When Will We Speak Up?

Come to this event if you have time. Otherwise, spread the word.

Its taking place at University of Toronto, Mississauga, Room CCI0080 on Nov-25-08 at 6:30 pm.

Kind Regards

A New War for Resources Might Begin

US Power ‘to Decline by 2025′ : US National Report

By Al Jazeera and agencies

November 21, 2008 “Al Jazeera” – US economic and political power is set to decline over the next two decades and the world will grow more dangerous as the battle for scarce resources intensifies, a report by US intelligence agencies has predicted.

The current global financial crisis is the beginning of a weakening of the US dollar to the point where it becomes “first among equals”, said the National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) Global Trends 2025 report published on Thursday.

One of the main conclusions of the report is that “the unipolar world is over, [or] certainly will be by 2025″, said Thomas Fingar, the NIC’s deputy director, at a press conference in Washington DC.

China and India were likely to join the US at the top of a multipolar world and compete for influence, the report added.

Russia’s future was less certain, but Iran, Turkey and Indonesia were also seen by the report as gaining power.

“The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over scarce resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons,” said the report.

“Widening gaps in birth rates and wealth-to-poverty ratios, and the uneven impact of climate change, could further exacerbate tensions.”

Nuclear risk

The reports are produced every five years and based on a global survey of experts by US intelligence analysts.

This year’s was more pessimistic about US status than on previous occasions.

It also highlighted the risk of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East where a number of countries have considered developing or acquiring technologies that would be useful to make nuclear weapons.

“Over the next 15-20 years, reactions to the decisions Iran makes about its nuclear programme could cause a number of regional states to intensify these efforts and consider actively pursuing nuclear weapons,” the report said.

It also said some African and South Asian states could wither away altogether and that criminal gangs could take over at least one state in central Europe.

Read the full article here.

Taliban and U.S. are the Same

Today, I watched this video and not surprisingly no tears came to my eyes. I guess my mind and heart finally hardened enough.  A colleague of mine once commented that she is confused about the war in Afghanistan. Of course, she is confused because both sides (referring to the ones engaging in military aggression, i.e. Taliban and U.S.) are doing the same thing.  Both sides are oppressing average citizens. Where’s the end to this? I do not know. And why do the average citizens have to pay the price? Here in North America a recession is occuring. Depression, suicide and teenage voilence is increasing. There in the Middle East a terrible illegal war is waging and the war in Afghanistan is the worst since its the forgotten war. Seriously, where is the end to this brutality towards people?

Secret Dossier on U.S. Muslims

Ethically and morally disgusting!

Secret Dossiers Kept on Muslims ?

Former Marine outlines secret dossiers

Muslims, Arabs not targeted, FBI says

By Rick Rogers

November 21, 2008 “Union Tribune” — -OCEANSIDE — Two years after his arrest, a former Marine gunnery sergeant is talking about the FBI, CIA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement files he stole from Camp Pendleton for a civilian agency.

In interviews with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Gary Maziarz, 39, said “dozens of files” he gave the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group while serving as an intelligence specialist at the base were dossiers on Muslims and Arabs living in Southern California.

This marks the first time Maziarz has spoken to the media about the files since pleading guilty in July 2007 to mishandling classified material and stealing government property.

He agreed to the interviews despite signing a plea agreement with the government limiting his comments on the security breach, which might involve a decade’s worth of intelligence culled from domestic and foreign sources. The deal also requires him to testify if called on.

“Most of the (monitored) people were from Los Angeles. The ties they had to San Diego were, like, maybe they had a house down here or a relative or came down to visit or went on vacation here,” said Maziarz, who splits his time between North County and Arizona as he looks for work and tries to move on with his life.

Many of the stolen files centered on the meeting spots of “people of interest,” including places of worship, businesses and travel plans, he said.

Maziarz’s case could have repercussions well beyond Camp Pendleton.

The existence of CIA, FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents profiling specific minority and religious groups in the United States could undermine contentions by the FBI, the primary federal agency for domestic security, that no programs target upstanding Muslims and Arabs.

“The FBI does not monitor the lawful activities of individuals in the United States, nor does the FBI have a surveillance program to monitor constitutionally protected activities of houses of worship,” FBI spokesman Darrell Foxworth said in an e-mail.

Maziarz’s arrest in October 2006 sparked multiple investigations, including those by the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Federal agents testifying at his trial said the files found in his possession could not be shared legally with civilian law enforcement.

Essentially, Maziarz said, he used computer networks at Camp Pendleton to tap into classified information that he then passed along to a higher-ranking Marine or one of that person’s subordinates. Maziarz and federal investigative documents have identified that individual as reserve Col. Larry Richards, the base’s former intelligence chief and co-founder of the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group.

Maziarz said he and others broke national-security protocols out of concern that FBI officials were not sharing anti-terrorism intelligence with local law enforcement or were doing it slowly because of bureaucracy. There was a feeling that lack of cooperation prevented aggressive efforts to prevent future terrorist attacks.

The Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group is composed of two dozen local, state and federal agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Secret Service and the FBI.

The Union-Tribune first reported on the Maziarz case in October 2007, after it obtained unclassified records from his court-martial.

Maziarz originally was charged with stealing Iraq war souvenirs from a base armory. That investigation evolved into the document-theft case.

He received a 26-month jail sentence. He was released in July after serving less than two years in Camp Pendleton’s brig.

In accepting Maziarz’s guilty plea, Marine judge Lt. Col. Jeffrey Meeks avoided revealing specific contents of the stolen files. Two federal agents attended the plea-agreement sessions to make sure classified details stayed secret.

While sitting recently at a café in Carlsbad, Maziarz explained how officials from the Los Angeles counter-terrorism group used him for years to steal highly sensitive FBI, CIA and immigration files to track and foil terrorist operations.

He was more tight-lipped about classified files known as TIGER documents.

TIGER, or the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system, is a database developed at the U.S. Census Bureau. It can be customized to identify special demographic centers, such as areas where certain ethnic groups live.

Read the full article here.

Brown Clouds: Byproduct of Global Warming

Brown Clouds Over Asia

Brown clouds over Asia pose new threat to planet: UN

WINNIPEG (CBC) – A brown haze of soot, particles and chemicals that hangs over parts of Asia is darkening cities, melting glaciers in the Himalayas and making weather systems more extreme, the United Nations said Thursday.

Scientists who have studied the thick brown clouds, which they estimate to be more than three kilometres thick, said the haze stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the Western Pacific Ocean. It is officially known as atmospheric brown clouds.

The scientists, who come from China, India, Europe and the U.S., said in a new report commissioned by the UN Environment Program that the brown clouds are aggravating the impact of climate change caused by greenhouse gases in some regions.

They said they are issuing the warning now about the brown haze because it is a “serious and significant” environmental challenge facing the planet that poses a threat to human health and food production.

“Imagine for a moment a three-kilometer-thick band of soot, particles, a cocktail of chemicals that stretches from the Arabic Peninsula to Asia,” Achim Steiner, UN undersecretary general and executive director of the program, said during a news conference on the findings.

“All of this points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet, because this is where the stories are linked in terms of greenhouse emissions and particle emissions and the impact that they’re having on our global climate,” he said.

The brown clouds have darkened 13 cities in Asia, including Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Cairo, Mumbai, New Delhi and Tehran, “dimming” sunlight in some places by as much as 25 per cent.

The brown clouds, produced by the burning of fossil fuels, wood and plants, form particles like black carbon and soot that absorb sunlight and warm the air, enhancing the greenhouse effect.

Scientists, however, said the brown clouds also “mask” the warming impacts of climate change by an average of 40 per cent because they contain particles that reflect sunlight and cool the earth’s surface.

According to the report, the phenomenon has been studied closely in Asia, but it is not unique to the region, with brown clouds seen over parts of North America, Europe, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin.

The scientists said the brown clouds are having a negative impact on air quality and agricultural production in Asia with risks to human health increasing. Health problems associated with the brown clouds include cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, head of the scientific panel that is carrying out the research and a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego, said the huge cloud masses can cross continents in the space of three to four days.

It’s not a regional issue, but a global one, he said.

“The main message is that it’s a global problem. This is not a problem where we point fingers at our neighbours. Everyone is in someone else’s backyard,” Ramanathan said.

He said one of most serious problems noted in the report is melting of the Hindu Kush-Himalaya-Tibetan glaciers, which provide the head-waters for the major river systems including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong and Yangtze rivers.

The Ganges basin, for example, is home to more than 400 million people and holds 40 per cent of India’s irrigated croplands.

He said the melting has “serious implications for the water and food security of Asia.”

The Chinese Academy of Sciences estimates that the glaciers have shrunk five per cent since the 1950s and the volume of China’s nearly 47,000 glaciers has fallen by 3,000 square kilometres over the past quarter century.

Read the full article here.

U.K. M.P.s seek to ban media

MPs seek to censor the media

Exclusive by Kim Sengupta
Monday, 10 November 2008

Britain’s security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall.

The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security.

The committee also wants to censor reporting of police operations that are deemed to have implications for national security. The ISC is to recommend in its next report, out at the end of the year, that a commission be set up to look into its plans, according to senior Whitehall sources.

The ISC holds huge clout within Whitehall. It receives secret briefings from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and is highly influential in forming government policy. Kim Howells, a respected former Foreign Office minister, was recently appointed its chairman. Under the existing voluntary code of conduct, known as the DA-Notice system, the Government can request that the media does not report a story. However, the committee’s members are particularly worried about leaks, which, they believe, could derail investigations and the reporting of which needs to be banned by legislation.

Civil liberties groups say these restrictions would be “very dangerous” and “damaging for public accountability”. They also point out that censoring journalists when the leaks come from officials is unjustified.

But the committee, in its last annual report, has already signalled its intention to press for changes. It states: “The current system for handling national security information through DA-Notices and the [intelligence and security] Agencies’ relationship with the media more generally, is not working as effectively as it might and this is putting lives at risk.” According to senior Whitehall sources the ISC is likely to advocate tighter controls on the DA-Notice system – formerly known as D-Notice – which operates in co-operation and consultation between the Government and the media.

Read the full article here.

Canada to quit Afghanistan by 2011

Toronto, Nov 10 (IANS) The Americans may have shown renewed interest in Afghanistan but Canada stays firm on its decision to end its mission in the war-torn country by 2011, says Canada’s new foreign minister Lawrence Cannon. The minister told a television channel Sunday that the tough stand by US president-elect Barack Obama on Afghanistan will have no impact on the Canadian decision to pull out of Afghanistan by 2011.

During the US presidential campaign, Obama promised to send two more US brigades to Afghanistan to go after the Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden.

“While we welcome the Americans’ renewed interest in Afghanistan, particularly president-elect Obama’s position during the campaign, we nonetheless want to make it perfectly clear that the US position will not change Canada’s position as defined in our parliamentary resolution,” the Canadian foreign minister said.

Read full article here.

The Case of Binyam Mohamed

Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice

10.11.08

The case of Binyam Mohamed just gets weirder and weirder. For the last six months, the British resident and Guantánamo prisoner, who was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, has been engaged in a transatlantic struggle to secure evidence relating to his “extraordinary rendition” and torture, by or on behalf of the CIA, which involved his disappearance from July 2002 until his arrival at the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan in May 2004. Since September 2004, Mohamed has been held at Guantánamo, and in conversation with his lawyers has explained that he was sent to Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months, and then spent another four months in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” near Kabul.

In June, a judicial review was triggered after the Treasury Solicitors turned down a request from Mohamed’s lawyers to release documents in the British government’s possession regarding his illegal detention in Pakistan and his subsequent disappearance. The lawyers pointed out that Mohamed was about to be put forward for a trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo (the system of “terror trials” conceived by the US administration in November 2001, and derided by Lord Steyn as a “kangaroo court”), and stated that the information was essential to his defence for two reasons: firstly, because the US government had refused to provide any information whatsoever about his whereabouts from July 2002 to May 2004; and secondly, because Mohamed claimed that the charges against him — primarily in connection with an alleged plot to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a US city — had been extracted, during this period, through the use of torture.

The judicial review took place in July, and Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones were clearly appalled by the behaviour of the British intelligence services. When they delivered a judgment at the end of August, they criticized the intelligence services for sending agents to interrogate Mohamed in May 2002, while he was being held illegally in Pakistan, and also for providing and receiving intelligence about him from July 2002 until February 2003, when they knew that he was being held incommunicado, and should not have been involved without receiving cast-iron assurances about his welfare. In the judgment, they stated explicitly that, “by seeking to interview BM [Mohamed] in the circumstances found and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship between the United Kingdom Government and the United States authorities went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.”

The judges also seized on an admission, made on behalf of the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, that Mohamed had “established an arguable case” that, until his transfer to Guantánamo, “he was subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by or on behalf of the United States,” and was also “subject to torture during such detention by or on behalf of the United States,” and ruled that, because the information obtained from Mohamed was “sought to be used as a confession in a trial where the charges … are very serious and may carry the death penalty,” and that it is “a long-standing principle of the common law that confessions obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment cannot be used as evidence in any trial,” the British government was required to hand over the evidence — 42 documents in total — to his lawyers.

This was a remarkable result, but celebrations on the part of Mohamed’s lawyers and human rights groups were soon muted when the government responded to the only lifeline extended by the judges — that national security concerns might override the necessity for disclosure — by filing a Public Interest Immunity certificate which stated, in so many words, that the need to preserve the “special relationship” between the American and British intelligence services trumped the right of a man rendered to torture by one country — and with the complicity, to some extent at least, of the other — to have access to evidence that might help in his defence.

Read the full article here.

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U.S. Foreign Policy contibutes to Terrorism

Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries

By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI

November 10, 2008 “New York Times” — – November 9, 2008 — WASHINGTON — 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.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.

Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.

According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said.
It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” a former senior military official said, “the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly.”

The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.

Even with the order, each specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia, for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.

The Pentagon has exercised its authority frequently, dispatching commandos to countries including Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been reported.

For example, shortly after Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command quietly sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88 crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaeda cell believed to be responsible for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

At the time, American officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaeda operatives if failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy.

Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes’ results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been killed.

But even with the new authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials said.

The details of one of those aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last June. In that case, an operation to send a team of the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, was aborted at the last minute.

Mr. Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command hastily put together a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the Pentagon and the C.I.A. about the quality of the intelligence, however, and some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky.

Read the rest of the article here.

Some Comments people posted in response to this particular article.

It might be more important to understand why there is terrorism in the first place??
It might be more important to understand how American foreign policy upsets individuals from the ME.
America is not consistent in its foreign policy outlook.
Double standards are readily apparent and the hypocrisy is often so blatant.
One must understand that American policy contributes to world wide terrorism.
Most unfortunate as American leadership is motivated by cold war rhetoric which is ultimately naive and unproductive.
Time will tell.
anonymous | 11.10.08 – 1:33 pm | #
The armed thugs that invade every corner of the world today bombing weddings, strafing distant blips from a monitor in Colorado, or anywhere else, pulverising entire villages and towns into pebbles and dust, including mosques, hospitals and schools, allowing Bahgdad’s incredible Museum of Civilization to be ransacked and ruined – these “soldiers” wil be drooling into their laps decades hence, while the latest apologists for military politics will be demanding people wear poppies on their lapels “lest we forget” the wonderful sacrifices they made for freedom and democracy. Maybe by then we’ll be neutralized if we don’t comply…
Rikko | 11.10.08 – 7:01 pm | #

A Rock that can Soak Up Carbon Dioxide

Wonderful news! They found a rock in Oman that can suck up carbon dioxide. If this rock’s power is harnessed properly, then it might be possible to stop global warming. Read the article.

Scientists say a rock can soak up carbon dioxide.

By Timothy Gardner

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A rock found mostly in Oman can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at a rate that could help slow global warming, scientists say.When carbon dioxide comes in contact with the rock, peridotite, the gas is converted into solid minerals such as calcite.

Geologist Peter Kelemen and geochemist Juerg Matter said the naturally occurring process can be supercharged 1 million times to grow underground minerals that can permanently store 2 billion or more of the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity every year.

Their study will appear in the November 11 edition of the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.

Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth’s mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. It also appears on the surface, particularly in Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that produces substantial amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of fossil fuels.

“To be near all that oil and gas infrastructure is not a bad thing,” Matter said in an interview.

They also calculated the costs of mining the rock and bringing it directly to greenhouse gas emitting power plants, but determined it was too expensive.

The scientists, who are both at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, say they could kick-start peridotite’s carbon storage process by boring down and injecting it with heated water containing pressurized carbon dioxide. They have a preliminary patent filing for the technique.

They say 4 billion to 5 billion tons a year of the gas could be stored near Oman by using peridotite in parallel with another emerging technique developed by Columbia’s Klaus Lackner that uses synthetic “trees” which suck carbon dioxide out of the air.

Read the full article here.