WMR has learned from its Lebanese intelligence sources that the Lebanese government is coming to realize that Israeli intelligence penetration of all political groups in the country is worse than originally believed.

Israel’s Mossad, once content on penetrating the Christian and Druze parties in the country, has now thoroughly infiltrated the top echelons of Sunni and Shi’a parties, as well. Recently, Lebanon charged retired General Fayez Karam, a senior member of retired General Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, which is allied with Hezbollah, with spying for Mossad.

Among the political parties penetrated by Israeli intelligence is the Future Movement of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, the son of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut in 2005. The UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is expected very soon to charge Lebanon’s Hezbollah with the assassination. However, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah recently announced the group had video evidence from Israeli drones that showed the Israeli Defense Force was tracking Hariri before his assassination.

The STL’s chief prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare of Canada, requested the evidence from Hezbollah. However, WMR has learned that Bellemare is suspected by Lebanese intelligence of having close previous contacts with agents of both the CIA and Mossad. WMR previously reported that Bellemare is suspected to have allowed and introduced into evidence against Hezbollah in the Hariri assassination, doctored cell phone intercepts pointing the “smoking gun” at Hezbollah. It is feared that Bellemare might give Hezbollah’s evidence to Mossad for the Israelis to determine the source of the leak of classified videos.

Mossad is also reported to be grooming a successor to the Lebanese Shi’a political leader Nabih Berri, currently the speaker of the Lebanese parliament. The Mossad operation is being actively supported behind the scenes by Saudi Arabia, a country that is fast becoming one of Israel’s most “open secret” allies in the Middle East.

According to WMR’s sources in Lebanon, one network that Israel and the United States can rely on to support the UN after the expected indictment of Hezbollah for Hariri’s assassination is a Sunni network in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. It includes a member of the same family as Ziad al-Jarrah, one of the alleged United flight 93 hijackers on September 11, 2001.

Lebanese intelligence has linked the Ziad al-Jarrah, who hailed from the Bekaa Valley, to a Saudi-supported Salafist network that includes “Al-Qaeda” associates that will be used to target Shi’as throughout Lebanon in the wake of the Bellemare charges against Hezbollah. Lebanese intelligence discovered that members of this same Mossad-supported Salafist/Al Qaeda network also targeted top Shi’a leaders in Iraq. WMR has learned that Ziad al-Jarrah was used by the Mossad, the CIA, and Saudi intelligence as a “patsy” in the 9/11 conspiracy, just as similar “patsies” are being used in Iraq and elsewhere to help keep the myth of “Al Qaeda” and Osama bin Laden alive.

The same Salafist/Al Qaeda network in Lebanon, while still in an embryonic stage, was used by Mossad and the CIA to spy on Palestinian groups in Lebanon during the 1980s and 90s, as well as on Syria during its occupation of Lebanon.

The Israeli espionage network also extends to Syria. Lebanese sources report that former Syrian Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam, who accused Syrian President Bashar al Assad of ordering Rafik Harir’s assassination, is tactically backed by Israel and the United States. Khaddam, who heads the exiled National Salvation Front (NSF), is seeking to overthrow Assad. The NSF not only receives support from Israeli and U.S. intelligence but also from the French and German intelligence.

The NSF maintains offices in Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and Washington, DC and it is suspected of working behind the scenes with Bellemare to bring chargss against Hezbollah for the Hariri assassination. However, previous attempts to have Assad and pro-Syrian Lebanese generals indicted for the assassination fell through due to lack of any credible evidence.

[ By Wayne Madsen -Via: OilPrice.com]

The next generation of hi-res satellite imaging technology is on the way, at least if the United States government has anything to say about it. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has awarded satellite imaging firms GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, which provide images for Google and Microsoft among others, contracts upwards of $3.5 billion each to help them get the next wave of imaging technology into the sky.

Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe was given a $3.55 billion 10-year contract, to be paid out in annual installments. Virginia-based GeoEye, whose high-res photos have often been featured on PopSci.com, got the same terms on an even richer $3.8 billion contract. For that kind of cash, the government won’t be accepting incremental improvements.

The NGA — the organ of state responsible for the collection of military and intelligence satellite imagery — wants next-gen technologies with higher-res capabilities as part of its EnhancedView program, an initiative to improve the military/intelligence community’s imaging capability. To that end, DigitalGlobe already issued a statement that it will immediately get cracking on its next satellite, WorldView-3, which could launch in 2014. GeoEye’s third-gen satellite, GeoEye-2, should be operational by 2013.

But the hardware isn’t actually the most costly portion of the contracts. Both agreements stipulate that $2.8 billion of the sum offered is for photos that will be provided to the government over the course of the contract. The balance of each deal is for additional services, infrastructure upgrades, new hardware and the like.

But unlike most massive government contracts, the little guy can expect to see some kind value out of the deal. Though obviously the best high-res imagery goes to the highest bidder (the NGA), both GeoEye and DigitalGlobe provide images for commercial mapping services as well, and better satellites should lead to better publicly available satellite imagery too.

Source: Pop Sci

Will they really be able to read a license plate, or ID an individual from orbit?

What could be the major improvements these satellites will have to offer, well I dont know, but below is a recent article that describes what DARPA is currently looking to develop.

It is a satellite that will deliver real time video.

If we’ve learned something these last couple of years, it’s that the warfighter wants video. But what if you can’t fly a UAV over hostile territory? How about real-time, tactical video from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit? That’s the objective of a new US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program – Membrane Optic Imager Real-time Explotation, or MOIRE.

MOIRE is looking to develop large, lightweight, deployable diffractive membrane optics – basically a wafer-thin lens that unfurls in space – for a geosynchronous imaging satellite. The goal is to fly a 10-meter membrane in Phase 3 of the program, to demonstrate the technology for an operational 20-meter system capable of providing visible-wavelength imagery of “denied areas”.

Concept: L’Garde

According to DARPA, an operational satellite would be able to image an area of more than 100km² at least once a second, with ”NIIRS 3.5+” performance – which equates to a ground resolution better than 2.5 meters, enough to identify aircraft, ships, helipads, radars and other key features. DARPA also wants to be able to detect vehicles moving at highway speeds.

Low cost is another goal, but with a “not-to-exceed” cost target of $500 million a copy, a geosynchronous real-time imaging satellite will be far from cheap. DARPA, meanwhile, has scheduled a MOIRE proposers’ day for interested bidders on March 12 in Washington.

TSA's X-ray backscatter scanning with "privacy filter" (Credit: TSA.gov)

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.”

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.

Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that critics have likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail. The U.S. government likes the idea because body scanners can detect concealed weapons better than traditional magnetometers.

This privacy debate, which has been simmering since the days of the Bush administration, came to a boil two weeks ago when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that scanners would soon appear at virtually every major airport. The updated list includes airports in New York City, Dallas, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to grant an immediate injunction pulling the plug on TSA’s body scanning program. In a separate lawsuit, EPIC obtained a letter (PDF) from the Marshals Service, part of the Justice Department, and released it on Tuesday afternoon.

These “devices are designed and deployed in a way that allows the images to be routinely stored and recorded, which is exactly what the Marshals Service is doing,” EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told CNET. “We think it’s significant.”

William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, acknowledged in the letter that “approximately 35,314 images…have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine” used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse. In addition, Bordley wrote, a Millivision machine was tested in the Washington, D.C. federal courthouse but it was sent back to the manufacturer, which now apparently possesses the image database.

The Gen 2 machine, manufactured by Brijot of Lake Mary, Fla., uses a millimeter wave radiometer and accompanying video camera to store up to 40,000 images and records. Brijot boasts that it can even be operated remotely: “The Gen 2 detection engine capability eliminates the need for constant user observation and local operation for effective monitoring. Using our APIs, instantly connect to your units from a remote location via the Brijot Client interface.”

More: Cnet

WASHINGTON – Invasion of privacy in the Internet age. Expanding the reach of law enforcement to snoop on e-mail traffic or on Web surfing. Those are among the criticisms being aimed at the FBI as it tries to update a key surveillance law.

With its proposed amendment, is the Obama administration merely clarifying a statute or expanding it? Only time and a suddenly on guard Congress will tell.

Federal law requires communications providers to produce records in counterintelligence investigations to the FBI, which doesn’t need a judge’s approval and court order to get them.

They can be obtained merely with the signature of a special agent in charge of any FBI field office and there is no need even for a suspicion of wrongdoing, merely that the records would be relevant in a counterintelligence or counterterrorism investigation. The person whose records the government wants doesn’t even need to be a suspect.

The bureau’s use of these so-called national security letters to gather information has a checkered history.

The bureau engaged in widespread and serious misuse of its authority to issue the letters, illegally collecting data from Americans and foreigners, the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded in 2007. The bureau issued 192,499 national security letter requests from 2003 to 2006.

Weathering that controversy, the FBI has continued its reliance on the letters to gather information from telephone companies, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses with personal records about their customers or subscribers — and Internet service providers.

That last source is the focus of the Justice Department’s push to get Congress to modify the law.

The law already requires Internet service providers to produce the records, said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s national security division. But he said as written it also causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation as some Internet companies have argued they are not always obligated to comply with the FBI requests.

A key Democrat on Capitol Hill, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont, wants a timeout.

The administration’s proposal to change the Electronic Communications Privacy Act “raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns,” Leahy said Thursday in a statement.
[More]

How did a Mexican drug trafficker manage to use a CIA rendition aircraft to smuggle drugs into the U.S.? The death of drug cartel leader, Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel reveals surprising (or not so surprising) connections.

Earlier this week, Sinaloa drug cartel leader Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel was killed in a raid conducted by the Mexican military. According to several media and official Mexican government reports, Coronel had a long criminal history and played significant roles mostly within the Sinaloa cartel. He was currently a member of the ‘inner circle’ working for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman –the drug lord listed by Forbes as one of the richest men in the world.

Yesterday, thanks to the arduous work of the Mexican newspaper Por Esto!, it was discovered that Nacho Coronel was literally running “El Chapo” Guzman’s cocaine operations in the Yucatan Peninsula since 2004, when evidently, he became the visible head of the Sinaloa Cartel which operated out of the cities of Merida, Cancun, and Cozumel. This was known as “the Yucatan Peninsula Route.”

Nefarious Connections

Coronel’s Yucatan operations included the transportation of narcotics via air, mainly cocaine from Colombia to be later smuggled into the United States. During that time, Nacho Coronel had the protection and collaboration of corrupt elements from local, state and federal police, as well as from Mexican military. One particular example of the involvement of Mexican military in his operations included the arrest of 11 Mexican Navy officials who were caught smuggling cocaine from Colombia into Yucatan on May 12 of 2006. Coronel had apparently established connections with the Colombian drug cartel known as “Valle del Norte” (North Valley). Further, Nacho Coronel had allegedly established connections with Cuban intelligence agents operating in Cancun, according to Mexican columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio.

The CIA plane crash and the 3 tons of cocaine belonging to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel

On September of 2007, there was a plane crash in Yucatan. When authorities arrived at the crash site, they discovered well over 3 tons of cocaine onboard the Gulfstream II aircraft. The narcotics reportedly belonged to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, under the command of “El Chapo” Guzman and the local control of Nacho Coronel. However, after further investigations into the origins of the aircraft’s markings and registration number (N987SA), it was discovered that it was used for CIA rendition flights. Later that month, another drug bust took place involving a DC9 aircraft transporting cocaine, registered to an American business (although the American owner was never arrested, and the identity was not publicly revealed).

Confirmed by several sources

The Mexican newspaper El Universal obtained several records pertaining to the ownership and recent flight information for the Gulfstream II aircraft. The plane had recently been purchased by a company registered as “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc.” Some news media outlets and investigators like Daniel Hopsicker discovered that the company known as “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc.” or “DBA” did not exist. He published detailed information about DBA’s phony address and empty offices on his website. According to flight records, the Gulfstream II aircraft had been used by the CIA in rendition flights from Europe to the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

The flight records obtained from the FAA and the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation or ‘Eurocontrol,’ included a time period from November 17, 2001 through September 18, 2007. A detailed list of some of the flights, including locations, dates, arrivals and departures was published by El Universal.

[Via:DeadlineLive.info]