U.S. confirms Israeli airstrikes inside Syria

my2hands

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/world/middleeast/12syria.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

US Confirms Israeli Strikes Hit Syrian Target Last Week
By Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper
The New York Times

Wednesday 12 September 2007

Washington - After days of silence from the Israeli government, American officials confirmed Tuesday that Israeli warplanes launched airstrikes inside Syria last week, the first such attack since 2003.

A Defense Department official said Israeli jets had struck at least one target in northeastern Syria last Thursday, but the official said it was still unclear exactly what the jets hit and the extent of the bombing damage.

Syria has lodged a protest at the United Nations in response to the airstrike, accusing Israel of "flagrant violation" of its airspace. But Israel's government has repeatedly declined to comment on the matter.

Officials in Washington said that the most likely targets of the raid were weapons caches that Israel's government believes Iran has been sending the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah through Syria. Iran and Syria are Hezbollah's primary benefactors, and American intelligence officials say a steady flow of munitions from Iran runs through Syria and into Lebanon.

In the summer of 2006, during fighting between Israeli and Hezbollah forces, the militant group fired hundreds of missiles into Israel, surprising Israel with the extent and sophistication of its arsenal. Israel has tried repeatedly to get the United Nations to prevent the arms shipments across the Syria-Lebanon border.

One Bush administration official said Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria, taking pictures of possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials believed might have been supplied with material from North Korea. The administration official said Israeli officials believed that North Korea might be unloading some of its nuclear material on Syria.

"The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left," the official said. He said it was unclear whether the Israeli strike had produced any evidence that might validate that belief.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a military action by another government.

In a letter circulated to members of the Security Council on Tuesday, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, said Israel dropped munitions though they did not cause any "material damage."

Syria made its protest via Qatar, the Arab representative on the Security Council, United Nations officials said. Security Council representatives discussed the issue on Tuesday, but did not come to any conclusions.

Neither Israel nor the United States has spoken publicly on the airstrikes. The State Department spokesman, Sean D. McCormack, referred all questions to Israel and Syria, and a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Tensions between Israel and Syria have escalated over the past year, since the end of the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, and both countries remain in a heightened state of alert along their common border.

Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, has said that if Israel is not willing to resume negotiations for the return of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the alternative would be to try to regain the territory by force.

Formal peace talks between Israel and Syria broke down in 2000.

my2hands

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2953462.ece

The "Proxy War": UK Troops Are Sent to Iranian Border
By Kim Sengupta
The Independent UK

Wednesday 12 September 2007

British soldiers return to action as tensions between US and Iran grow.
British forces have been sent from Basra to the volatile border with Iran amid warnings from the senior US commander in Iraq that Tehran is fomenting a "proxy war."

In signs of a fast-developing confrontation, the Iranians have threatened military action in response to attacks launched from Iraqi territory while the Pentagon has announced the building of a US base and fortified checkpoints at the frontier.

The UK operation, in which up to 350 troops are involved, has come at the request of the Americans, who say that elements close to the Iranian regime have stepped up supplies of weapons to Shia militias in recent weeks in preparation for attacks inside Iraq.

The deployment came within a week of British forces leaving Basra Palace, their last remaining base inside Basra city, and withdrawing to the airport for a widely expected final departure from Iraq. Brigadier James Bashall, commander of 1 Mechanised Brigade, based at Basra said: "We have been asked to help at the Iranian border to stop the flow of weapons and I am willing to do so. We know the points of entry and I am sure we can do what needs to be done. The US forces are, as we know, engaged in the 'surge' and the border is of particular concern to them."

The mission will include the King's Royal Hussars battle group, 250 of whom were told at the weekend that they would be returning to the UK as part of a drawdown of forces in Iraq.

The operation is regarded as a high-risk strategy which could lead to clashes with Iranian-backed Shia militias or even Iranian forces and also leaves open the possibility of Iranian retaliation in the form of attacks against British forces at the Basra air base or inciting violence to draw them back into Basra city. Relations between the two countries are already fraught after the Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized a British naval party in the Gulf earlier this year.

The move came as General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, made some of the strongest accusations yet by US officials about Iranian activity. General Petraeus spoke on Monday of a "proxy war" in Iraq, while Mr Crocker accused the Iranian government of "providing lethal capabilities to the enemies of the Iraqi state."

In an interview after his appearance before a congressional panel on Monday, General Petraeus strongly implied that it would soon be necessary to obtain authorisation to take action against Iran within its own borders, rather than just inside Iraq. "There is a pretty hard look ongoing at that particular situation" he said.

The Royal Welsh battle group, with Challenger tanks and Warrior armoured vehicles, is conducting out regular exercises at the Basra air base in preparation for any re-entry into the city. No formal handover of Basra to the Iraqi government has yet taken place and the UK remains responsible for maintaining security in the region.

The Iraqi commander in charge of the southern part of the country, General Mohan al-Furayji, said he would not hesitate to call for British help if there was an emergency.

While previous US military action has been primarily directed against Sunni insurgents, it is Shia fighters, which the US accuses Iran of backing, who now account for 80 per cent of US casualties.

For the British military the move to the border is a change of policy. They had stopped patrols along the long border at Maysan despite US concerns at the time that the area would become a conduit for weapons into Iraq.

The decision to return to the frontier has been heavily influenced by the highly charged and very public dispute with the United States. British commanders feel that they cannot turn down the fresh American request for help after refusing to delay the withdrawal from Basra Palace. They also maintain that the operation will stop Iranian arms entering Basra.

Brigadier Bashall said: "We are not sitting here idly at the air bridge. The security of Basra is still our responsibility and we shall act where necessary. We are also prepared to restore order in Basra City if asked to do so."

The US decision to build fortifications at the Iranian border, after four years of presence in Iraq, shows, say American commanders, that the "Iranian threat" is now one of their main concerns.

Maj-Gen Rick Lynch, commander of the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said 48 Iranian-supplied roadside bombs had been used against his forces killing nine soldiers. "We've got a major problem with Iranian munitions streaming into Iraq. This Iranian interference is troubling and we have to stop it," he told The Wall Street Journal this week.

Meanwhile at a conference in Baghdad on regional co-operation, Iran claimed the US was supporting groups mounting attacks from Iraqi territory in the Kurdish north.

Said Jalili, Iran's deputy foreign minister, last night said: "I think [the US and its allies] are going to prevaricate with the truth because they know they have been defeated in Iraq and they have not been successful. And so they are going to put the blame on us, on the other side."

my2hands

Bush Administration Ramps Up Secrecy
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 10 September 2007

The Bush administration is continuing its campaign to keep the public in the dark about the federal government's policies and decisions and to suppress discussion of those policies, their underpinnings, and their implications.

This is the conclusion reached in the latest annual "report card" on government secrecy compiled by OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of consumer and good government groups, librarians, environmentalists, labor leaders, journalists, and others who seek to promote greater transparency in public institutions.

Summarizing developments during the past year, the report card says, "Government secrecy, particularly in the executive branch, continues to expand across a broad array of agencies and actions, including military procurement, new private inventions, and the scientific and technical advice that the government receives."

But, the authors of the report also see "glimmers of progress toward more openness and examples of continued determination on the part of the public and its representatives." They conclude, "Even as more and more categories that exclude information from access are created by agencies, the public use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain information from our government continues to rise."

The report card's principal findings for fiscal year 2007 include:

More than 25 percent of all federal dollars ($107.5 billion) awarded to Defense Department contractors were without competition. Only a third of contract dollars were subject to full and open competition. On average since 2000, more than a quarter of all contract funding was not competed.

Some 18 percent of the Department of Defense's FY 2007 acquisition budget is classified. These so-called "black programs" amounted to $31.5 billion. Classified acquisition funding has more than doubled in real terms since fiscal year 1995, the report said.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved 2,176 orders by the Justice Department - rejecting only one - in 2006. The Court, established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) following the Watergate scandals to restrict government snooping on citizens, has been at the center of a political firestorm since President Bush revealed the administration had been conducting electronic surveillance without seeking FISA warrants.

The administration continued to invoke the so-called "state secrets" privilege, which allows the president to withhold documents from the courts, Congress and the public. At the height of the Cold War, the administration used the privilege only six times between 1953 and 1976. Since 2001, it has been used a reported 39 times - an average of six times a year in 6.5 years, or more than double the average (2.46) over the previous 24 years.

Requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) totaled 21,412,736, an increase of 1,462,189 over the previous year. The report card says backlogs of unfilled request remain significant: The oldest FOIA request in the federal government has now been pending for more than 20 years.

The government recovered more than $3.1 billion in settlements and judgments as a result of complaints from whistleblowers. Over the last two decades, whistleblowers helped the federal government recover more than $18 billion according to the latest figures from the US Department of Justice.

While the number of original classified documents decreased from 258,633 in 2005 to 231,995 in 2007, classification activity still remains significantly higher than before 2001. For every dollar the government spent declassifying documents in 2006, it spent $185 maintaining the secrets already on the books, a $51 increase from last year. Although more pages were declassified this year, the total publicly reported amount spent on declassification decreased. However, the report card notes, the intelligence agencies, which account for a large segment of the declassification numbers, are excluded from the total reported figures.

Government departments and agencies continued their practice of designating documents as "Sensitive But Unclassified" (SBU). Only some 19 percent of 107 SBU designations were based on formally promulgated regulations, about half with comment and half without. The rest - 82 percent - were made up by the agencies as they went along, the report card charges.

In six years, President Bush has issued at least 151 signing statements, challenging 1149 provisions of laws. "In the 211 years of our Republic to 2000, fewer than 600 signing statements that took issue with the bills were issued," the report card asserts. In six years, it says, President Bush has issued at least 151 signing statements, challenging 1,149 provisions of laws, adding, "In the 211 years of our Republic to 2000, fewer than 600 signing statements that took issue with the bills were issued. Among recent presidents, Reagan issued 71 statements challenging provisions of laws before him; G.W.H. Bush issued 146; Clinton, 105." The most notorious of the current president's signing statements related to the so-called McCain Amendment to a 2005 defense authorization bill that barred the "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" of detainees. The presidential statement raised serious questions about whether Bush intended to obey this new law.

The report card cites a report by the Justice Department's inspector general indicating the government made 143,074 National Security Letter (NSL) requests between 2003 and 2005. The number for 2006 remains classified. NSLs can be used to obtain information about individuals without the government applying for a court-reviewed warrant. With 2,176 secret surveillance orders approved in 2006, federal surveillance activity under the jurisdiction of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has more than doubled in five years.

The federal penchant for secrecy is also spilling over to state governments, the report card claims. Since 2001, it says, "States have continued to introduce and enact new laws that limit, rather than loosen, access to government information at the state and local level. In that period, some 339 bills were introduced in the states and 266 passed the respective legislatures. The largest number of bills introduced (114) had to do with expanded executive powers, confidentiality based on federal regulations or programs, and closure of otherwise public meetings for security meetings. Fewer than half (52) passed; the lowest percentage of passage among 6 categories of bills."
OpenTheGovernment.org concludes, "The current administration has exercised an unprecedented level not only of restriction of access to information about federal government's policies and decisions, but also of suppression of discussion of those policies, their underpinnings, and their implications. It has also increasingly refused to be held accountable to the public through the oversight responsibilities of Congress. These practices inhibit democracy and our representative government; neither the public nor Congress can make informed decisions in these circumstances. Our open society is undermined and made insecure."

The Open the Government coalition includes representatives of the Federation of American Scientists, the Sunlight Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries, OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the National Freedom of Information Coalition, the US Public Interest Research Group, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Fund for Constitutional Government, the Center for American Progress, the AFL-CIO and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In a related development, the White House has declared the Office of Administration (OA) exempt from the FOIA to avoid complying with a request to make public its information about five million missing emails.

Citizens for Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a FOIA request with the White House's OA for records that would document the White House's knowledge of the missing emails, its failure to restore the email or put in place an electronic record-keeping system that would prevent this problem, and the possibility the emails were purposefully deleted.

In response, the Justice Department declared the OA is not subject to FOIA. CREW is suing the White House's OA for failing to respond to their request.

At least five million emails "disappeared" between March 2003 and October 2005, according to a report by CREW. The missing emails were discovered by the White House in 2005, according to a briefing given to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff by Keith Roberts, the deputy general counsel of the White House Office.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, is demanding the OA turn over its analysis of the email system, conducted by the Office of the Chief Information Officer. According to the letter Rep. Waxman sent to White House counsel Fred Fielding on August 30, Roberts informed the Oversight Committee that an unidentified company working for the Information Assurance Directorate of the Office of the Chief Information Officer was responsible for daily audits of the email system and the email archiving process.

According to Rep. Waxman's letter, Roberts was not able to explain why the daily audits conducted by this contractor did not detect the problems in the archive system when they first began. The revelation that there were daily audits suggests emails were destroyed, Anne Weismann, general counsel of CREW, told Bloomberg News.

The White House recently changed its FOIA web site to exclude the OA from White House entities subject to FOIA. A note in the FOIA sections of the OA web site now says, "The Office of Administration, whose sole function is to advise and assist the President, and which has no substantial independent authority, is not subject to FOIA and related authorities." Under OA's FOIA Regulations, it says, "The OA's Regulations concerning FOIA are currently being updated." OA's annual FOIA reports are available on the White House web site for 1996-2006. In 2006, OA processed 65 requests and spent $87,772 on FOIA processing (including appeals).

The National Security Archive, a member of the OpenTheGovernment.org coalition, filed a lawsuit against the White House last week seeking the recovery and preservation of the emails.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091007A.shtml

my2hands

Troop Blogs Show Increasing Criticism of War
By Robert Weller
The Associated Press

Sunday 09 September 2007

Denver - With the world being bombarded by all factions on their side on the war in Iraq, U.S. soldiers Internet blogs provided the kind of public relations Madison Avenue would drool over.

Soldiers told of helping Iraqi families, the loss of friends and their dangerous daily missions.

In the past year, as soldiers and Marines return for the second, third or even fourth deployments, and the death toll approaches 4,000, some soldiers began questioning the war.

At the very least they risk administrative punishments, called Article 15s, though if it has happened it has been kept quiet.

"The toothpaste is out of the tube. And, try as they might, the military's information nannies are not going to be able to stuff it back in," said Noah Schatman of Wired Magazine in an e-mail from Taji, Iraq. He said soldiers will pay $55 a month for a private connection.

The military is so petrified it will lose information control screensavers were installed on military computers warning blogs could jeopardize security, said Schatman, who runs Wired's Danger Room blog and has tracked the unofficial use of the Internet by soldiers.

The campaign has led some soldiers to steer clear of the Internet. Others do it anyway as confusion reigns because of conflicting signals sent from Washington, he said.

"President Eisenhower warned of the growing military industrial complex in his farewell address. Since Dick Cheney can now afford solid gold oil derricks, it's safe to say we failed Ike miserably. After losing two friends and over a dozen comrades, I have this to say: Do not wage war unless it is absolutely, positively the last ditch effort for survival," wrote Spc. Alex Horton, 22, of the 3rd Stryker Brigade in Army of Dude. "In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn't deem that idea unpatriotic," he blogged.

Sgt. Thomas Strickland, 27, of Douglasville, Ga., calling himself the Rev Wayfarer, was one of the earliest to speak out publicly. Two days before he drowned in a vehicle accident at Mahmudijah on his second tour he condemned the leadership in "One Foot in the Grave." He asked what the chain of command had been doing since his first tour. "We were winning somewhat when I left. And now we are being pinned down in our own (expletive deleted) homes. Insurgents are pushing locals out of their homes and taking over my area at will."

Spc. Eleonai Israel of Bowling Green, Ky., court-martialed and given a less than honorable discharge last month after refusing to go on combat missions, said that like Horton he never heard a peep about what he said on his MySpace site during his year in Iraq.

"The truth will come out, and there is nothing they can do to hide it. The occupation is a disaster. I'm convinced that everyday it continues that it makes America, and the Iraqis less safe," he said on his MySpace Blog. He now works for the presidential campaign of Democrat Mike Gravel of Alaska.

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said a soldier would have to go pretty far before facing any retribution, and officers would be more vulnerable. "The government never wants to make someone a martyr," he said.

"It's the first digital war. It's exciting to watch this because it is going to raise rich issues," said Fidell, who also teaches at Yale, American University and practices law. Loren Thompson, CEO of the Lexington Insatiate, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, agreed.

"It's the subversive nature of the Internet. Technology has caught up with the soldiers, who have always known what was really going on but didn't have the tools to tell their story," said Thompson.

The Army has said winning the information war is necessary to win the ground war. Insurgents agree. Tributes to Saddam Hussein are uploaded to YouTube, along with alleged film showing attacks on convoys. Some caught in the middle post their travails. The Army also uploads videos. In many cases it is impossible to verify or even identify who the source is, and it must be taken with a grain of digital salt.

In April, the Army announced new rules on blogging that required soldiers to clear them with a superior. Access to MySpace and some other popular Web sites was blocked. The Army said it was not trying to stop soldiers from speaking their mind, however. And so far, some of them have been.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/09/ap_soldierblogs_070909/

DriftingByTheStorm

wow.
i'm dizzy from all that!

things are looking "real good"!

:(