Sept. 11, 2001: The Day the Earth Stood Still

2001: Militants from al-Qaida, a network of Sunni jihadists under the nominal leadership of Osama bin Laden, hijack four California-bound commercial airliners and use them to stage suicide attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. Nearly 3,000 people are killed in the most carefully orchestrated attack against U.S. targets since Pearl Harbor.

The fallout from what has become known, simply, as 9/11 continues to reverberate internationally, throughout all spheres of life. In the tech world, 9/11 and President Bush's subsequent declaration of a "war on terror" led to some nice profits in some sectors, especially among businesses involved in communications, surveillance, security and weapons technology.

Probably the most conspicuous tech impact on the average citizen involves the security measures now in place at virtually every major airport on Earth. Almost six years of trial and error, and an improvement in scanning equipment and training, have streamlined the process of screening every single passenger on every single flight, but this technology, like any, is hardly foolproof. It is, however, likely to remain a permanent fixture of airline travel.

More insidious is the intrusion of sophisticated surveillance technology into everyday life. Some of it -- like the Bush administration's controversial domestic spying program -- can be tied directly to 9/11. Under provisions granted by the Patriot Act, the government began actively spying on the communications of its own citizens, including the inspection of cell-phone records and e-mail logs.

Federal law enforcement officials, in the name of ferreting out terrorists (as well as more garden-variety criminals like child molesters and online fraudsters), have also pressured ISPs into providing customer information that allows them to track an individual's whereabouts on the internet. The result of all this has led many Americans, and some of their politicians, to begin questioning how much government intrusion is permissible in the name of homeland security.

Since it led directly to the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, 9/11's impact on military technology has also been profound, but not necessarily to the good. Rather, these conflicts have exposed the limitations of high-tech warfare on battlefields lacking a static front or a concentrated enemy force. If anything, the guerrilla war that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's conventional army seems better suited to low-tech ordnance: Roadside bombs and portable rocket launchers, for example, have been used to devastating effect against the Americans and their Iraqi allies.

In the end, though, 9/11's immediate effect on technology probably has had less to do with the development of new surveillance toys and weapons than it has with the mindset of the people using what's already available.

(Source: Various)

 

Quoted from http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/09/dayintech_0911:

Sept. 11, 2001: The Day the Earth Stood Still

Technorati Tags:History,Privacy,Sad,Scary,War

Students to McCain: Too old to be prez?

By PHILIP ELLIOTT,

Associated Press Writer

Tue Sep 4, 6:18 PM ET

An unflinching John McCain was told Tuesday by New Hampshire high school students he might be too old to be president and too conservative to be respected. McCain, the Arizona senator whose presidential bid has stumbled through the summer, countered the Concord High School students with humor.

"Thanks for the question, you little jerk," McCain joked back to one student who asked the 71-year-old about his age. "You're drafted."

McCain's two-day trip to New Hampshire launches his fall campaign for the GOP nomination. During a morning visit with students, he explained why he was not shrinking from his support for a temporary increase of troops in Iraq and why students should pay attention.

"If this war continues much longer, there will be people in this audience who will serve in the military, who also may be going over there (in Iraq) or to Afghanistan," McCain told the high school students.

He said the students should watch the upcoming report on Iraq from Gen. David Petraeus.

"It may be a seminal debate. It may be one of the most important debates in history and it may directly affect your lives," he warned. "He's going to say: Whether it was or was not in the beginning, if we lose Iraq, it will be part of this struggle against radical, Islamic extremism because al-Qaida will take over and the area will deteriorate into chaos and destruction."

But during a town hall-style meeting, students were more interested in pushing McCain on the environment, his support for gay rights and even his age.

"If elected, you'd be older than Ronald Reagan, making you the oldest president. Do you ever worry you might die in office or get Alzheimer's or some other disease that might affect your judgment?" one student asked.

The audience groaned; McCain slid into a joke.

"I think it was one of my sons that alleged I'm getting to the point I hide my own Easter eggs," McCain said to laughter. "When you saw my 95-year-old mother (on a video introduction), you saw the kind of genes I have."

He said he's a hard campaigner and his age won't be an issue.

Another student pushed him on gay rights; McCain repeated his pledge to oppose discrimination but support for traditional marriage.

"I came here looking to see a good leader," 16-year-old William Sleaster told McCain, earning himself boos from his classmates. "I don't."

McCain, a veteran of such candid exchanges in New Hampshire, smoothly pushed forward and told the crowd not to disrespect its peer.

"I understand. I thank you," McCain said. "That's what America is all about."

 

Quoted from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070904/ap_po/mccain_students:

Students to McCain: Too old to be prez? on Yahoo! News

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How close is World War 3.0?

Examining the reality of cyberwar in wake of Estonian attacks

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan,

Network World,08/22/07

When the Estonian government was hit with major, sustained denial-of-service attacks this spring, the headlines screamed that it was the first incident of modern cyberwarfare.

The attacks disrupted a dozen government Web sites and networks run by ISPs, financial institutions and media outlets for several weeks in April and May. A global botnet of compromised home computers was used to create and direct the packet flood attacks that reached a peak of 90Mbps. Hackers also defaced key government Web sites with anti-Estonian slogans.

Pro-Russian activists were behind the cyber attacks, which were motivated by the Estonian government’s decision to move a Soviet World War II memorial. All in all, the hackers launched hundreds of individual cyberattacks against Estonian Web sites, ranging from less than one minute to 10 hours or more.

The Estonian attacks have left U.S. IT and network professionals wondering if they’ve entered a new era of cyberwar and what they should be doing to prepare for politically motivated attacks.

Glen Baker, CIO of Outsource Partners Inc. (OPI), says he is "absolutely" concerned about the Estonia incident and the threat of politically motivated attacks against his company's network. The New York City firm does finance and accounting outsourcing for multinational companies, and it has the majority of its 1,500 employees in India and Bulgaria.

"We're in the process of hiring a security consulting firm to try to mitigate this threat," he says. "They will do analysis for us and build what a typical industry response should be."

Baker says OPI suffered Web defacements in 2001 and sees regular virus and spam attacks through incoming e-mail. He says he's more concerned about hactivism than he is about internal threats such as disgruntled employees.

"We have locked down facilities in India and Bulgaria. Users don't have many access rights or Internet access. They can't bring personal items on to our networks," Baker says. "But we do worry about external attacks. We can imagine political or anti-outsourcing attacks. Those are the ones we are trying to target and trying to mitigate."

Jose Nazario, senior security researcher with Arbor Networks, says CIOs in government and industry have been asking about the Estonian incident and whether it is evidence of a new online threat.

"As we move more critical infrastructure to the Internet and we depend on it more and more for communications, the threat [of cyberwar] is real," Nazario says. "It could be as specific as shutting down a phone system or it could be like the Estonian attacks, which were hitting key government sites and mail servers. It could be both making a statement and disrupting an activity."

Security experts agree that despite the damage caused by the Estonian attacks, they were more hactivism than all-out cyberwar. However, experts fear that we could be entering an era of more frequent politically motivated attacks and that commercial networks will be targeted.

Experts say that the success of the Estonian attacks and the publicity they received may encourage other disgruntled individuals or groups to launch copycat attacks. Companies with unpopular employment policies, business practices or those contributing to global climate change could be hit by similar attacks, they warn.

"There is potential for [politically motivated attacks] to be more frequent based on the attention brought to what happened in Estonia," says Michael Witt, deputy director of the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team within the Department of Homeland Security.

"We’re sort of in unchartered territory," Witt adds. "You don’t know what is going to upset an individual or a group to see if later they will launch a cyber attack."

Read aQ&A with Witt.

Among the industries that could be targets for future cyber attacks are not only ISPs and banks but also oil and electric companies.

"When you think about the citizens of many countries that may disappear beneath the ocean from global warming within 50 years, it’s fairly easy to imagine a small, disaffected group [launching cyber attacks] because they’re not being heard otherwise," says Eugene Spafford, executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University. "We have seen various groups because of racial or religious extreme ideologies…circulating literature about bringing down utility grids."

Was it cyberwar?

Despite the initial headlines, most security experts say the Estonian incident wasn’t all-out cyberwarfare because it doesn’t appear to have been sponsored by the Russian government.

"I would call it more of a political statement," Witt says.

Spafford says true cyberwarfare would be undertaken by one nation to bend another to its political will, and network attacks would likely be a companion to other physical attacks.

"The activity that was carried out in Estonia was malicious and criminal," Spafford says. "If you look at some of the political demonstrations held in countries around the world, where traffic is brought to a standstill and there are work stoppages and banks are shut down as a matter of political statement, you wouldn’t call that warfare."

Charles Kaplan, chief technology strategist at Mazu Networks, says the Estonian attacks appear to have been conducted by Russian citizens but weren’t orchestrated by the Russian government.

"If it really was a government-caused event, we would have seen something more damaging," Kaplan says. "This was a pure demonstration of brute force, and it did have some economic impact. If somebody really wanted to take these guys down, the damage would have been greater than it was."

There are only two other known network attacks that were as devastating as the Estonian incident and have been called cyberwarfare. One, dubbed Titan Rain by the U.S. government, took place in 2003 and involved Chinese military attacks on networks run by Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal and NASA. The other incident, which the U.S. government refers to as Moonlight Maze, occurred in 1999 and involved Russian attacks on classified military information.

Whether it was cyberwar or hactivism, the Estonian incident shows the devastation that a politically motivated network attack can have on government and commercial networks.

Security experts agree that it should be an eye-opener for CIOs, who have been focused on profit-oriented attacks and should consider the threat of politically motivated ones, too.

Spafford calls the threat of political or ideological attacks against U.S. corporate networks significant. He points out that many early viruses and Web defacements were political statements.

"There are many organizations that may be targets for ideological groups because they do business somewhere in the world that may be unpopular," Spafford says. "If you’re part of the banking or power industries, you may be a target for purposes of harm to the overall economy."

Spafford estimates that there are thousands of politically motivated attacks across the Internet each year. "Many of them aren’t that coordinated or don’t have as big of an impact as in Estonia," he adds.

However, the majority of cyber attacks are economically motivated, with the most common targets being gambling, e-commerce, pornography and financial Web sites.

"We don’t see a lot of denial-of-service attacks these days because most of the cyber attacks we see are profit motivated," says Steve Bellovin, an Internet security expert and professor of computer science at Columbia University. "The most common are extortion, especially against gambling sites."

 

Lessons learned from Estonia

The packet floods used in the Estonian DoS attacks were not new. What was unusual about these attacks was the duration and the disruption they caused, experts say.

"The size and scale of these attacks in terms of the bandwidth and packets per second is in the middle in terms of what we have seen for these kinds of attacks," Nazario says. "But they lasted for weeks, not hours or days, which is much longer than we’ve seen for most of these attacks in the past. And the targets and the inferred motivation were geo-political rather than economic or a simple grudge. That suggests we have turned a corner."

Spafford says what’s important for U.S. companies to learn about the Estonian incident is how much damage a small number of people with resources can do.

Another lesson learned from this incident is that the Estonian response – of admitting the problem and getting help from ISPs and international governments – was largely successful.

Find out what Estonia did right.

One suggestion for network managers is not to worry too much about figuring out where a cyber attack is coming from or why. Ed Amoroso, CSO at AT&T, says network managers should instead focus on mitigating the attack.

"For the day to day types of attacks people are dealing with, the goal of trying to determine where the attack originates remains very elusive because most of the attacks involve bots," Amoroso says. "It’s so tempting in cyber security to say let’s trace back the attack to see where it’s coming from, and let’s hypothesize what the geo-political situation is. Let’s assume if we see that it’s an intense attack, that it’s well funded. But it’s just as likely to be a kid sitting in Brooklyn. That’s one of the great difficulties of doing cyber security."

The good news for U.S. CIOs is that they are better positioned to defend themselves against similar DoS attacks because the United States is so much larger than Estonia and has a more robust network infrastructure.

"The country of Estonia is about the size of Rhode Island [based on population]," says Marty Lindner, a senior member of the technical staff at the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. "They only have so much infrastructure. When somebody decides to launch a DoS attack, all it takes is a little more energy than the size of your infrastructure to knock it over. The attacker here decided to take out 11 to 12 Web sites….If you take a big corporate network in the U.S., it is bigger and more robust than Estonia’s will ever be."

Even though the U.S. network infrastructure is more robust than Estonia’s, hactivism and other politically motivated attacks are still a worry for CIOs, Witt says.

"We have worked diligently with our critical infrastructure owners and operators, whether in the telecom industry or the IT industry or the chemical or energy sectors," Witt says. "We’ve been working at this for many years to make sure we have a more robust type of backbone to deal with this kind of attack. Is that to say we are 100% protected against this type of attack? Absolutely not. It all comes back to best practices and having plans in place to deal with attacks."

What will happen next?

Security experts predict that politically motivated attacks will be more targeted than all-out cyberwar aimed at taking down the Internet.

"What motive would Russia or China have to try to take out the U.S. suddenly? If they do that, they’re going to get hurt, too," Bellovin says. "If they take out the internaps, they take them out for themselves, too. If they take out our economy, they take out some of their big trading partners, which hurts them, too. There’s not an obvious motive for something happening on that scale in the very near future."

Bellovin says the more likely scenario is that hactivists or cyber terrorists would disrupt individual commercial or government targets.

"What if someone said: Pay us $100 million or the denial-of-service attack that took out the electrical grid in California is going to happen again?" Bellovin asks. "That would be an act of war. And from a military perspective, every major country is looking at attacks and defenses on this issue."

Kaplan says politically motivated attacks are more likely to come in the form of spear phishing attacks rather than DoS attacks like those used against Estonia.

"If I want to steal a piece of information from a particular company or government, I just look around at publicly available information such as Google, find the controller of that information, and send that particular person a phishing e-mail," Kaplan explains. "He’s the only one who gets it, and it’s specific enough that he opens up. I can’t do that on a mass scale, but I can do it to get deep into a particular organization."

Kaplan also worries about hard-to-detect polymorphic viruses and malware hiding in virtualization engines.

"This is not to say that a big cyberwar attack couldn’t happen," Kaplan adds. "But when I think about what a group of kids or terrorists could do, there are so many other options that are more attractive than all-out governmental cyberwarfare."

Experts say what will happen next in cyberwar is that hactivists will launch whatever kinds of attacks – DoS, Web defacements, worms, viruses, phishing or pharming – that help them meet their goals.

"It’s an arms race. I would never predict what the next bad thing will be,” Lindner says. “The best thing that a corporation or anyone can do is have a good layered defense, understand their exposures and have a good plan for managing the attacks when they occur."

Most of the steps that CIOs should take to prepare for hactivism involve keeping up with state-of-the-art security practices. And these steps will protect networks from both political and profit-driven attacks.

"You shouldn’t neglect politically motivated attacks as a threat, but you should be worrying much more about the economic impact today," Bellovin says. "Most of the things you should do about that would help to protect you against this threat as well."

 

Quoted from http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/export/home/httpd/htdocs/news/2007/082207-cyberwar.html&pagename=/news/2007/082207-cyberwar.html&pageurl=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/082207-cyberwar.html&site=security:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/082207-cyberwar.html

 

Technorati Tags:Business,International,Internet,Scary,War

Congress sends 9/11 bill to Bush

By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Congress sent President Bush legislation Friday to intensify anti-terror efforts in the U.S., shifting money to high-risk states and cities and expanding screening of air and sea cargo to stave off future Sept. 11-style attacks.

The measure carries out major recommendations of the independent 9/11 Commission.

The bill, passed by the House on a 371-40 vote, ranks among the top accomplishments of the six-month-old Democratic Congress. The Senate approved the measure late Thursday by 85-8, and the White House said the president would sign the bill.

Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks and three years after the 9/11 Commission made its recommendations, "Congress is finally embracing what the 9/11 families have been saying all along," said Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. "It takes a willingness to do things a different way."

The bill elevates the importance of risk factors in determining which states and cities get federal security funds — that would mean more money for such cities as New York and Washington — and also puts money into a new program to assure that security officials at every level can communicate with each other.

It would require screening of all cargo on passenger planes within three years and sets a five-year goal of scanning all container ships for nuclear devices before they leave foreign ports.

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who steered the legislation through the Senate with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said it would "make our nation stronger, our cities and towns more secure and our families safer."

Republicans generally backed the bill while stressing their own administration's success in stopping another major terrorist attack. The bill, said Rep. Peter King of New York, top Republican on the Homeland Security panel, "is another step in the right direction building on the steps of the previous 5 1/2 years."

"These efforts build upon the considerable progress we've made over the past six years," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.

Completion of the bill, six months after the House passed its original version on the first day of the current Congress, was a major victory for Democrats who have seen some of their other priorities — immigration and energy reform and stem cell research funding — thwarted by GOP and presidential resistance and House-Senate differences.

Another goal, raising the minimum wage, went into effect last Tuesday, and Democratic leaders still hope for agreement on ethics and lobbying changes before Congress departs for its August recess at the end of next week.

The independent 9/11 Commission in 2004 issued 41 recommendations covering domestic security, intelligence gathering and foreign policy. Congress and the White House followed through on some, including creating a director of national intelligence, tightening land border screening and cracking down on terrorist financing.

Democrats, after taking over control of Congress, promised to make completing the list a top priority.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., the vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, said with enactment of the bill some 80 percent of the panel's recommendations will have been met. "The bottom line is that the American people will be safer," he said.

The 9/11 bill led off the first busy legislative week in the House last January, and the Senate passed its version in March. The measure stalled after that, partly because of a White House veto threat over language, since dropped, to give collective bargaining rights to aviation screeners.

House-Senate negotiators finally reached an agreement this week after Democrats worked out a provision satisfying GOP demands that people who report what they in good faith believe to be terrorist activity around planes, trains and buses be protected from lawsuits.

The most controversial provision in the legislation requires the radiation scanning of cargo containers in more than 600 ports from which ships leave for the U.S. The White House, and other critics, say that the technology isn't there, that the requirement could disrupt trade and that current procedures including manifest inspections at foreign ports and radiation monitoring in U.S. ports are working well.

Supporters argue that the unthinkable devastation from the detonation of a nuclear device in an American port makes it imperative to scan cargo before it reaches U.S. shores. As a compromise, it was agreed that the Homeland Security secretary can extend the five-year deadline for 100 percent scanning in two-year increments if necessary.

The White House was also unhappy with a provision that requires total amounts requested and appropriated for the intelligence community to be made public.

There was more agreement on changing the formula to ensure that more federal security grants go to high-risk states and cities. The current formula makes sure that every lawmaker, even those representing rural areas relatively safe from terrorism, get a chunk of the federal grants. Under the new formula a larger percentage of grants will go to high-risk urban areas.

The bill also establishes a new grant program to ensure that local, state and federal officials can communicate with each other and approves $4 billion over four years for rail, transit and bus security.

It strengthens security measures for the Visa Waiver Program, which allows travelers from select countries to visit the United States without visas.

The massive legislation also contains language requiring the president to confirm that Pakistan is making progress in combatting al-Qaida and Taliban elements within its borders before the United States provides aid to the country.

Hamilton said that one shortcoming of the bill is that it fails to carry out the commission's recommendation that Congress streamline its own overlapping setup for monitoring intelligence and homeland security matters. "I think congressional oversight still remains a weakness in our homeland security," he said.

___

The bill is H.R. 1

 

This was found at Yahoo! News.

Technorati Tags: Maine, Politics, Security, War

Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq

 

Message to the Congress of the United States Regarding International Emergency Economic Powers Act

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported,

withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the

receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

Sec. 2. (a) Any transaction by a United States person or within the United States that evades or avoids, has the purpose

of evading or avoiding, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

(b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

Sec. 3. For purposes of this order:

(a) the term "person" means an individual or entity;

(b) the term "entity" means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization; and

(c) the term "United States person" means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.

Sec. 4. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets

instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.

Sec. 6. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government, consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order and, where appropriate, to advise the Secretary of the Treasury in a timely manner of the measures taken.

Sec. 7. Nothing in this order is intended to affect the continued effectiveness of any rules, regulations, orders, licenses, or other forms of administrative action issued, taken, or continued in effect heretofore or hereafter under 31 C.F.R. chapter V, except as expressly terminated, modified, or suspended by or pursuant to this order.

Sec. 8. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, instrumentalities, or entities, its officers or employees, or any other person.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WHITE HOUSE,

July 17, 2007.

 

This was found at The Freakin' White House.

Technorati Tags: Business, History, International, Justice, Laws, Politics, Sad, Scary, War

Senior Qaeda figure in Iraq a myth: U.S. military

By Dean Yates

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A senior operative for al Qaeda in Iraq who was caught this month has told his U.S. military interrogators a prominent al Qaeda-led group is just a front and its leader fictitious, a military spokesman said on Wednesday.

Brigadier-General Kevin Bergner told a news conference that Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq, which was purportedly set up last year, did not exist.

The Islamic State of Iraq was established to try to put an Iraqi face on what is a foreign-driven network, Bergner said. The name Baghdadi means the person hails from the Iraqi capital.

Bergner said the information came from an operative called Khalid al-Mashadani who was caught on July 4 and who he said was an intermediary to Osama bin Laden.

He said Mashadani was believed to be the most senior Iraqi in the Sunni Islamist al Qaeda in Iraq network.

"In his words, the Islamic State of Iraq is a front organization that masks the foreign influence and leadership within al Qaeda in Iraq in an attempt to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of al Qaeda in Iraq," Bergner said.

U.S. military officials in recent weeks have been pressed to explain the link between al Qaeda in Iraq and bin Laden's global network given the military's heightened focus on al Qaeda in Iraq as the biggest threat to the country.

The military blames al Qaeda in Iraq for most of the major bombings in Iraq, saying the group is trying to spark all-out civil war between majority Shi'tes and minority Sunni Arabs.

Bergner said Mashadani served as an intermediary between the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, Egyptian Abu Ayyab al-Masri and bin Laden and also the Egyptian cleric Ayman al-Zawahri, who is the global network's No. 2 commander.

The Islamic State of Iraq was set up in October, comprising a group of Sunni militant affiliates and tribal leaders led by Baghdadi. In April, it named a 10-man "cabinet".

The Islamic State of Iraq has claimed many high-profile acts of violence.

But Bergner said Mashadani and Masri had co-founded a "virtual organization in cyberspace called the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006 as a new Iraqi pseudonym for AQI".

"To further this myth, Masri created a fictional head of the Islamic State of Iraq known as Abu Omar al-Baghdadi," he said.

"To make al-Baghdadi appear credible, al-Masri swore allegiance to al-Baghdadi and pledged to obey him, which is essentially pledging allegiance to himself since he knew Baghdadi was fictitious and a creation of his own," he said.

"The rank and file Iraqis in AQI believe they are following the Iraqi al-Baghdadi. But all the while they have been following the orders of the Egyptian Abu Ayyab al-Masri."

Voice recordings purporting to be from Baghdadi have appeared on the Internet, although Bergner said he had been played by an actor. He did not refer to any video clips.

Bergner said Mashadani was al Qaeda's "media emir" for Iraq.

He said the operative was "providing significant insights into the nature and circumstances of al Qaeda in Iraq".

The U.S. military has always said al Qaeda in Iraq was run by foreigners.

 

This was found at Reuters.

Technorati Tags: International, Politics, Scary, War

Stolen keys delay start of military mission

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's 1,200 troops assigned to NATO forces in Afghanistan will not achieve full combat readiness for up to several weeks due to stolen vehicle keys, the defense ministry said Thursday.

"We had been told a 10 percent theft rate was likely in convoys brought in from Pakistan, but we had not expected the spare car keys to go missing," defense ministry spokesman Jaroslaw Rybak told news channel TVN24.

"We shall have to send away for spares, so it may take from several days to several weeks for our contingent to become combat ready."

According to media reports, Polish troops taking part in NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan have been assigned to patrol the mountainous border area with Pakistan to search for Taliban guerrilla activity.

The military vehicles used by Polish forces include Poland's Land Rover-like Honkers and U.S.-built Humvees.

This was found at Reuters.

Terminator kill-bots to be run by system called 'Skynet'

How many hints do we need? Flee while you can
By Lewis Page
Published Friday 11th May 2007 14:34 GMT

Following the announcement of the new Flying-HK-style "Reaper" death machines for the British forces, the prophetic nature of the Terminator movies has been further confirmed.

Not only will the UK MoD deploy airborne cyber-gunships remarkably similar to those in the films, the flying robot assassins will be controlled by an IT project named "Skynet".

This latest case of life imitating art (well, kind of art) was revealed this morning, with the news that the first of the Skynet 5 satellites has gone operational and is now successfully carrying data to and from British forces fighting in Southwest Asia.

"This important milestone is very good news for the armed forces," said Lord Drayson, the Minister for Defence Procurement. "Skynet 5 will supply about 2.5 times the capacity of the old system and generate a very significant improvement for our global communications systems - allowing us to pass more data faster. It is an excellent example of a successful Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deal."

This PFI was the largest ever signed by the UK MoD, around £3.6bn in total. The Skynet 5 satellites are run by Paradigm Secure Communications and were built by EADS-Astrium. Skynet 5A was launched into space aboard an Ariane 5-ECA rocket from French Guiana in March, sharing the ride with an Indian TV platform. Skynet 5B and 5C will follow later this year and next.

It seems pretty clear that the Reaper flying kill machines will be run using the Skynet satellites, not any other comms channels.

"Take for example the capability of unmanned air vehicles. These generate a lot of imagery and that has to be passed over a secure communications link," according to Bill Sweetman, technology and aerospace editor for defence analysts Jane's.

"The practice is to offload mundane traffic on to commercial satellites and then to use a complementary, secure proprietary system for the traffic that has to be protected."

And it may not just be the Reapers that are controlled by Skynet. There's no word yet of any plans to cloak Asimo robots in living flesh cloned from large Austrian bodybuilders, but it can only be a matter of time.

"Ground control segments for the new system have been upgraded," reported the Beeb today. "Ships, planes and land vehicles are being equipped to make the best use of the upgraded Skynet."

Or for Skynet to make use of them. ®

This was found at The Register.

Iraq conflict passes WWII

THEY were America's days of infamy, 60 years apart - Pearl Harbour and September 11. The first led the US into World War II, a conflict it endured for 1348 days; the second was followed by a war that from tomorrow will have lasted even longer.
America's involvement in Iraq will reach that milestone at a time when the clamour for withdrawal has never been louder, and the possibility of achieving it has never seemed so difficult. The decisive end of World War II in 1945 delivers no lessons that could be applied to a very different war in a very different era.
If anything, things seem to be getting worse, the options less appealing. Baghdad is reeling from the deadliest assault on Iraqi civilians since the start of the US invasion in March 2003. At least 200 people died and more than 250 were injured after six car bombs, mortar attacks and missiles battered the Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City.
Plumes of black smoke and anguished screams rose above a chaotic landscape of flames and charred cars, witnesses said.
Violence later spread to other neighbourhoods in retaliatory attacks across Baghdad, even as politicians and senior religious clerics appealed for calm.
The Iraqi Government locked down the capital with an indefinite curfew and shut the airport to commercial flights.
It is a long way from Mission Accomplished - the banner that decorated a US aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003 as the US President, George Bush, proclaimed the end of "major combat operations". Forty-four months on, Americans still count the cost of the war: more than 2860 US soldiers dead, more than 21,000 injured.
Those figures do not compare with US casualties in World War II, when 406,000 American soldiers died and 671,000 were wounded. But the Iraq campaign has become a symbol of the pitfalls of a new style of conflict - a war against an ill-defined enemy with no end in sight.
American politicians have not failed to note the symbolism of the milestone.
The top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, pointed to it as he pushed for a phased withdrawal within four to six months.
"We are 3 years into a conflict which has already lasted longer than the Korean conflict and almost as long as World War II. We should put the responsibility for Iraq's future squarely where it belongs: on the Iraqis."
In Canberra, the Prime Minister, John Howard, acknowledged Iraq was "going through a bad phase" and that nobody was "other than horrified at the continued loss of life". Mr Howard said any change in the role of Australia's troops would depend on "what's involved in any possible British reduction" of its commitment.
"We haven't agreed to anything else and if there are any proposals that we do something differently, well they will have to be assessed on their merits and according to our judgement as to whether it's appropriate."