• WASHINGTON - Since the attempted bombing of a US airliner on Christmas Day, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports.
• What he has made little mention of is that the Chertoff Group, his security consulting agency, includes a client that manufactures the machines. Chertoff disclosed the relationship on a CNN program Wednesday, in response to a question.
• Chertoff’s advocacy for the technology dates to his time in the Bush administration. In 2005, Homeland Security ordered the government’s first batch of the scanners - five from California-based Rapiscan Systems. Rapiscan is one of only two companies that make full-body scanners in accordance with current contract specifications required by the federal government.
• Currently 40 body scanners are in use among 19 US airports. The number is expected to skyrocket, at least in part because of the Christmas Day incident. The Transportation Security Administration has said it will order 300 more machines.
• In the summer, TSA purchased 150 more machines from Rapiscan with $25 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. Rapiscan was the only company that qualified for the contract because it had developed technology that performs the screening using a less-graphic body imaging system, which is also less controversial.

• Police are trying to determine whether five Americans detained in Pakistan had planned to attack a complex that houses nuclear power facilities.
• The young Muslim men, who are from the Washington DC area, were arrested in Pakistan earlier this month. Pakistani police and government officials have made a series of escalating and, at times, seemingly contradictory claims about the men’s intentions. US officials have been far more cautious, but they, too, are looking at charging the men.
• A Pakistani government official alleged on Saturday that the men had established contact with Taliban commanders and had planned to attack sites in Pakistan. Earlier, however, local police accused the five of intending to fight in Afghanistan after meeting militant leaders.
• The men allegedly had a map of Chashma Barrage, a complex that along with nuclear power facilities houses a water reservoir and other structures, said Javed Islam, a senior police official in the Sargodha area of Punjab province where the men were arrested.
• He stressed that they were not carrying a specific map of a nuclear power plant, but a map of the whole Chashma Barrage. The detained men had also exchanged emails about the area, Islam claimed. “We are also working to retrieve the deleted material in their computers,” he said.
• Pakistan has an arsenal of nuclear weapons, but also has nuclear power plants for civilian purposes.
• Any nuclear activity in Pakistan tends to come under US scrutiny after the main architect of its atomic weapons programme, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was accused of leaking sensitive nuclear secrets. But, as militancy has spread in Pakistan, officials have repeatedly insisted that the nuclear weapons programme is secure.

• A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe.
• David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.
• He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.
• Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley, suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT.
• Despite being firmly on the radar of the US intelligence agencies, he was allowed to return to India as recently as March. Indian officials are furious that their American counterparts did not share details of that visit at the time. The Indian media has raised the possibility that Mr Headley was being protected by his American handlers — a theory that experts say is credible.
• “The feeling in India is that the US has not been transparent,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.
• “That Headley was an agent for the DEA is known. Whether he was being used by the CIA as well is a matter of speculation, but it is almost certain that the CIA was aware of him and his movements across the subcontinent.”

The Military’s Plan For The Afghan War Surge, In One Giant Chart

yowza, looks like the plan for Afghanistan might be “too big too fail”, eh?

The Origin and Myth of ‘Al Qaeda’

This is a clip from the 3-part BBC series “The Power of Nightmares.” Here, the origins of the name “al Qaeda” are explained, as is the myth of the power and reach of Osama bin Laden and the so-called “al Qaeda network.”

• “If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International’s Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report “Jailed Without Justice” and said in an interview, “It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn’t believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren’t anything wrong.”
• Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is also confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants—nary a sign, a marked car or even a US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were provided.

earthmancomehome:

The answer is not to monitor us all to combat the actions of a few. Total security, in cyberspace or otherwise, is impossible, and attempts to create it are subject strongly to the law of diminishing returns. The only way to combat violent extremism is to tackle its causes, a banal statement in itself perhaps. Like it or not, states will decide what types of material are deemed inappropriate to view and share online, but treating all internet use as de facto potentially problematic and appropriate for regulation does no-one any favours. Hot on the heels of Google’s CEO last week stating, ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’ (a specious argument at the best of times) there are rough times ahead.

• KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday that Afghanistan would not be able to pay for its own security until at least 2024, underscoring his government’s long-term financial dependence on the United States and NATO even as President Obama has pledged to begin withdrawing American troops in 2011.

• This past February, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded a one-year, $2.6 million grant to the Cambridge, MA.-based Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to develop computerized sensors capable of detecting a person’s level of “malintent” — or intention to do harm. It’s only the most recent of numerous contracts awarded to Draper and assorted research outfits by the U.S. government over the past few years under the auspices of a project called “Future Attribute Screening Technologies,” or FAST. It’s the next wave of behavior surveillance from DHS and taxpayers have paid some $20 million on it so far.
• Conceived as a cutting-edge counter-terrorism tool, the FAST program will ostensibly detect subjects’ bad intentions by monitoring their physiological characteristics, particularly those associated with fear and anxiety. It’s part of a broader “initiative to develop innovative, non-invasive technologies to screen people at security checkpoints,” according to DHS.
• The “non-invasive” claim might be a bit of a stretch. A DHS report issued last December outlined some of the possible technological features of FAST, which include “a remote cardiovascular and respiratory sensor” to measure “heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia,” a “remote eye tracker” that “uses a camera and processing software to track the position and gaze of the eyes (and, in some instances, the entire head),” “thermal cameras that provide detailed information on the changes in the thermal properties of the skin in the face,” and “a high resolution video that allows for highly detailed images of the face and body … and an audio system for analyzing human voice for pitch change.”
• Ultimately, all of these components would be combined to take the form of a “prototypical mobile suite (FAST M2) … used to increase the accuracy and validity of identifying persons with malintent.”
• Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and bestselling author who has been one of the most vociferous critics of such new high-tech DHS initiatives, concurs. In fact, he says, all the evidence suggests the opposite. “The problem is the false positives,” he says.
• Beyond the fact that ordinary travelers are likely to exhibit many of the symptoms supposedly indicative of malintent (how many people run to catch a plane and end up overheated and out of breath?), compare the rarity of terrorist attacks with the millions of travelers who pass through a security checkpoint. Statistically, Schneier argues, it’s a fool’s errand. “If you run the math, you get several million false positives for every real attack you find. So it ends up being as useless as picking people randomly. If you’re going to spend money on something, you can spend money on dice — it’s cheaper. And equally as effective.”

Blackwater’s Erik Prince to step down, reveals CIA role

• Blackwater’s Erik Prince was recruited as a CIA agent in the years after the 9/11 attacks, says an exclusive report at Vanity Fair that also reveals the billionaire ex-Navy SEAL plans to step down from Blackwater to teach high school.
• For the past six years, Prince “appears to have led an astonishing double life,” writes Adam Ciralsky. “Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s CEO and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the CIA’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into ‘denied areas’—places US intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies.”
• Prince also told Vanity Fair he believes that people inside the US government sold him out when news of Blackwater’s involvement in the CIA’s secret assassination program went public. Last summer, CIA director Leon Panetta informed congressional intelligence committees that the CIA had kept secret an on-and-off assassination program that many people believe was run during the Bush administration by Vice President Dick Cheney.
• Prince told Ciralsky that he was engaged in work for the CIA “up until two months ago—when Prince says the Obama administration pulled the plug.” That would seem to confirm recent news reports that the Obama administration was using Blackwater for assassinations in Pakistan.
• Read the full Vanity Fair report here.

• The group, Wikileaks, says some of the messages were sent by federal and local officials, but most appear to be from regular people, including frantic New Yorkers trying to reach loved ones in and around the World Trade Center.
• Wikileaks was posting the messages for most of the day Wednesday and expected to finish early Thursday.
• The messages range from “DO NOT GET ON THE PATH TRAIN…THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IS ON FIRE” to “President has been rerouted wont be returning to washington but not sure where he will go.”
• One says, “THIS IS MYRNA, I WILL NOT REST UNTIL YOU GO HOME, THE SECOND TOWER IS DOWN, I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO KEEP CALLING YOU AFTER EVERY EVENT. PLS JUST GO HOME.”
• Some are unrelated to the terrorist attacks: “Paul, Jerry and I feel that we can expect around 200 people for the Pig Picking. Call if you want to. Keith”
• Wikileaks says its goal is to promote transparency by putting leaked documents online. Its repository includes manuals, lawsuits and numerous government documents.
• Daniel Schmitt, a Wikileaks spokesman from Berlin, said the pager messages were submitted to the site anonymously several weeks ago.
• “From the context information that the source provided we have strong reasons to believe that this is valid data,” Schmitt said.
• Schmitt said publishing the messages “is one more building block to getting a full picture of what happened on that day.” He noted that none of the messages appear to lend credence to conspiracy theories that suggest the U.S. government was behind the attacks or had advance knowledge of them.
• New York City’s police and fire departments said they could not confirm that any of the messages were actual department communications. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the U.S. Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Administration declined to comment on the messages.
• Most of the pages come from three companies, Metrocall, Skytel and Arch.
• USA Mobility Inc., which merged Arch and Metrocall systems in 2004, issued a statement Wednesday saying it was “troubled to learn that paging messages, including communications involving government officials, appear to have been intercepted and publicly disclosed in clear violation of federal criminal law.”

These pager messages are available HERE.

(via thedaytheytriedtokillme)

• At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.