Have you heard the rumors that Bush had started drinking again during a part of his administration?, well here is some possible video evidence of his intoxication during a press conference.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
The following is part of a talk delivered by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh at the University of Minnesota last night. For a full report, go here
“After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it.
“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …
“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.
“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.
“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.
“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee.?’
“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”
The NSA’s colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the ‘Black Widow,’ scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages.’
Barack Obama will be in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA)—located and guarded at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 10 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun’s national security correspondent, David Wood: “The NSA’s colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the ‘Black Widow,’ scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages.”
In July, George W. Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives the NSA even more power to look for patterns that suggest terrorism links in Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.
The ACLU immediately filed a lawsuit on free speech and privacy grounds. The new Bush law provides farcical judicial supervision over the NSA and other government trackers and databasers. Although Senator Barack Obama voted for this law, dig this from the ACLU: “The government [is now permitted] to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it’s conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.”
This gives the word “dragnet” an especially chilling new meaning.
The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer, director of its National Security Project, adds that the new statute, warming the cold hearts of the NSA, “implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind.”
Why did Obama vote for this eye-that-never-blinks? He’s a bright, informed guy, but he wasn’t yet the President-Elect. The cool pragmatist wanted to indicate he wasn’t radically unmindful of national security—and that his previous vow to filibuster such a bill may have been a lapse in judgment. It was.
What particularly outraged civil libertarians across the political divide was that the FISA Amendments Act gave immunity to the telecommunications corporations—which, for seven years, have been a vital part of the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program—thereby dismissing the many court cases brought by citizens suing those companies for violating their individual constitutional liberties. This gives AT&T, Verizon, and the rest a hearty signal to go on pimping for the government.
That’s OK with the Obama administration? Please tell us, Mr. President.
Some of us began to see how deeply and intricately the telecoms were involved in the NSA’s spying when—as part of an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit—it was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, that he had found a secret AT&T room in which the NSA was tapping into the telecom giant’s fiber-optic cables. On National Public Radio on November 7, 2007, he disclosed: “It’s not just AT&T’s traffic going through these cables, because these cables connected AT&T’s network with other networks like Sprint, Qwest [the one firm that refused to play ball with the government], Global Crossing, UUNet, etc.”
… Continue Reading
What, exactly, does president-elect Barack Obama’s mild-mannered choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, former senator Tom Daschle, have to do with neo-conservatives who want to bomb Iran?
A familiar coalition of hawks, hardliners and neo-cons expects Obama’s proposed talks with Iran to fail – and they’re already proposing an escalating set of measures instead. Some are meant to occur alongside any future talks. These include steps to enhance coordination with Israel, tougher sanctions against Iran, and a region-wide military buildup of US strike forces, including the prepositioning of military supplies within striking distance of that country.
Once the future negotiations break down, as they are convinced will happen, they propose that Washington quickly escalate to war-like measures, including a US Navy-enforced embargo on Iranian fuel imports and a blockade of that country’s oil exports. Finally, of course, comes the strategic military attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran that so many of them have wanted for so long.
It’s tempting to dismiss the hawks now as twice-removed from power: first, figures like John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were purged from top posts in the George W Bush administration after 2004; then the election of Obama and the announcement on Monday of his centrist, realist-minded team of establishment foreign policy gurus seemed to nail the doors to power shut for the neo-cons, who have bitterly criticized the president-elect’s plans to talk with Iran, withdraw US forces from Iraq, and abandon the reckless “war on terror” rhetoric of the Bush era.
A new generation of spy technology designed to strengthen the U.S. military’s ability to detect and eliminate suspected insurgents in Iraq and elsewhere based on computer analyses of their movements and activities is being developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has begun granting contracts to software firms to create algorithms that can be applied to the real-time video feeds from drone aircraft so the data can be sorted and stored on a wide range of human activities, from digging a ditch to climbing into a car to kissing someone.
The contracts represent the latest step in the Bush administration’s seven-year drive to develop high-tech spying capabilities that can be applied to a variety of situations and locales to detect terrorist or insurgent activities.
The new DARPA project would develop algorithms that would identify specific human activities – both by individuals and by groups – and evaluate if these actions suggested behavior that would justify a military response.
The list of activities that would draw attention to a single person include “digging, loitering, picking up, throwing, exploding/burning, carrying, shooting, launching, walking, limping, running, kicking, smoking, gesturing,” according to DARPA’s contract description.
For person-to-person activities, the project would identify and catalogue cases of “following, meeting, gathering, moving in a group, dispersing, shaking hands, kissing, exchanging objects, kicking, carrying together.”
Categories relating to vehicles include getting into or out of a car, opening or closing the trunk, driving, accelerating, turning, stopping, passing and maintaining distances.
According to DARPA’s description, the research project addresses challenges faced by intelligence analysts in processing and retrieving the vast amounts of visual data created by live video feeds from Predator drones and other aerial surveillance over Iraq and Afghanistan. By identifying and indexing specific actions, the analysts would be helped in evaluating potential threats and could retrieve video regarding similar behavior.
“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” said the DARPA document, written in March but withheld from the public until September.
Kitware, a software company with offices in New York and North Carolina, won an initial $6.7 million contract for what is technically called Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool, or VIRAT.
In a statement about the contract award, Kitware projected that through its proposed system, “the most high-value intelligence content will be clearly and intuitively presented to the video analyst, resulting in substantial reductions in analyst workload per mission as well as increasing the quality and accuracy of intelligence yield.”
Anthony Hoogs, Kitware’s project leader, said, ”This project will really make a difference to the war fighter.”
To carry out the project, Kitware said it was teaming up with two leading military technology companies, Honeywell and General Dynamics, as well as a number of academic researchers. [See Kitware Awarded $6.7M DARPA Contract.]
Repression Works
Though this DARPA project is not expected to be completed until early next decade, other technological breakthroughs reportedly have helped U.S. forces identify and kill insurgents in Iraq.
In his latest book, The War Within, Bob Woodward writes that highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics allowed for rapid targeting and killing of Iraqi insurgent leaders, representing a more important factor in undermining the insurgency than President George W. Bush’s much touted troop “surge.” However, Woodward withheld details of these secret techniques so as not to undermine their effectiveness.
Still, there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspected insurgents. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War” and “Iraq’s Laboratory of Repression.”]
However, the marriage of advanced technology and military repression has raised concerns among some human rights advocates that these techniques could open the door to an Orwellian future in which authoritarian regimes repress popular resistance.
DARPA, with its mandate to push the envelope on the application of technology for military and intelligence purposes, also has been caught up before in controversies about balancing security against liberty.
In 2002, DARPA came under criticism when it unveiled plans for Total Information Awareness, a project that sought to detect terrorist activities by mining electronic data about virtually everyone on earth, anyone who participated in the modern economy.
The plan was to map out “transactional data” collected from every kind of activity – “financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources, government, communications,” according to the DARPA Web site.
The program would then cross-reference this data with the “biometric signatures of humans,” data collected on individuals’ faces, fingerprints, gaits and irises. To run the sensitive project, the Bush administration selected retired Admiral John Poindexter, who was convicted of five felony counts in the Iran-Contra Affair (though a conservative-dominated appeals court later reversed the jury verdicts).
Public and congressional outrage over this massive data-mining operation supposedly killed the TIA program in 2003, but the National Journal revealed in February 2006 that the project was ended in name only, kept alive within the secret budget of the National Security Agency.
One TIA component, called the Information Awareness Prototype System, was renamed “Basketball” at NSA, but still provided the basic architecture tying together information extraction, analysis and dissemination tools developed under TIA.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration began deploying similar advanced technology to Iraq with the goal of throttling the insurgency that was challenging the U.S. military occupation.
In effect, Iraq was transformed into a test tube for modern techniques of repression, including use of night-vision optics on drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging, and firepower that is both deadly and precise.
The new techniques marked a modernization of tactics used in other counterinsurgencies, such as in Vietnam in the 1960s and in Central America in the 1980s.
In Vietnam, U.S. forces planted sensors along infiltration routes for targeting bombing runs against North Vietnamese troops. In Guatemala, security forces were equipped with early laptop computers for use in identifying suspected subversives who would be dragged off buses and summarily executed.
Last year, a conservative counterinsurgency expert sent me a video, spliced together by the U.S. military in Iraq, showing how some of the modern techniques worked in Iraq. The video showed night-vision aerial surveillance of suspected “terrorists” as they moved in the dark with what was described as a truck-mounted anti-aircraft gun, the muzzle still warm from firing.
The tiny figures of these “terrorists” then walked into a forested area where they were mowed down by miniguns from an AC-130. Their truck also was blown to bits.
Biometrics
Besides using Predator drones to monitor the movement of Iraqis from the sky, massive amounts of biometric data have been collected on the country’s people for use in identifying suspected insurgents.
Explaining the value of this computerized database, Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post that it gave valuable information to soldiers on the ground.
“A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” Duong said.
Though Duong is best known for designing high-explosives used to destroy hardened targets, she also supervised this Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, known as a “lab in a box” for analyzing biometric data, such as iris scans and fingerprints, that have been collected on more than one million Iraqis.
The labs – collapsible, 20-by-20-foot units each with a generator and a satellite link to a biometric data base in West Virginia – let U.S. forces cross-check data in the field against information collected previously that can be used to identify insurgents.
Duong said the next step would be to shrink the lab to the size of a “backpack” so soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list and should be killed. [Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2007]
By identifying and indexing a wide range of human activities captured on surveillance videos, the new DARPA project could augment some of these other security projects, already in place or in development.
Regarding the video analysis, however, DARPA specifically prohibited inclusion of biometric algorithms for identifying people by their gaits or other individual features. However, those elements, which are being developed separately, presumably could be added to the overall technological package at a later date.
Loading ...
Recent Comments