are constantly dredging the river's sandy bottom or building levees to keep barges moving. Those efforts to confine the river to a deep and narrow channel are believed to have made surrounding areas more vulnerable to extreme floods – as in 2011, when thousands were forced to flee their homes.

Such measures may also not make sense in the long-term use of the river.

Criss argues the long barge trains floating on the Mississippi are just too big for the upper reaches of the river anyway, and that the industry is unfairly subsidised compared with other transport providers such as rail.

"The whole system around here has been entirely reconfigured to accommodate these monstrous barges," he said.

"This is the whole problem. We want to run boats on the river with 9ft drafts that are almost a quarter of a mile long. They are too big for the size of the river up here."

The Mississippi, Criss said, needs smaller boats.
The Atlantic Cities

The One should just rais the water levels

Progressives Plan March On NRA In DC Monday

CREDO, a progressive grassroots group, is organizing a march on the National Rifle Association's lobbying arm in Washington, D.C. Monday.

"After the shooter Adam Lanza, no one is more to blame for the massacre of 20 first graders and six women at the Sandy Hook Elementary School than the National Rifle Association," CREDO wrote on the Facebook page where the march is being organized. "To stop the senseless killing we must first stop the NRA."

You have to wonder why there never seems to be a mad gunman massacre at a NRA rally?

Attorney General Secretly Granted Gov. Ability to Develop and Store Dossiers on Innocent Americans

In a secret government agreement granted without approval or debate from lawmakers, the U.S. attorney general recently gave the National Counterterrorism Center sweeping new powers to store dossiers on U.S. citizens, even if they are not suspected of a crime, according to a news report.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder granted the center the ability to copy entire government databases holding information on flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and other data, and to store it for up to five years, even without suspicion that someone in the database has committed a crime, according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story.

Whereas previously the law prohibited the center from storing data compilations on U.S. citizens unless they were suspected of terrorist activity or were relevant to an ongoing terrorism investigation, the new powers give the center the ability to not only collect and store vast databases of information but also to trawl through and analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior in order to uncover activity that could launch an investigation.

The changes granted by Holder would also allow databases containing information about U.S. citizens to be shared with foreign governments for their own analysis.

A former senior White House official told the Journal that the new changes were “breathtaking in scope.”

But counterterrorism officials tried to downplay the move by telling the Journal that the changes come with strict guidelines about how the data can be used.

“The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes,” Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the paper.

The NCTC currently maintains the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, or TIDE, which holds data on more than 500,000 identities suspected of terror activity or terrorism links, including friends and families of suspects, and is the basis for the FBI’s terrorist watchlist.

Under the new rules issued in March, the NCTC can now obtain almost any other government database that it claims is “reasonably believed” to contain “terrorism information.” This could conceivably include collections of financial forms submitted by people seeking federally backed mortgages or even the health records of anyone who sought mental or physical treatment at government-run hospitals, such as Veterans Administration facilities, the paper notes.

The Obama administration’s new rules come after previous surveillance proposals were struck down during the Bush administration, following widespread condemnation.

In 2002, the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program proposed to scrutinize both government and private databases, but public outrage killed the program in essence, though not in spirit. Although Congress de-funded the program in 2003, the NSA continued to collect and sift through immense amounts of data about who Americans spoke with, where they traveled and how they spent their money.

The Federal Privacy Act prohibits government agencies from sharing data for any purpose other than the reason for which the data was initially collected, in order to prevent the creation of dossiers, but agencies can do an end-run around this restriction by posting a notice in the Federal Register, providing justification for the data request. Such notices are rarely seen or contested, however.

The changes to the rules for the NCTC were sought in large part after authorities failed to catch Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he boarded a plane on Christmas Day in 2009 with explosives sewn into his underwear. Abdulmutallab wasn’t on the FBI watchlist, but the NCTC had received tips about him, and yet failed to search other government databases to connect dots that might have helped prevent him from boarding the plane.

As the NCTC tried to remedy that situation for later suspects, legal obstacles emerged, the Journal reports, since the center was only allowed to query federal databases for a specific name or a specific passenger list. “They couldn’t look through the databases trolling for general ‘patterns,’” the paper notes.

But the request to expand the center’s powers led to a heated debate at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, with Mary Ellen Callahan, then-chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security, leading the charge to defend civil liberties. Callahan argued that the new rules represented a “sea change” and that every interaction a citizen would have with the government in the future would be ruled by the underlying question, is that person a terrorist?

Callahan lost her battle, however, and subsequently left her job, though it’s not known if her struggle over the NCTC debate played a role in her decision to leave.
Wired

Report finds harsh CIA interrogations ineffective

After a contentious closed-door vote, the Senate intelligence committee approved a long-awaited report Thursday concluding that harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs, officials said.

The 6,000-page document, which was not released to the public, was adopted by Democrats over the objections of most of the committee’s Republicans. The outcome reflects the level of partisan friction that continues to surround the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques four years after they were banned.

The report is the most detailed independent examination to date of the agency’s efforts to “break” dozens of detainees through physical and psychological duress, a period of CIA history that has become a source of renewed controversy because of torture scenes in a forthcoming Hollywood film, “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Officials familiar with the report said it makes a detailed case that subjecting prisoners to ­“enhanced” interrogation techniques did not help the CIA find Osama bin Laden and often were counterproductive in the broader campaign against al-Qaeda.

The committee chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein ­(D-Calif.), declined to discuss specific findings but released a written statement describing decisions to allow the CIA to build a network of secret prisons and employ harsh interrogation measures as “terrible mistakes.”

“I also believe this report will settle the debate once and for all over whether our nation should ever employ coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said.

That conclusion has been disputed by high-ranking officials from the George W. Bush administration, including former vice president Richard B. Cheney and former CIA director Michael V. Hayden. Both of them argued that the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other measures provided critical clues that helped track down bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who was killed in a U.S. raid in Pakistan in May 2011.

Largely because of those political battle lines, Republicans on the Senate intelligence committee refused to participate in the panel’s three-year investigation of the CIA interrogation program, and most opposed Thursday’s decision.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the committee’s ranking Republican, said in a statement that the report “contains a number of significant errors and omissions about the history and utility of CIA’s detention program.” He also noted that the review was done “without interviewing any of the people involved.”

The 9 to 6 vote indicates that at least one Republican backed the report, although committee officials declined to provide a breakdown.

Other GOP lawmakers voiced support for the report’s conclusions. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, issued a statement saying that the committee’s work shows that “cruel” treatment of prisoners “is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”

It could be months, if not years, before the public gets even a partial glimpse of the report or its 20 findings and conclusions. Feinstein said the committee will turn the voluminous document over to the Obama administration and the CIA to provide a chance for them to comment.

When that is completed, the committee will need to vote again on whether to release even a portion of the report, a move likely to face opposition from the CIA, which has fought to keep details of the interrogation program classified.

Even if it were released, the report would probably have little impact beyond providing new ammunition for a largely dormant interrogation debate.

The agency abandoned its harshest interrogation methods years before President Obama was elected, and the Justice Department began backing away from memos it had issued that had served as the legal basis for the program.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department closed investigations of alleged abuses, eliminating the prospect that CIA operatives who had gone beyond the approved methods would face criminal charges.

Civil liberties groups praised the report.
WaPo

3,000 US troops secretly return to Iraq via Kuwait

Over 3,000 US troops have secretly returned to Iraq via Kuwait for missions pertaining to the recent developments in Syria and northern Iraq, Press TV reports.

According to our correspondent, the US troops have secretly entered Iraq in multiple stages and are mostly stationed at Balad military garrison in Salahuddin province and al-Asad air base in al-Anbar province.

Reports say the troops include US Army officers and almost 17,000 more are set to secretly return to Iraq via the same route.

All US troops left Iraq by the end of 2011, after nine years of occupation, as required by a 2008 bilateral security agreement between the two countries. The troops left Iraq for the neighboring Kuwait.

Washington decided to pull out all its troops from Iraq after Baghdad refused to grant legal immunity to the remaining US soldiers.

Washington claims that the only US military presence left in Iraq now is 157 soldiers responsible for training at the US Embassy, as well as a small contingent of marines protecting the diplomatic mission.

US-led forces attacked Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam Hussein on the pretext of possessing weapons of mass destruction. But no WMD was ever discovered in Iraq. At the peak of the US-led military operation in Iraq, there were 170,000 US troops and more than 500 bases in Iraq.

More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.
OpEdNews

Chavez close to joining the pantheon of great communist

Saudi Arabia says cyber attack aimed to disrupt oil, gas flow

Saudi Arabia's national oil company, Aramco, said on Sunday a cyber attack against it in August which damaged some 30,000 computers was aimed at stopping oil and gas production at the biggest OPEC exporter.

The attack on Saudi Aramco — which supplies a tenth of the world's oil — failed to disrupt production, but was one of the most destructive cyber strikes conducted against a single business.

"The main target in this attack was to stop the flow of oil and gas to local and international markets and thank God they were not able to achieve their goals," said Abdullah al-Saadan, Aramco's vice president for corporate planning, on al-Ekhbariya television. It was the firm's first comments on the apparent aim of the attack.

Aramco and the Saudi Interior Ministry is conducting an investigation into the cyber strike. Interior Ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki said the attackers were an organized group operating from different countries on four continents.

The attack used a computer virus known as Shamoon which infected workstations on Aug. 15 and the company shut down its main internal network for more than a week.

Turki said that the investigation had not shown any involvement of Aramco employees but he could not give more details as the investigation was not yet complete.

Saudi Arabia's economy is heavily dependent on oil. Export revenues from oil have accounted for 80-90 percent of total Saudi revenues and above 40 percent of the country's gross domestic product, according to U.S. data.

Shamoon spread through the company's network and wiped computers' hard drives clean. Saudi Aramco said damage was limited to office computers and did not affect systems software that might hurt technical operations.

Hackers from a group called "Cutting Sword of Justice" claimed responsibility for the attack, saying their motives were political and that the virus gave them access to documents from Aramco's computers, which they threatened to release. No documents have so far been published.

In a posting on an online bulletin board the day the files were wiped, the group blamed Saudi Arabia for "crimes and atrocities" in several countries, including Syria and Bahrain.

Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain last year to back the Gulf state's rulers, fellow Sunni Muslims, against Shi'ite-led protesters. Riyadh is also sympathetic to mainly Sunni rebels in Syria while Iran backs the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, whose Alawite religion is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.
NBC

Russia, China alliance wants greater govt voice in Internet oversight

DUBAI, Dec 9 (Reuters) - A Russia-led proposal calling for sweeping new governmental powers to regulate cyberspace could enable countries to block some Web locations and wrest control of allotting Internet addresses from a U.S.-based body.

The proposal, co-signed by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, added to fears in some Western countries of a stalemate midway through a 12-day conference in Dubai to rewrite a longstanding treaty on international communications.

Russia and its supporters, which include many African and Arab states, seek to formally extend the remit of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to govern many aspects of the Internet.

The United States, Europe and other allies including Australia and Japan insist the treaty should continue to apply only to traditional telecommunications such as international wireline and wireless calls.

Countries can opt out of parts of the revised treaty when it emerges or refuse to sign it altogether.

"If we have no agreement it will create political tension around the Internet," said Markus Kummer, vice president for public policy at industry think tank The Internet Society.

A leaked draft of the Russia-led proposals would give countries "equal rights to manage the Internet including in regard to the allotment, assignment and reclamation of Internet numbering."

This could allow governments to render websites within their borders inaccessible, even via proxy servers or other countries. It also could allow for multinational pacts in which countries could terminate access to websites at each others' request.

Such moves would undermine ICANN, a self-governing nonprofit organization under contract to the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is ultimately responsible for making sure that people trying to reach a given website actually get there.

"Much of the Internet was developed from U.S. research funding, and the U.S. has kept a residual role, so many other governments say it's not right that one government 'controls' the Internet," said Kummer.

"The irony is the U.S. has a very laid-back role and protects the Internet from political interference, but the fact it's the U.S. makes it highly political."

'ANOTHER POINT OF CONTROL'

"The reason some countries want to create national control over addresses is so they can have another point of control," said Rod Beckstrom, until recently chief executive of ICANN, which currently sits atop the addressing system.

Decentralizing the process could prove chaotic if many countries demand that companies use only their national system, he told Reuters.

Beyond web locations and addresses, the Russia-led coalition document says ITU member states should be able to control other elements of the Internet's infrastructure within their borders, as Russia has sought for months.

The revision would give nations the explicit right to "implement policy" on net governance and "regulate the national Internet segment," the draft says.

"If you throw in addressing and naming, that puts the entire ecosystem in play, which is what the U.S. and E.U. said they would never agree to," said a Western participant at the conference who asked not to be named to maintain his ability to negotiate.

"You're almost guaranteeing lock-up in certain areas that might prevent the other areas from easily going forward," he said.

The coalition wants the new treaty to include measures to combat spam email, but its definition of spam is so broad that it could be applied to almost any emailed message.

That would provide a pretext for authoritarian regimes to suppress opponents, critics warn, while also doing little to solve what is a technical problem.

Another clause states any country should have the right to know the route of telecom traffic "where technically feasible," which differs from an earlier submission and appears to acknowledge tracing Internet traffic is impractical.

"Internet networks don't follow national borders and a lot of governments are not happy with that notion, that they don't have control over their territory," said Kummer. "Some governments feel threatened, which they see as undermining their national sovereignty."

SIGN OF CRACKS?

Egypt was named as a co-author of the Russia-led submission, but on Sunday it disavowed the document in what may be a sign of cracks emerging in the loose anti-U.S. coalition.

"Our name was associated to this proposal by mere misunderstanding," Nashwa Gad, a department manager at Egypt's Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT), said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

"Egypt has always been supporting the basic Internet principles that ... the Internet should remain free, open, liberal. We do not see that the ITU mandate deals with the Internet."

The United States has made a counterproposal co-signed by Canada that would stop the treaty being applied to Internet companies such as Google or government and business networks.

It say increasing the treaty's scope could provide a platform for governments to stifle free speech, reduce online anonymity and censor Internet content.

But Russia and its supporters argue they need new powers to able to fight cyber crime and protect networks.

After six days of largely private talks, very little seems to have been agreed, with the main plenary committee meeting on Monday to again consider the U.S.-Canada proposal among others.

The ITU usually agrees decisions by consensus, but the intransigence of both sides means it could come down to a vote, which may leave the United States and its allies in the minority.

"The U.S. is not considering walking out of the conference and is still participating as normal," a U.S. spokesman said in an emailed statement, denying an earlier report that the United States could quit the summit, which ends on Friday.
Reuters
Someone should make it clear that messing with the internet is tantamount to war.

'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistleblower

The FBI has the e-mails of nearly all US citizens, including congressional members, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. Speaking to RT he warned that the government can use information against anyone it wants.

­One of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history resigned in 2001 because he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the constitution.
He asserts, that the FBI has access to this data due to a powerful device Naris.
This year Binney received the Callaway award. The annual award was established to recognize those, who stand out for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.
RT: In light of the Petraeus/Allen scandal while the public is so focused on the details of their family drama one may argue that the real scandal in this whole story is the power, the reach of the surveillance state. I mean if we take General Allen – thousands of his personal e-mails have been sifted through private correspondence. It’s not like any of those men was planning an attack on America. Does the scandal prove the notion that there is no such thing as privacy in a surveillance state?
William Binney: Yes, that’s what I’ve been basically saying for quite some time, is that the FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the e-mails of virtually everybody in the country. And the FBI has access to it. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. They are all included. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least.
RT: And it’s not just about those, who could be planning, who could be a threat to national security, but also those, who could be just…
WB: It’s everybody. The Naris device if it takes in the entire line, so it takes in all the data. In fact they advertised they can process the lines at session rates, which means 10 gigabit lines. I forgot the name of the device (it’s not the Naris) – the other one does it at 10 gigabits. That’s why the building Buffdale, because they have to have more storage, because they can’t figure out what’s important, so they are just storing everything there. So, e-mails are going to be stored there for the future, but right now stored in different places around the country. But it is being collected – and the FBI has access to it.
RT: You mean it’s being collected in bulk without even requesting providers?
WB:Yes.
RT: Then what about Google, you know, releasing this biannual transparency report and saying that the government’s demands for personal data is at an all-time high and for all of those requesting the US, Google says they complied with the government’s demands 90% of the time. But they are still saying that they are making the request, it’s not like it’s all being funneled into that storage. What do you say to that?
WB: I would assume, that it’s just simply another source for the same data they are already collecting. My line is in declarations in a court about the 18-T facility in San Francisco, that documented the NSA room inside that AST&T facility, where they had Naris devices to collect data off the fiber optic lines inside the United States. So, that’s kind of a powerful device, that would collect everything it was being sent. It could collect on the order over one hundred billion one thousand character e-mails a day. One device.
RT: You say they sift through billions of e-mails. I wonder how do they prioritize? How do they filter it?
WB: I don’t think they are filtering it. They are just storing it. I think it’s just a matter of selecting when they want it. So, if they want to target you, they would take your attributes, go into that database and pull out all your data.
RT: Were you on the target list?
WB: Oh, sure! I believe I’ve been on it for quite a few years. So I keep telling them everything I think of them in my e-mail. So that when they want to read it they’ll understand what I think of them.
RT: Do you think we all should leave messages for the NSA mail box?
WB: Sure!
RT: You blew the whistle on the agency when George W. Bush was the President. With President Obama in office, in your opinion, has anything changed at the agency – in the surveillance program? In what direction is this administration moving?
WB: The change is it’s getting worse. They are doing more. He is supporting the building of the Buffdale facility, which is over two billion dollars they are spending on storage room for data. That means that they are collecting a lot more now and need more storage for it. That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the electronic frontiers foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future.
RT: What are they going to do with all of that? Ok, they are storing something. Why should anybody be concerned?
WB: If you ever get on the enemies list, like Petraeus did or… for whatever reason, than you can be drained into that surveillance.
RT: Do you think they would… General Petraeus, who was idolized by the same administration? Or General Allen?
WB: There are certainly some questions, that have to be asked, like why would they target it (to begin with)? What law were they breaking?
RT:In case of General Petraeus one would argue that there could have been security breaches. Something like that. But with General Allen – I don’t quite understand, because when they were looking into his private e-mails to this woman.
WB: That’s the whole point. I am not sure what the internal politics is… That’s part of the program. This government doesn’t want things in the public. It’s not a transparent government. Whatever the reason or the motivation was, I don’t really know, but I certainly think, that there was something going on in the background, that made them target those fellows. Otherwise why would they be doing it? There is no crime there.
RT: It seems that the public is divided between those, who think that the government surveillance program violates their civil liberties, and those, who say: “I’ve nothing to hide. So, why should I care?” What do you say to those, who think that it shouldnt concern them.
WB: The problem is if they think they are not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does, the central government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you. So, it’s not up to the individuals. Even if they think they are doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target.
RT: Tell me about the most outrageous thing that you came across during your work at the NSA.
WB: The violations of the constitution and any number of laws that existed at the time. That was the part that I could not be associated with. That’s why I left. They were building social networks on who is communicating and with whom inside this country. So that the entire social network of everybody, of every US citizen was being compiled overtime. So, they are taking from one company alone roughly 320 million records a day. That’s probably accumulated probably close to 20 trillion over the years. The original program that we put together to handle this to be able to identify terrorists anywhere in the world and alert anyone that they were in jeopardy. We would have been able to do that by encrypting everybody’s communications except those, who were targets. So, in essence you would protect their identities and the information about them until you could develop probable cause, and once you showed your probable cause, then you could do a decrypt and target them. And we could do that and isolate those people all alone. It wasn’t a problem at all. There was no difficulty in that.
RT: It sounds very difficult and very complicated. Easier to take everything in and…
WB: No. It’s easier to use the graphing techniques, if you will, for the relationships for the world to filter out data, so that you don’t have to handle all that data. And it doesn’t burden you with a lot more information to look at, than you really need to solve the problem.
RT: Do you think that the agency doesn’t have the filters now?
WB: No.
RT: You have received the Callaway award for civic courage. Congratulations! On the website and in the press release it says: “It is awarded to those, who stand out for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.” Under the code of spy ethics (I don’t know if there is such a thing) your former colleagues, they probably look upon you as a traitor. How do you look back at them?
WB: That’s pretty easy. They are violating the foundation of this entire country. Why this entire government was formed? It’s founded with the constitution and the rights were given to the people in the country under that constitution. They are in violation of that. And under executive order 13526, section 1.7 (governing classification) – you can not classify information to just cover up a crime, which this is- and that was signed by President Obama. Also President Bush signed it earlier executive order, a very similar one. If any of this comes into Supreme court and they rule it unconstitutional, then the entire house of cards of the government falls.
RT: What are the chances of that? What are the odds?
WB: The government is doing the best they can to try to keep it out of court. And, of course, we are trying to do the best we can to get into court. So, we decided it deserves a ruling from the Supreme court. Ultimately the court is supposed to protect the constitution. All these people in the government take an oath to defend the constitution. And they are not living up to the oath of office.
RT: Thank you for this interview.
WB: You are welcome.
RT