Ramanisblog

Tag: Homeland security

  • Secret US Intelligence Community Not Accountable,Details

    There is furor over NSA’s eavesdropping and the latest fact that France is livid with the US for listening in to about million Calls.

    We know CIA,FBI, Home Land Security, NIA and may be another five or ten visible Intelligence Communities of The US.

    Dana Priest.
    Dana Priest who exposed the Secret Intelligence Community in US.

    But not this one.

    You would find, towards the end of the post , a Video on  Secret White House Bank Account.

    And this information is through Washington Times Advertisers and I am sure the Newspaper has published verified information.

    While checking on this, I stumbled into the Intelligence Community.

    “Dear Washington Times Reader,

    You have to see this…

    A colleague of mine has stumbled onto some rather intriguing research.

    In short, it’s an account almost no one in the country has ever heard about. By one expert’s estimate, only 0.07% of Americans (one in 1,500) has one of these private accounts.

    But the rich have long favored this idea…

    President Roosevelt, for example, had an account.

    So did Walt Disney, Ray Kroc, JFK, and even current Vice President Joe Biden.

    John McCain at one time even held over $1,000,000 inside his own account!

    What’s so special about this account? Well, for one, it can let you retire 100% tax-free. You can pass it along to your heirs without paying a dime to the IRS. It also grows your money 3-4 times faster than standard CDs… and, to top it off, you can access your money ANYTIME!

    But here’s perhaps the best part: This account is available to nearly anyone… regardless of how much money you have or even if you don’t have any political connections!

    My colleague literally invested over $100,000 of his own money into this idea once he was convinced of how good it was.”

    About three years ago. Washington Post‘s Reporter,Pulitzer Prize Winner, Dana Priest, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and William Arkin wrote that they found “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” After nine years of “unprecedented spending,” the intelligence community has become a sector of government so massive that oversight is next to impossible and that it is of questionable benefit to the United States’ security.

    That there is even a behemoth of an Intelligence Group is tucked away behind the Public eye.

    This Intelligence community is managed by ,

    ,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the country.

    — An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

    — In the Washington area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work have been built or are under construction since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.”

    Worse is that it is not accountable to any one nobody knows how much Budget is allocated to it!

    Interview with Dana Priest excerpts.

    ‘A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post Priest is the author, along with William Arkin, of Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. Here she takes FRONTLINE through the rapid growth of Top Secret America, which began with an impulse to secrecy and a blank check from Congress in the days after 9/11, and which now employs nearly a million people at 1,900 private companies and 1,300 federal organizations. “These are gigantic edifices that are going to stay,” she says. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on June 18, 2011.

     

    I just think that we have accepted what it is the government says we need to do without questioning how much money it costs, without questioning whether it’s effective or not. And in part we’ve done that because we’ve accepted the secrecy that surrounds it all.

    ..

    The reaction in Congress, which becomes so important in our story, is they really wrote a blank check. … The money flowed out. And there weren’t very many constraints on it at all. There definitely wasn’t any sort of oversight of what was going on with the money, because, again, people were worried. …

    And so George Bush, for example, gave the CIA a billion dollars right off the bat, because the CIA was in the best position, not the military, to go after bin Laden and his followers in Afghanistan. And he gave them a billion dollars, and he also ordered the military to do whatever it took to support the CIA. …

    They did the same thing with the NSA. Lots of money poured into the National Security Agency, which was the eavesdropper around the world. And they couldn’t grow fast enough. Not only were they asked to eavesdrop in many different places that they weren’t used to doing — not just capitals and not just leaders of countries, which is really what they were doing, mostly, prior to 9/11. They would want to know what a leader was saying or what an opposition group was saying. And they would report those conversations back.

    Source:

    http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/19/top-secret-america-washington-post-unmasks-unwieldy-security/

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/topsecretamerica/dana-priest-top-secret-america-is-here-to-stay/

    The White House’s Secret Account video Link.

    http://pros.palmbeachletter.com/1309PBLIFL495LEGPN/LPBLPA64/?h=true

    The President’s Secret Book.

     

     

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  • Spy Agencies Failed to Collate Clues on Terror

    Politicians shall always indulge in blame game.if this had happened during Bush’s admin,reactions would be the same; the parties names would have changed.

    Cause of failure is missing communication, miscommunication,inability to sift through myriad of intelligence, most of them hoaxes and most importantly the ego clash of heads of different inteeligence heads and duplication of intelligence functions. Comparatively human intelligence are more prone to failure because of egos,which we can not avoid as against elint.
    Story:
    WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but American spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.

    The electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks, government officials said on Wednesday, but analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November when the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now accused of the attempted bombing, visited the United States Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization.

    The father, a wealthy Nigerian businessman named Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cellphone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical.

    A family cousin quoted the father as warning officials from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in Nigeria: “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.”

    The cousin said: “They promised to look into it. They didn’t take him seriously.”

    The new details help fill in the portrait of an intelligence breakdown in the months before Mr. Abdulmutallab boarded a plane in Amsterdam with the intent of blowing it up before landing in Detroit.

    In some ways, the portrait bears a striking resemblance to the failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, despite the billions of dollars spent over the last eight years to improve the intelligence flow and secret communications across the United States’ national security apparatus.

    One day after President Obama delivered a blistering indictment of “human and systemic failures” leading up to the foiled attack, the battle to assign blame for these failures escalated on Wednesday.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31terror.html

  • www.jihad.com

    Why can’t the sites that promote jihad be blocked?If China can block any site at any time, why not others?
    What do the ‘soft muslims’ have to say on this?
    Story:
    Let’s not fool ourselves. Whatever threat the real Afghanistan poses to U.S. national security, the “Virtual Afghanistan” now poses just as big a threat. The Virtual Afghanistan is the network of hundreds of jihadist Web sites that inspire, train, educate and recruit young Muslims to engage in jihad against America and the West. Whatever surge we do in the real Afghanistan has no chance of being a self-sustaining success, unless there is a parallel surge — by Arab and Muslim political and religious leaders — against those who promote violent jihadism on the ground in Muslim lands and online in the Virtual Afghanistan.

    Last week, five men from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan, where they went, they told Pakistani police, to join the jihad against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They first made contact with two extremist organizations in Pakistan by e-mail in August. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday: “ ‘Online recruiting has exponentially increased, with Facebook, YouTube and the increasing sophistication of people online,’ a high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official said. … ‘Increasingly, recruiters are taking less prominent roles in mosques and community centers because places like that are under scrutiny. So what these guys are doing is turning to the Internet,’ said Evan Kohlmann, a senior analyst with the U.S.-based NEFA Foundation, a private group that monitors extremist Web sites.”

    The Obama team is fond of citing how many “allies” we have in the Afghan coalition. Sorry, but we don’t need more NATO allies to kill more Taliban and Al Qaeda. We need more Arab and Muslim allies to kill their extremist ideas, which, thanks to the Virtual Afghanistan, are now being spread farther than ever before.

    Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.

    Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.

    What is really scary is that this violent, jihadist minority seems to enjoy the most “legitimacy” in the Muslim world today. Few political and religious leaders dare to speak out against them in public. Secular Arab leaders wink at these groups, telling them: “We’ll arrest if you do it to us, but if you leave us alone and do it elsewhere, no problem.”

    How many fatwas — religious edicts — have been issued by the leading bodies of Islam against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Very few. Where was the outrage last week when, on the very day that Iraq’s Parliament agreed on a formula to hold free and fair multiparty elections — unprecedented in Iraq’s modern history — five explosions set off by suicide bombers hit ministries, a university and Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts, killing at least 127 people and wounding more than 400, many of them kids?

    Not only was there no meaningful condemnation emerging from the Muslim world — which was primarily focused on resisting Switzerland’s ban on new mosque minarets — there was barely a peep coming out of Washington. President Obama expressed no public outrage. It is time he did.

    “What Muslims were talking about last week were the minarets of Switzerland, not the killings of people in Iraq or Pakistan,” noted Mamoun Fandy, a Middle East expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. “People look for red herrings when they don’t want to look inward, when they don’t want to summon the moral courage to produce the counter-fatwa that would say: stabilizing Iraq is an Islamic duty and bringing peace to Afghanistan is part of the survival of the Islamic umma,” or community.

    So please tell me, how are we supposed to help build something decent and self-sustaining in Afghanistan and Pakistan when jihadists murder other Muslims by the dozens and no one really calls them out?

    A corrosive mind-set has taken hold since 9/11. It says that Arabs and Muslims are only objects, never responsible for anything in their world, and we are the only subjects, responsible for everything that happens in their world. We infantilize them.

    Arab and Muslims are not just objects. They are subjects. They aspire to, are able to and must be challenged to take responsibility for their world. If we want a peaceful, tolerant region more than they do, they will hold our coats while we fight, and they will hold their tongues against their worst extremists. They will lose, and we will lose — here and there, in the real Afghanistan and in the Virtual Afghanistan.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/opinion/16friedman.html?hp

  • Fort Hood suspect contacted Islamist: sources-Reuters:CIA,NSA,HS,FBI?!

    1.What is the point in having world’s best listening post,NSA, when Elint is not used properly?
    2.Typical governmental apathy in not letting the right hand know what the left does, and starting the blame game!
    3.Once the information about the suspect has been received action should have been taken ,not withstanding his records and early back ground check.
    4.Yet another instance of faith transcending National loyalty!What the apologists for Muslims are going to say who have been saying fingerprinting or profiling Muslims by Homeland Security/FBI is racist, on this issue?
    Story:
    By Jeremy Pelofsky and Adam Entous

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. intelligence agencies learned an Army psychiatrist contacted an Islamist sympathetic to al Qaeda and they relayed the information to authorities before the man allegedly went on a shooting spree that killed 13 people in Texas last week, U.S. officials said on Monday.

    While the agencies were monitoring contacts by Anwar al-Awlaki, a fiery, anti-American cleric in Yemen who sympathized with al Qaeda, they came across some communications late last year with the shooting suspect, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, U.S. government officials said.

    They said the information was given to federal authorities who determined that Hasan’s writings were largely consistent with his academic work, offering no hint that he was planning an attack or was following orders from anyone
    http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE5A85DK20091110?feedType=nl&feedName=usmorningdigest

  • FBI Profiling of Muslims on the Rise- Can’t help it.

    It is a fact that members of a particular race/community have been involving in Terrorist activities.
    It is inescapable that authorities tend to profile;otherwise how do they go about their job?.
    No doubt, particular community may be peeved at the authorities,but it is better their ire is directed at the members of the community who preach and practice violence.
    At the same time the authorities must ensure that there is no arbitrary victimisation and harassment of the innocents.
    Story:
    SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Muslim Americans are being increasingly targeted for unwarranted house searches and questioning, said Veena Dubal, staff attorney of the Asian Law Caucus, during a brown-bag seminar at the organization’s headquarters here Aug. 5.

    Last October — in the waning days of the Bush administration — FBI director Robert Mueller signed new guidelines allowing broader FBI authority in pursuing potential threats to national security. The new guidelines allow agents to consider race or ethnicity in determining whether someone is a suspect.

    These guidelines – which became effective Dec. 1, 2008 — allow the FBI to launch a criminal investigation against someone without any factual predicate and without approval from FBI headquarters, said Dubal. “Under the current guidelines, FBI agents are allowed to racially profile an individual if it is determined to be in the nation’s national interests,” she said, adding that the guidelines may also be used ambiguously to “prevent conduct.”

    “A really negative shift has occurred,” said Dubal, who received the Northern California South Asian Bar Association’s Public Interest Attorney of the Year award in 2009
    http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=11a699af1441226d96c0b7d4f9d59330