The Ruthless Truth blog

Disinformation Tactics: The Methods Used To Keep You In The Dark

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 02/04/2010

There was a time, not too long ago (relatively speaking), that governments and the groups of elites that controlled them did not find it necessary to conscript themselves into wars of disinformation. Propaganda was relatively straightforward. The lies were much simpler. The control of information […]

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Surviving Economic Collapse: Tips, Tactics, And Gear

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 01/26/2010

A large part of our society operates on a disturbing assumption, a belief that has been driven into the very fabric of our culture for generations; the assumption that preparation for disaster is unnecessary because all will remain the same as it always has been.
This collective assumption exists in very few […]

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The Surveillance Society: Trading Freedom For The Illusion Of Safety

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 01/18/2010
Governments, regardless of their political structure or historical background, have always striven to not only control information, but also to gather it from the people by covert means.  Often, this secretive observation of the citizenry escalates into a completely open and full-fledged surveillance state.  The U.S. in particular […]

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Identifying Sure Signs Of The Final Economic Plunge

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 01/12/10

Many researchers, including those here at Neithercorp, have projected that the third and final stage of the economic collapse will begin sometime in 2010. Barring some kind of financial miracle, or the complete dissolution of the Federal Reserve, a snowballing implosion should become visible by the end of this year. […]

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Will Globalists Trigger Yet Another World War?

Friday, January 8th, 2010

By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – Jan. 8, 2010

World War III is the most iconic event in American culture that never happened. Since the early 1950’s, generations have been preparing for it, writing books about it, producing films and fictional accounts on it, and even playing video games based on it. The […]

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Here In The Long Solemn Dark: An Examination Of Global Elitism

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 1/02/2010

Inherent in every human being lurk the qualities that make us capable of indelible and enduring good, or astounding and catastrophic evil. Many of us struggle with these natural inborn psychological dualities every day of our lives. With the help of conscience; the ever present […]

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While You Were Sleeping… The Economy Collapsed

Monday, December 21st, 2009

By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 12/21/2009

One of the most powerful forces in human psychology is the force of habit. Consistency, apathetic comfort, ties men to the ocean bottom to squeeze every ounce of oxygen from their last breath until it is gone, and we wake up at 50 or 60, only realizing […]

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Carbon Footprints In The Sand: The Failure Of Global Warming Science

Monday, December 14th, 2009

By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 12/14/2009

The great secret to the “Global Warming Debate,” the underlying current that no one in the mainstream seems willing to discuss openly, is the fact it is not really a debate about the environment; it is actually a catalyst, a symbolic fight over a mountain of social conflicts that have […]

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Auditing The Federal Reserve: What Are The Banksters So Afraid Of…?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 12/08/2009

One thing I have learned in my work with the Liberty Movement over the years, a fact which I will never again take for granted, is that the world can turn on a dime, without warning, or pity. We often expect that these drastic changes will be for the […]

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Recent World Events Indicate Impending Market Chaos

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 12/1/2009

For the past couple years we have been covering every nuance of the economic collapse and in almost every instance we have come to the conclusion that 2010 would be the year that the U.S. would see an incredible downturn, possibly resulting in the inflationary disintegration of the Dollar, and […]

All Posts 51 Comments

 

http://neithercorp.us/npress/

By Julian Sanchez

January 29, 2010

In a major speech on Internet freedom last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged American tech companies to "take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance." Her call to action followed a series of dazzlingly sophisticated cyberattacks against online giant Google and more than thirty other major technology companies, believed to originate in the People’s Republic of China. Few observers have found the Chinese government’s staunch denials of involvement persuasive–but the attacks should also spur our own government to review the ways our burgeoning surveillance state has made us more vulnerable.

The Google hackers appear to have been interested in, among other things, gathering information about Chinese dissidents and human rights activists–and they evidently succeeded in obtaining account information and e-mail subject lines for a number of Gmail users. While Google is understandably reluctant to go into detail about the mechanics of the breach, a source at the company told ComputerWorld "they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with [US] search warrants by providing data on Google users." In other words, a portal set up to help the American government catch criminals may have proved just as handy at helping the Chinese government find dissidents.

In a way, the hackers’ strategy makes perfect sense. Communications networks are generally designed to restrict outside access to their users’ private information. But the goal of government surveillance is to create a breach-by-design, a deliberate backdoor into otherwise carefully secured systems. The appeal to an intruder is obvious: Why waste time with retail hacking of many individual targets when you can break into the network itself and spy wholesale?

The Google hackers are scarcely the first to exploit such security holes. In the summer of 2004, unknown intruders managed to activate wiretapping software embedded in the systems of Greece’s largest cellular carrier. For ten months, the hackers eavesdropped on the cellphone calls of more than 100 prominent citizens–including the prime minister, opposition members of parliament, and high cabinet officials.

It’s hard to know just how many other such instances there are, because Google’s decision to go public is quite unusual: companies typically have no incentive to spook customers (or invite hackers) by announcing a security breach. But the little we know about the existing surveillance infrastructure does not inspire great confidence.

Consider the FBI’s Digital Collection System Network, or DCSNet. Via a set of dedicated, encrypted lines plugged directly into the nation’s telecom hubs, DCSNet is designed to allow authorized law enforcement agents to initiate a wiretap or gather information with point-and-click simplicity. Yet a 2003 internal audit, released several years later under a freedom-of-information request, found a slew of problems in the system’s setup that appalled security experts. Designed with external threats in mind, it had few safeguards against an attack assisted by a Robert Hanssen-style accomplice on the inside. We can hope those problems have been resolved by now. But if new vulnerabilities are routinely discovered in programs used by millions, there’s little reason to hope that bespoke spying software can be rendered airtight.

Of even greater concern, though, are the ways the government has encouraged myriad private telecoms and Internet providers to design for breach.

The most obvious means by which this is happening is direct legal pressure. State-sanctioned eavesdroppers have always been able to demand access to existing telecommunications infrastructure. But the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 went further, requiring telephone providers to begin building networks ready-made for easy and automatic wiretapping. Federal regulators recently expanded that requirement to cover broadband and many voice-over-Internet providers. The proposed SAFETY Act of 2009 would compound the security risk by requiring Internet providers to retain users’ traffic logs for at least two years, just in case law enforcement should need to browse through them.

A less obvious, but perhaps more serious factor is the sheer volume of surveillance the government now engages in. If government data caches contain vast quantities of information unrelated to narrow criminal investigations–routinely gathered in the early phases of an investigation to identify likely targets–attackers will have much greater incentive to expend time and resources on compromising them. The FBI’s database now contains billions of records from a plethora of public and private sources, much of it gathered in the course of broad, preliminary efforts to determine who merits further investigation. The sweeping, programmatic NSA surveillance authorized by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 has reportedly captured e-mails from the likes of former President Bill Clinton.

The volume of requests from both federal and state law enforcement has also put pressure on telecoms to automate their processes for complying with government information requests. In a leaked recording from the secretive ISS World surveillance conference held back in October, Sprint/Nextel’s head of surveillance described how the company’s L-Site portal was making it possible to deal with the ballooning demand for information:

"My major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated, but that’s just scratching the surface…. Like with our GPS tool. We turned it on–the web interface for law enforcement–about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the [L-Site portal] has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just the sheer volume of requests…. They anticipate us automating other features, and I just don’t know how we’ll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in."

Behold the vicious cycle. Weakened statutory standards have made it easier and more attractive for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to seek information from providers. On top of the thousands of wiretap and so-called "pen/trap" orders approved each year, there are tens of thousands of National Security Letters and subpoenas. At the ISS World conference, a representative of Cricket, one of the smaller wireless providers, estimated that her company gets 200 law enforcement requests per day, all told; giants like Verizon have said they receive "tens of thousands" annually. (Those represent distinct legal demands for information; Sprint’s "8 million" refers to individual electronic requests for updates on a target’s location.)

Telecoms respond to the crush of requests by building a faster, more seamless, more user-friendly process for dealing with those requests–further increasing the appeal of such tools to law enforcement. Unfortunately, insecurity loves company: more information flowing to more legitimate users is that much more difficult to lock down effectively. Later in his conference, the Sprint representative at ISS World speculated that someone who mocked up a phony legal request and faxed it to a random telecom would have a good chance of getting it answered. The recipients just can’t thoroughly vet every request they get.

We’ve gotten so used to the "privacy/security tradeoff" that it’s worth reminding ourselves, every now and again, that surrendering privacy does not automatically make us more secure–that systems of surveillance can themselves be a major source of insecurity. Hillary Clinton is absolutely right that tech companies seeking to protect Internet freedom should begin "challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance." But her entreaty contains precisely one word too many.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100215/sanchez

Glenn Greenwald
Salon
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:09 EST

Every debate over expanded government surveillance power is invariably framed as one of "security v. privacy and civil liberties" — as though it’s a given that increasing the Government’s surveillance authorities will "make us safer." But it has long been clear that the opposite is true. As numerous experts (such as Rep. Rush Holt) have attempted, with futility, to explain, expanding the scope of raw intelligence data collected by our national security agencies invariably impedes rather than bolsters efforts to detect terrorist plots. This is true for two reasons: (1) eliminating strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism; and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots. As Rep. Holt put it when arguing against the obliteration of FISA safeguards and massive expansion of warrantless eavesdropping power which a bipartisan Congress effectuated last year:

It has been demonstrated that when officials must establish before a court that they have reason to intercept communications — that is, that they know what they are doing — we get better intelligence than through indiscriminate collection and fishing expeditions.

The failure of the U.S. Government to detect the fairly glaring Northwest Airlines Christmas plot — despite years and years of constant expansions of Surveillance State powers — illustrates this dynamic perfectly. As President Obama said yesterday, the Government — just as was true for 9/11 — had gathered more than enough information to have detected this plot, or at least to have kept Abdulmutallab off airplanes and out of the country. Yet our intelligence agencies — just as was true for 9/11 — failed to understand what they had in their possession. Why is that? Because they had too much to process, including too much data wholly unrelated to Terrorism. In other words, our panic-driven need to vest the Government with more and more surveillance power every time we get scared again by Terrorists — in the name of keeping us safe — has exactly the opposite effect. Numerous pieces of evidence prove that.

Comment:

[Intelligence agencies] failed to understand what they had in their possession. Why is that? Because they had too much to process, including too much data wholly unrelated to Terrorism.

Or they failed because elements within the same Intelligence Community participated and allowed the farcical terrorist attempt, thus perpetuating the fear-myth, and further validating their own ever increasing authoritative power?

Today in The Washington Post, that paper’s CIA spokesman, David Ignatius, explains that Abdulmutallab never made it onto a no-fly list because there are simply too many reports of suspicious individuals being submitted on a daily basis, which causes the system to be "clogged" — overloaded — with information having nothing to do with Terrorism. As a result, actually relevant information ends up obscured or ignored. Identically, Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report that U.S. intelligence agencies intercept, gather and store so many emails, recorded telephone calls, and other communications that it’s simply impossible to sort through or understand what they have, quite possibly causing them to have missed crucial evidence in their possession about both the Fort Hood and Abdulmutallab plots:

This deluge of Internet traffic — involving e-mailers whose true identity often is not apparent — is one indication of the volume of raw intelligence U.S. spy agencies have had to sort through as they have tried to assess Awlaki’s influence in the West and elsewhere, said the officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information. The large volume of messages also may help to explain how agencies can become so overwhelmed with data that sometimes it is difficult, if not impossible, to connect potentially important dots.

Newsweek adds that intelligence agencies likely possessed emails between accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki — as well as recorded telephone calls between al-Awlaki and Abdulmutallab — but simply failed to analyze or understand what they had intercepted.
The problem is never that the U.S. Government lacks sufficient power to engage in surveillance, interceptions, intelligence-gathering and the like. Long before 9/11 — from the Cold War — we have vested extraordinarily broad surveillance powers in the U.S. Government to the point that we have turned ourselves into a National Security and Surveillance State. Terrorist attacks do not happen because there are too many restrictions on the government’s ability to eavesdrop and intercept communications, or because there are too many safeguards and checks. If anything, the opposite is true: the excesses of the Surveillance State — and the steady abolition of oversights and limits — have made detection of plots far less likely. Despite that, we have an insatiable appetite — especially when we’re frightened anew — to vest more and more unrestricted spying and other powers in our Government, which — like all governments — is more than happy to accept it.
UPDATE: Writing in the midst of the FISA debate and on behalf of numerous intelligence professionals, former FBI agent and 9/11 whistleblower Collen Rowley made similar points in explaining how constantly expanding surveillance and related powers — driven by fear-mongering over terrorism — has impeded the government’s ability to detect terrorist plots (h/t cj):

Extraneous, irrelevant data clutter the system, making it even harder for analysts to make meaningful future connections. A needle is hard enough to find in the proverbial haystack, without adding still more hay. . . . Quantity cannot substitute for quality. Higher quality data collection depends not only on better guidance with respect to relevance, but also on judiciousness applied from the beginning and throughout the collection process. Unfortunately, case and statutory law has come to be regarded as some kind of nicety — or a barrier that needs to be overcome. Not so. That law sets standards of relevancy for collection that used to hold down data clutter.

Those barriers, standards and oversight mechanisms have been inexorably diminished or abolished entirely over the last decade. And the results are becoming clear.

 

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/200484-The-Backfiring-of-the-Surveillance-State

Saturday, 7. November 2009

Definition of Terms & Analysis of Klein’s Affidavit

This piece will attempt to analyze the US Government’s Warrantless Wiretap Program utilizing open source information including A.T.&T. Whistleblower Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit, podcasts by James Bamford and Russell Tice available on this site, and comparisons with similar surveillance networks currently in use in Great Britain and China. The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the past thirty years has been touted as a mechanism of information freedom and open societies, a global clearinghouse for political and personal empowerment and a panacea against the forces of repression and censorship. What I will attempt to show in this piece is how those lofty goals remain largely unrealized and how governments, under the guise of “security” are, in fact, using the Internet as a new, overarching and suffocating surveillance state to monitor, compile and track the personal and private lives of virtually everyone who uses modern telecommunications in any form. I will attempt to demonstrate that, because of the erection of this surveillance regime, privacy of communications is essentially dead. I will also attempt to show how information gathered under this program can be used to populate private corporation databases and affect the general populace through credit reports, employment opportunities and the convergence of private and government databases.

Let me begin by defining some terms to help the reader understand the overall scope of Warrantless Wiretaps. These terms will give the reader an idea of the masses of data being monitored:

The basic building block circuit for our purposes is called a DS-3. Each DS-3 contains 28 T-1s, each containing 24 voice channels. So 1 DS-3 equals 24 times 28 or 672 voice channels. These DS-3s are multiplexed to the Optical Channel level and have a numerical value of 1. Therefore, an Optical Channel or OC-3 circuit contains 3 DS-3s capacity or 2016 voice channels. An OC-12 circuit contains 12 DS-3s or 8064 voice channels; an OC-48 circuit contains 48 DS-3s or 32,556 voice channels. These circuits are multiplexed to an OC-192 DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplex) level for long distance transport. What the last term means is anywhere from 24 to 36 OC-192 (192 DS-3s) modulated on a single fiber for long distance transport. So a single optic fiber can carry almost 5,000,000 individual phone channels at once. Most single mode fiber cables contain between 50 and 100 individual fibers providing a transmit and receive path for 25-50 OC-192 DWDM circuits. I am personally certified on equipment up to and including the OC-192 DWDM level.

Now we turn to Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit, Hepting v A.T.&T. :

In it, Klein describes his tasks as an A.T.&T. data communications technician in general terms as well as a project he was tasked to perform at the A.T.&T. Central Office located in 611 Folsom St., San Francisco. He describes how he was charged with the installation, test and turn-up of optical hybrid splitters to tap off optical signals from an array of A.T.&T. and other OCC (Other Common Carrier) circuits for transport and analysis within secret rooms installed  in Central Offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Seattle, among others, for the National Security Agency. Inside these rooms, the traffic was routed through a Semantic Traffic Analyzer provided by Narus, an Israeli-owned company affiliated with Israel’s counterpart agency to the NSA, as documented by James Bamford in his podcast interview available on this site. It was also routed to the main NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD where it was stored for further data mining as part of the WWP. The splitter circuit diagrams are included on page 24 of the affidavit with the circuit cutover diagram visible on page 15. Of particular interest to me is the engineering document on page 17 of his affidavit, listing the Other Common Carriers leasing A.T.&T. facilities whose circuits and customers were also being monitored. It reads like a Who’s Who of major telecommunications IXCs (Inter-Exchange Carriers) including Qwest, Level3, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing and a host of others. It also lists the size of each circuit routed to the NSA by it’s OC-x number as detailed above. Since Klein’s declaration only spotlights the West Coast central offices affected by this nationwide program, it is fair to assume it was also being carried out in corresponding offices on the East Coast as well.

The official justification offered by both the Bush and Obama administrations is that these circuits were only used for overseas traffic and, therefore, within the NSA’s lawful mandate to monitor overseas communications. The fallacy of that argument is that all the offices mentioned, while having some overseas circuits originating from them, primarily contained domestic telecommunications traffic. If the NSA wished to stay within its official mandate, this program could have been accomplished with far less cost by placing the NSA rooms with their equipment at overseas cable terminal offices such as the Transpacific Cable Terminal at Los Osos, near Morro Bay, CA.

Both Bamford and Tice, in their podcast interviews, speak of the two massive new NSA data storage facilities being built in Utah and Texas. Those locations are where all this information will be stored once they come online. Now consider the outsourcing of intelligence work to private contractors and security firms like CACI, Choicepoint and others who specialize in data mining from public sources as well and you begin to see the scope and impact of this program on ordinary citizens. Consider, also, Bamford and Tice’s revelations of a parallel National Telecommunications Traffic Control Center being constructed at Fort Meade identical to A.T.&T.‘s National Traffic Control Center in Bedminster, NJ. The eventual merging and sharing of this information between government and corporate entities is almost inevitable. Remember, as Benito Mussolini defined it:

“Fascism is the convergence of governmental and corporate power.”

So the questions I have are this.

1. Why is such an overarching, intrusive, draconian wiretap program necessary?

2. What mechanisms are there in place to prevent government-sourced private information from being shared with corporate entities?

3. Is the NSA positioning itself to take control of all telecommunications in the event of a national emergency?

4. What national emergency might provide a trigger mechanism for the assumption of such control?

 

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/

Control of the Female Body and Humiliation: When women are sinners in the eyes of extremists

Alaa Al-Aswany
The Independent
Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:22 EDT

© Unknown
The excessive interest in covering up women’s bodies is not confined to the extremists in Somalia

Somalia is in the grip of famine and chaos but officials there are inspecting bras
The Shabaab movement in Somalia controls large parts of the south and centre of the country, and because officials in this movement embrace the Wahabi ideology they have imposed their views on Somalis by force and have issued strict decrees banning films, plays, dancing at weddings, football matches and all forms of music, even the ring tones on mobile phones.
Some days ago these extremists carried out a strange operation: they arrested a Somali woman and whipped her in public because she was wearing a bra. They announced clearly that wearing these bras was unIslamic because it is a form of fraud and deception.
We may well ask what wearing bras has to do with religion, why they would consider them to be a form of fraud and deception, and how they managed to arrest the woman wearing the bra when all Somali women go around with their bodies completely covered. Did they appoint a special female officer to inspect the breasts of women passing by in the street? One Somali woman called Halima told the Reuters news agency: "Al Shabaab forced us to wear their type of veil and now they order us to shake our breasts… They first banned the former veil and introduced a hard fabric which stands stiffly on women’s chests. They are now saying that breasts should be firm naturally, or just flat."

Read More…

Best of the Web: How the EU is watching you: the rise of Europe’s surveillance state

Open Europe
Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:30 EDT

© Unknown

As ratification of the EU Lisbon Treaty draws closer, new research from Open Europe warns that the Treaty will help accelerate moves towards an EU surveillance state.
The Lisbon Treaty marks a significant shift of power from national governments to the EU in the field of justice and home affairs. It will lead to an increase in the volume and scope of EU legislation, which is already having a profound impact on EU citizens’ civil liberties and privacy.
As well as measures on asylum and immigration policy, EU ministers and the European Commission are currently negotiating a raft of controversial new proposals, which are set to radically increase the EU’s role in policing, criminal, and security matters. EU leaders hope to reach formal agreement on many controversial new initiatives by the end of the year.
They include: a target to train a third of all police officers across the EU in a "common culture" of policing; the mass collection and sharing of personal data including DNA records into an EU-wide database; controversial surveillance techniques including ‘cyber patrols’; the creation of a fledgling ‘EU Home Office’ with powers to decide on cooperation on police, border, immigration and criminal justice issues; an EU "master plan" on information exchange; the transfer of criminal proceedings among EU member states; a three-fold increase in the number of controversial EU arrest warrants; access to other member states’ national tax databases; and EU laws on citizens’ right to internet access, among many other things.

Read More…

Best of the Web: AFRICOM and America’s Global Military Agenda: Taking The Helm Of The Entire World

Rick Rozoff
Global Research
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:37 EDT

© Unknown

"The developments come as the White House seeks grounds to establish a major military presence in Africa…[A]nalysts caution that similar pretexts were used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan, the missile attacks in Pakistan, and its waning military operations in Iraq, where the civilian population continues to bear the brunt of the US intervention."
"AFRICOM facilitates the United States advancing on the African continent, taking control of the Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the entire globe."

October 1st marked the one-year anniversary of the activation of the first U.S. overseas military command in a quarter of a century, Africa Command (AFRICOM).
AFRICOM was established as a temporary command under the wing of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) a year earlier and launched as an independent entity on October 1, 2008.

Read More…

Best of the Web: Ignored by western media: Indonesian asteroid exploded with energy of ‘small atomic bomb’

Spaceweather.com
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:07 EDT

© Unknown
Indonesian News Report

Picture this: A 10-meter wide asteroid hits Earth and explodes in the atmosphere with the energy of a small atomic bomb. Frightened by thunderous sounds and shaking walls, people rush out of their homes, thinking that an earthquake is in progress. All they see is a twisting trail of debris in the mid-day sky.
This really happened on Oct. 8th around 11 am local time in the coastal town of Bone, Indonesia. The Earth-shaking blast received remarkably little coverage in Western press, but meteor scientists have given it their full attention. "The explosion triggered infrasound sensors of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) more than 10,000 km away," report researchers Elizabeth Silber and Peter Brown of the Univ. of Western Ontario in an Oct. 19th press release. Their analysis of the infrasound data revealed an explosion at coordinates 4.5S, 120E (close to Bone) with a yield of about 50 kton of TNT. That’s two to three times more powerful than World War II-era atomic bombs.

Read More…

Best of the Web: America’s Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

Dave Lindorff
Counterpunch
Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:43 EDT

© Unknown

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose, just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: "Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work."
Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.
Okay, the article was lacking much historical perspective (more on that later), and the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that "The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House." Well, duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even in Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and about how can the government explain this to the over 1000 soldiers and Marines who have died supposedly helping to build a new Afghanistan). But that said, the newspaper that helped cheerlead us into the pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that prevented journalist Risen from running his exposé of the Bush/Cheney administration’s massive warrantless National Security Agency electronic spying operation until after the 2004 presidential election, this time gave a critically important story full play, and even, appropriately, included a teaser in the same front-page story about October being the most deadly month yet for the US in Afghanistan.

Read More…

Read More SOTT Focus / Read More Best of the Web

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• Self-defence Stories from Gaza
• Ethnic cleansing: Israel denying Palestinians access to clean water
• Ahmadinejad: Israel is a threat to all nations
• 60 kids feared buried under Baghdad bomb site

— More Recent News —

Grand Theft Economics

• Japan Consumer Prices Fall 2.3% as Deflation Continues
• Ukrainian economy suffers sharp fall in 2009
• The U.S. recession ends, but not for you
• Clunkers: Taxpayers paid $24,000 per car
• US (fake) economy is growing once again
• Shell to cut 5,000 jobs by the end of the year after profits (less record dividends) slump
• Is capitalism on the ropes? Interview with Michael D.Yates and Fred Magdoff
• Why the Goldman Sachs-AIG Story Won’t Go Away
• GMO sneak attack: Genetically modified flaxseeds have contaminated Canadian prairie fields
• U.S. Senate Said to Revise Plan to Extend, Expand Homebuyer Credit

— More Recent News —

The Living Planet

• India: Earthquake Magnitude 5.2 – Bhutan
• Strong 6.0 earthquake strikes Afghanistan – or did it?
• US: Autumn Snowstorm Wallops Rockies, Plains
• Bad weather system causes Cyprus flooding
• Ancient ‘Monster’ Insect: ‘Unicorn’ Fly Never Before Observed
• Wolves Lose Their Predatory Edge In Mid-life
• Tsunami Waves Reasonably Likely To Strike Israel
• Volcanoes Played Pivotal Role In Ancient Ice Age, Mass Extinction
• Algae foam killing thousands of sea birds
• Do Bears Stimulate their Vagus Nerves? The ‘Man Who Walks with Bears’ Discovers their ‘Hum’

— More Recent News —

Health & Wellness

• Researchers Link Low-Level Mercury Exposure, Zinc Deficiency and Learning Disorders
• Diet And Intestinal Bacteria Linked With Healthier Immune Systems
• No pain, no gain: Mastering a skill makes us stressed in the moment, happy long term
• Why Fish Oils Help And How They Could Help Even More
• Breakthrough documentary "House of Numbers" challenges conventional thinking on HIV, AIDS
• Eating animals is making us sick
• When Cancer Spreads to the Brain
• A Molecule of Motivation, Dopamine Excels at Its Task
• This Is Your Brain Without Dad
• Is Childhood Sexual Abuse Linked to Inability to Express Emotions in Adulthood?

— More Recent News —

Science & Technology

• The map that changed the world
• Opening Up A Colourful Cosmic Jewel Box
• Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 leaked footage set to ignite controversy
• Ancient Sea-Monster Discovered
• Fermi Telescope Caps First Year With Glimpse of Space-Time
• Controversial Moon Origin Theory Rewrites History
• Comets Didn’t Wipe Out Sabertooths, Early Americans?
• Monster supernovae may explain Milky Way’s mystery haze of radiation
• 10,000-year-old flint found on Coventry allotment
• Augmented reality system lets you see through walls

— More Recent News —

Our Haunted Planet

• Ignored by western media: Indonesian asteroid exploded with energy of ‘small atomic bomb’
• Asteroid explosion over Indonesia raises fears about Earth’s defences
• UK: More sightings of mysterious ‘ball’ in the sky
• ‘Meteorite’ that landed in Latvia is a hoax, experts say
• ‘UFO cloud formation’ filmed in Romania
• Meteorite falls in northern Latvia, no one injured
• Hoax? Video footage of blazing ‘meteorite’ in Latvia
• Did a meteor make this crater in Latvia?
• Author on UFOs Mac Tonnies Found Dead in Apartment
• UFO Alert: Police Officer Sees Aliens at Crop Circle

— More Recent News —

Don’t Panic! Lighten Up!

• Anti Terror Keystone Cops in Action!
• Alberta Girl, 5, Saves Mother’s Life After Horrific Crash
• Satire, or is it? U.S. Continues Quagmire-Building Effort In Afghanistan
• Surprised by Disaster
• Michigan Man Claims He’s Cockroach King
• George W. Bush set to become motivational speaker
• US: For Alabama man, XXXXXXX license plate marks spot for ticket-magnet
• Switzerland: Police Stop Driver for 15 Violations in 11 Minutes
• Do the Global Handwashing dance!
• Bear Run! Black Bear Chills in Wisconsin Beer Cooler

— More Recent News —

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