Blue Spot

ABC News: NSA Eavesdropping 'Outrageous' and 'Disturbing,' Critics Say

A Senate panel is probing claims top secret government workers eavesdropped on communications from American service members, journalists and aid workers overseas.

Hundreds of US citizens overseas, including US troops in Iraq, have been eavesdropped on, according to two former military and NSA intercept operators, despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials.
(ABC News )Announcing the probe, Senate intelligence committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) called the allegations, made on ABC News, "extremely disturbing."

House intelligence committee chair Silvestre Reyes is also looking for answers from the National Security Agency (NSA) about its apparent violations of Americans' privacy. "The NSA let us know that your story may be coming down the pipeline," a spokeswoman for Reyes told ABC News Thursday. "We went ahead and made an inquiry and have been in contact with NSA We're awaiting further information."

Off of Capitol Hill, reaction was swift and sharp to the news that U.S. intelligence officials listened in to hundreds of private conversations, including pillow talk between U.S. military officers and their spouses.

"This outrageous episode is a reminder that government spying powers can be used to invade the most intimate thoughts of even the most trustworthy people," noted Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies, and a former Justice Department official.

"Today's report is an indictment not only of the Bush administration, but of all of those political leaders, Democratic and Republican, who have been saying that the executive branch can be trusted with surveillance powers that are essentially unchecked," charged Jameel Jaffer, director of the national security program at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Labels: Domestic spying, FISA, Patriot Act, Surveilance, Terrorism

Democracy Now! | The Way of the World: Ron Suskind on How the Bush Admin Deliberately Faked an Iraq-al-Qaeda Connection and Undermined Diplomacy, Democracy in Pakistan and Iran

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Judiciary Committee say they will review allegations the White House ordered the CIA to forge and disseminate false intelligence documents linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. The revelation is among several in Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind’s explosive new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Suskind joins us for the hour to talk about the letter controversy and the thin denials that have followed its disclosure. He also reveals details of his lengthy conversations with the late Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto and her frustrations with the Bush administration in the months before her assassination, and discloses the previously unknown case of an interrogation “cell” beneath the White House.

Labels: Intelligence, Iraq War, Terrorism, WMD

After Gitmo Ruling, What Next for Detainees? | Newsweek National News | Newsweek.com

The Supreme Court delivered a blow to the Bush administration's polarizing Guantánamo Bay policies Thursday, giving the roughly 300 foreign terror suspects being held there the right to challenge their detention through the U.S. civilian court system. In a 5-4 ruling on the jointly decided cases Boumediene v. Bush and Al-Odah v. The United States, the nation's highest court determined that the detainees have a constitutional right to habeas corpus despite their detention outside the borders of the United States. Further, the justices rejected the administration's argument that the reviews provided through the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 were adequate substitutes for that right.

Also announced was the court's decision on the cases of Shawqui Omar and Mohammad Munaf, Americans detained on terrorism-related charges in Iraq who similarly argued for habeas corpus and challenged their pending transfer to Iraqi authorities. While the justices likewise upheld their habeas rights, they unanimously ruled that Iraq has jurisdiction over those within their borders.

Jonathan Hafetz: It's a vindication of the basic principle that government cannot deprive individuals of habeas corpus when it detains them merely by holding them outside the United States. It's a real vindication for the Guantánamo detainees to finally have their day in court and for the rule of law. It also has implications for the military commissions, because if the Constitution applies, then all the people who have been charged before the commissions are going to be able to contend that the commissions have to satisfy the Constitution, which they haven't been able to do so far.

Labels: Constitutional attacks, Gitmo, Supreme Court, Terrorism, Torture

The Campaign Spot on National Review Online
So now that Obama sees the finish line, the media is lining up right behind him trying to push him forward. As if winning the nomination will automatically get him in the White House. Why even bother with a general election in November? The media has already determined the winner.

...you would think their readers might deserve to know what prompted McCain's campaign to suggest that Obama is the candidate of Hamas, i.e., top Hamas
political adviser Ahmed Yousef saying the terrorist group supports Obama’s
foreign-policy vision and hopes he wins:

“We don’t mind–actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not
with domination and arrogance,” Yousef said in response to a question about the group’s willingness to meet with either of the Democratic presidential candidates.

I mean, seriously, one of his advisers, Rob Malley, was holding meetings with Hamas, and Obama's promised to hold unconditional face-to-face presidential summits with
the guy who's funding and encouraging Hamas.

Labels: Clueless Pundits, Election 2008, Media bias, Obama, Terrorism

Obama's 'mainstream' friends - The Boston Globe

Is this Obama's idea of "respectable" and "mainstream" political thinking? If so, doesn't that tell us something about his judgment and standards?

In Chicago the other day, radio producer Guy Benson discovered video recordings of Ayers and Dohrn speaking at a reunion of antiwar radicals in November 2007. To live in the United States, Dohrn told the group, is to be "inside the heart of the monster" that is such a "purveyor of violence in the world." Ayers denounced America as an imperial warmonger steeped in "jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy . . . attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on."

Even if Obama doesn't personally believe these things, is it really "tired tripe" to ask why he seems so comfortable in the company of people who do? Is it really "extremely stupid politics" to wonder whether such people might play a role in an Obama administration? Rather than slam the few journalists who raise such questions, might it not behoove others in the media to follow suit?

Labels: Election 2008, Media, Obama, Terrorism

I was a little reluctant to put this up. Especially since the publisher's name is "DemocratsHateTheUS". However, despite what Obamabots seem to think, I believe character is still an important requisite for the presidency. They're running on the notion that Obama has better judgment. That's their whole campaign. Time after time, he's showing through his militant connections, that he lacks the judgment necessary for the job. I wonder if he wasn't under such a spotlight now, whether he would've approved Carter's meeting with Hamas, or whether he would've met with them himself.

So you be the judge.

Labels: Election 2008, Obama, Terrorism

Labels: GOP Hypocrisy, Terrorism

Pakistan's Bhutto assassinated - Pakistan - msnbc.com

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan - Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide bombing that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, a party aide and a military official said.

The death of the charismatic former prime minister threw the campaign for the Jan. 8 election into chaos and created fears of mass protests and an eruption of violence across the volatile south Asian nation, which has nuclear weapons and a support base for Muslim extremists.

"At 6:16 p.m. she expired," said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Bhutto's party who was at Rawalpindi General Hospital where she was taken after the attack.

Labels: Pakistan, Terrorism, World news

Global terror's India connection - Yahoo! News

NEW DELHI and LONDON - When President George Bush visited this country of 150 million Muslims last year, he introduced his wife to the prime minister with a fact surely intended to amaze: "Not one Indian Muslim has joined Al Qaeda," he said.

At a time when Muslim nations from Algeria to Indonesia have emerged as incubators for anti-Western extremists, India – by some estimates the world's second-most-populous Muslim nation – has remained a unique case.

Yet reports from Britain suggest that, for the first time, an Indian Muslim is likely to be implicated in an act of international terrorism. Khafeel Ahmed, the man who police say crashed a Jeep into Glasgow's airport on June 30, is an engineer from Bangalore, a city previously known only as the high-tech capital of the new India.

Labels: Terrorism, World news

Here's a scene from the classic movie The Battle of Algiers, about Algeria's fight for independence from France from 1954 to 1962.

Scary how this movie mirrors Iraq in many ways. After you watch this clip you have to ask yourself: Do we realy want to keep going down this road? Do we want to lose our moral authority and continue damaging our reputation around the world? It's funny how we didn't learn from the French mistakes in both Viet Nam or Algeria.

Labels: Comment, Terrorism, Torture

President of The Boyd Group, Mike Boyd talks to Keith about the recent foiled JFK terror plot. Sounds like the announcement was more of a big photo op for the officials in charge rather than an actual threat.

Labels: Homeland Security, Local, Terrorism

JFK plots fuels concern about spread of extremism - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Caribbean and Latin American links of people charged in an alleged plot to blow up New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport underscore the spread of global extremism, analysts said on Sunday.

But they warned about overstating the threat from America's southern neighbors, and said the case showed that U.S. counterterrorism efforts were working to avert another attack like that of September 11, 2001.

U.S. officials on Saturday said they had charged four people, including a former member of Guyana's parliament, with planning to blow up the Kennedy airport's jet fuel tanks and part of the 40-mile (64-km) pipeline feeding them.

Three of the four suspects, who included a former airline cargo handler, have been arrested, federal law enforcement officials said. The fourth was being sought in the Caribbean.

Labels: 9-11, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Terrorism

6 held in alleged Army base terror plot - U.S. Security - MSNBC.com

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. - Six foreign-born Muslims were arrested and accused Tuesday of plotting to attack the Army's Fort Dix and massacre scores of U.S. soldiers — a plot the FBI says was foiled when the men took a video of themselves firing assault weapons to a store to have the footage put onto a DVD.

Labels: Intelligence, Terrorism

A comprehensive study of 1,776 terrorist incidents (240 international, the rest domestic) by Harvard professor Albert Abadie, who was sympathetic to the poverty-terrorism idea at first, found no such thing. "When you look at the data," he told the Harvard Gazette, "it's not there."What he did find was more intriguing.



read more | digg story

Labels: Terrorism