President Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget would fund a major new spy satellite proposal, provide $2 billion in additional funding for Department of Defense surveillance efforts and increase spending on drug-related intelligence programs.

Although most specifics of the intelligence budget are classified, budget documents provide hints of some priorities.

The budget would allocate an unspecified amount to the new “Imagery Satellite Way Ahead” program, a joint effort between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense designed to revamp the nation’s constellation of spy satellites.

The mostly classified plan would include new, redesigned “electro-optical” satellites, which collect data from across the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as the expanded use of commercial satellite imagery. Although the cost is secret, most estimates place it in the multibillion-dollar range.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been at odds with Defense appropriators and intelligence community leaders over spy satellite capabilities.

The top Republican on the Intelligence panel, Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, has pushed for alternative plans to those recommended by intelligence community leaders, contending that his proposals would cost less and perform better.

The Pentagon would get about $2 billion more for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) programs such as unmanned drones and improved software for processing data — all to better combat terrorists and insurgents. The total amount is classified.

According to a Pentagon budget summary, that money would pay for:

• 50 Predator-class unmanned aerial patrols. According to a Defense Department summary, “This capability, which has been in high demand in Iraq and Afghanistan, will now be permanently funded in the base budget.”

• An increase in manned ISR capabilities, “such as the turbo-prop aircraft deployed as part of Task Force Odin in Iraq.”

• “Research and development on a number of ISR enhancements and experimental platforms.”

In addition, the FBI would get a boost of $555.6 million to help pay for an additional 357 agents and 321 intelligence analysts, according to a Department of Justice summary.

The Treasury Department’s counterterror and financial intelligence operations would receive $168 million, or 10 percent more than in fiscal 2009. Some of the funds would go toward supporting a joint program between the Treasury and U.S. Special Operations Command, an Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell designed to disrupt terror financing in that country, with an emphasis on narcotics.

Increased funding through the Drug Enforcement Administration and other Justice Department drug-related programs would pay for 25 new intelligence analysts. Much of their work would focus on interrupting drug flows across the U.S.-Mexico border and aiding law enforcement in combating Mexican drug cartels.

Unlike his predecessor, Obama does not recommend closing the National Drug Intelligence Center, a program that is located in the district of House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John P. Murtha , D-Pa., and has prompted heated partisan floor fights.

Although the request for the National Intelligence Program — which includes all spy agencies except those of the military branches — is classified, recently disclosed figures for fiscal 2008 put the budget total at $47.5 billion.

a Global Currency,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote:

“A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.

“‘We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,’ it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.

“In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”

Indeed they will. The article is subtitled, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” Which naturally raises the question, who or what will serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity? When the world’s central bankers met in Washington last September, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role. A former governor of the Bank of England stated:

“[T]he answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). . . . The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.”1

And if the vision of a global currency outside government control does not set off conspiracy theorists, putting the BIS in charge of it surely will. … Continue Reading

The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.
… Continue Reading

Apparently the following article cites  “secret military technology” as being the key component to the rapid decline in violence that we have seen in Iraq over the past several months.

I was just wondering why we have not heard of these operational capabilities mentioned anywhere else in the mainstream media, although the mention of it in this article is very general and non-specific.

WASHINGTON — The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq is due in large part to a secret program the U.S. military has used to kill terrorists, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward.

The program — which Woodward compares to the World War II era Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb — must remain secret for now or it would “get people killed,” Woodward said Monday on CNN’s Larry King Live.

“It is a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have,” Woodward said.

In “The War Within: Secret White House History 2006-2008,” Woodward disclosed the existence of secret operational capabilities developed by the military to locate, target and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent leaders.

National security adviser Stephen Hadley, in a written statement reacting to Woodward’s book, acknowledged the new strategy. Yet he disputed Woodward’s conclusion that the “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq was not the primary reason for the decline in violent attacks.

“It was the surge that provided more resources and a security context to support newly developed techniques and operations,” Hadley wrote.

Woodward, associate editor of the Washington Post, wrote that along with the surge and the new covert tactics, two other factors helped reduce the violence.

One was the decision of militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to order a cease-fire by his Mehdi Army. The other was the “Anbar Awakening” movement that saw Sunni tribes aligning with U.S. troops to battle al Qaeda in Iraq.

Woodward told Larry King that while there is a debate over how much credit the new secret operations should get for the drop in violence, he concluded it “accounts for a good portion.”

“I would somewhat compare it to the Manhattan Project in World War II,” he said “It’s a ski slope right down in a matter of months, cutting the violence in half. This isn’t going to happen with the bunch of joint security stations or the surge.”

The top secret operations, he said, will “some day in history … be described to people’s amazement.”

While he would not reveal the details, Woodward said the terrorists who have been targeted were already aware of the capabilities.

“The enemy has a heads up because they’ve been getting wiped out and a lot of them have been killed,” he said. “It’s not news to them.

“If you were a member of al Qaeda or the resistance or some extremist militia, you would be wise to get your rear end out of town,” Woodward said. “It is very dangerous.”

One of Britain’s top intelligence officials left a file with secret documents about Iraq and al Qaeda on a train, in an embarrassing government security breach that was exposed on Wednesday.

The Cabinet Office, the central government department that supports the work of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, acknowledged the incident and said it had called in a police investigation.

“The documents were secret. They were in the possession of a senior intelligence official who works in the Cabinet Office. They were lost on a train,” a Cabinet Office spokesman said.

“They were retrieved by a member of the public who handed them to the BBC,” he said. “When the official realized what had happened, he reported it immediately to the Cabinet Office. We called the police in and they launched an investigation.”

A police spokeswoman confirmed that the counter-terrorism command of London’s police force was carrying out the probe.

The Cabinet Office declined to comment on the contents of the missing file. But the BBC said they contained two reports, one on Iraq’s security forces and one on al Qaeda.

BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner at one point waved what he said were the documents on air. In a subsequent report he said that he had turned them over to police officers.

He said the passenger who found the documents had given them to a local BBC office, which phoned him to have a look.

“As soon as I saw ‘UK Top Secret’, I thought: ‘Wow. This is important’,” he said. “It was marked top secret. It reveals what the government knows about al Qaeda’s capabilities, and more importantly, its vulnerabilities.”

Government sources suggested that the leak was embarrassing but would not actually hurt Britain’s security.

But the news will hurt Brown, who has already been stung by accusations of lax security after a civil servant lost computer disks containing the names, addresses and bank details of 25 million people in the mail last year.

In January the Ministry of Defence reported it had lost a laptop containing personal data on 600,000 recruits.

Brown, whose popularity has plunged since he took over from Tony Blair last year, is promoting plans to roll out a national identity card system, and opponents of the measure often cite the government’s poor record of keeping data secure.

The prime minister won a narrow victory in parliament on Wednesday to extend the period that terrorism suspects can be held without charge.