Saudi coup against King Abdullah fails

The anonymous source told Aafaq that military officers and members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) managed to prevent the coup.

The source said National Guard officer Major Ahmed Maiad Zahrani, backed by a Saudi prince, had recruited 150 of his fellow officers to carry out the takeover.

The officers were taken in for questioning and later charged with conspiracy, it added.

The motive behind the planned coup was, apparently, to overthrow the Saudi National Arabian Guard leader, who is loyal to King Abdullah and prevent the selection of another member of the family as crown prince.

Saudi Arabia’s current crown prince, the 80-year-old Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz, is seriously sick.

King Abdullah has appointed his eldest son Mutaib as deputy commander of the National Guard.

In Saudi Arabia, the Bay’ah Council chooses the crown prince from three candidates named by the king. The council was formed after divisions emerged among the descendents of the former King Abdulaziz

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=68316&sectionid=351020205

Bolivia asks U.S. ambassador to leave as protests mount

By Eduardo Garcia

LA PAZ (Reuters) – Leftist President Evo Morales on Wednesday asked the U.S. ambassador to leave Bolivia, blaming him for intensified opposition protests that shut down a key natural gas pipeline to Brazil.

“The ambassador of the United States is conspiring against democracy and wants Bolivia to break apart,” Morales said during a speech at the presidential palace in La Paz.

Morales, an ally of anti-Washington leftist leader Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, said he had asked his foreign affairs minister to send a letter to the U.S. Embassy asking Ambassador Philip Goldberg to “urgently return to his country.”

The U.S. Embassy said it had no comment and had not been formally informed of Morales’ decision.

Anti-Morales protesters continued an occupation of government buildings in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, an opposition stronghold, for a second day on Wednesday and also attacked energy facilities, forcing the country to reduce natural gas exports.

Bolivia’s state energy company YPFB said it had to reduce overall natural gas exports to neighbouring Brazil by about 10 percent after anti-government protesters attacked a pipeline in what the government described as a “terrorist act,” forcing the closure of the pipeline.

“(Natural gas) exports to Brazil have been reduced by 3 million cubic meters,” the head of YPFB Santos Ramirez told reporters in La Paz.

Brazil’s energy ministry, however, said shipments of Bolivian natural gas were steady at 31 million cubic meters a day.

The protests stem from a power struggle between Morales and the governors of five of the country’s nine provinces, who are demanding more autonomy and a larger share of the country’s booming energy revenues.

Protesters also stormed the Vuelta Grande natural gas field in central Chuquisaca province forcing gas producer Chaco, a unit of Bolivian state energy company YPFB, to halt production on Tuesday night.

“Some 100 people occupied the field and we had to stop operations for security reasons,” said Juan Callau, head of Chaco’s institutional relations. The plant will not be able to restart production until the protesters withdraw, he said.

Vuelta Grande produces about 2.5 million cubic meters of natural gas a day to domestic and export markets, but the company could not immediately say how exports have been affected.

Morales, who nationalized the energy industry two years ago, had sent troops to protect energy facilities after opposition protesters threatened to attack natural gas fields and pipelines.

(Reporting by Eduardo Garcia and Carlos Quiroga in La Paz and Denise Luna in Rio de Janeiro; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

http://www.swissinfo.org/

The Return of U. S. Death Squads

 From Afghanistan to Africa

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According to a 2007 study by the industrial College of the Armed Forces, “Africa may do for the mercenary industry in the next 20 years what Iraq has done in the past four years, provide a significant growth engine.”

The U.S. has established a military command for the region—Africom—but no nation has agreed to host it yet. While suspicions about U.S. goals in Africa run high, those doubts apparently don’t extend to U.S.-based mercenary organizations. While countries are holding Africom at arm’s length, those same countries are embracing Blackwater, DynCorp. Triple Canopy, and MPRI.

United Nations officials charge that secret “international intelligence services” are conducting raids to kill Afghan civilians, then hiding the perpetuators behind an “impenetrable” wall of bureaucracy.

Philip Alston of the UN Human Rights Council said that “heavily armed internationals” leading local militias have killed scores of Afghan civilians. Coalition forces have killed more than 200 Afghan civilians since January.

He called the raids, which operate independent of the US and NATO military commands, “unacceptable.” Alston pointed to a specific incident last January in which two brothers were killed during a raid in the southern city of Kandahar, an area where the Taliban have a strong presence.

“The two victims are widely acknowledged, even by well informed government officials, to have no connection to the Taliban, and the circumstance of their deaths is suspicious,” he said.

When Alston tried to investigate the murders, however, he hit a stonewall. “Not only was I unable to get any international military commander to provide their version of what took place, but I was unable to get any military commander to even admit that their soldiers were involved,” the UN official told the Financial Times.

Suspicion has fallen on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which led such teams into Afghanistan during the 1990s in an attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Ladin, and again during the 2001 invasion.

According to Alston, the shadow units work out of two bases: U.S. Camp Ghecko near Kandahar, and a base in the province of Nangarhar. “It is absolutely unacceptable for heavily armed internationals, accompanied by heavily armed Afghan forces, to be wondering around conducting dangerous raids that too often result in killings without anyone taking responsibility for them,” he wrote in a recent UN report.

Something very similar may be going on in Iraq. In his latest book, “The War Within,” Bob Woodward writes that the U.S. military has a program to “locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups.” Last month U.S. Special Forces killed the son and nephew of the governor of Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. Unlike the shootings at roadblocks by U.S. troops, a common occurrence, Iraqi investigators say the two men were essentially executed.

A U.S. spokesman said the raid was conducted to capture a “suspected Al Qaeda in Iraq operative,” and that the man was injured when he “charged” the American troops. The other “suspected terrorist” was wounded and arrested. “Both men were armed and presented hostile intent,” the spokesman said.

But according to a spokesman for Governor Hamed al-Qaisi, U.S. troops broke into the house at 3 AM and shot the governor’s 17-year old son to death while he slept. The nephew, hearing the commotion, tried to enter the room and was gunned down as well.

The killings are similar to one near Karbala in June, where a cousin of current Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was killed. In both cases, Iraqi authorities were kept in the dark about the impending raids.

The question is: are Special Forces in Iraq and CIA units in Afghanistan carrying out clandestine hits? In most places in the world, those groups are called “death squads.”

• * *

Mercenaries are on a roll. Last month’s Associated Press story that the infamous mercenary firm Blackwater Worldwide was getting out of the private army business was a mistake. A company spokesman said the reporter had misunderstood him. Indeed, as the Iraq war winds down, firms like Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp are finding new markets to exploit, many of them in Africa.

As conservative military analyst David Isenberg points out in his column, “Dogs of War,” mercenaries are, in a sense, returning to their modern roots. “The progenitor for many of today’s private security firms was the South-Africa-based Executive Outcomes, which fought in Angola and Sierra Leone,” says Isenberg.

Executive Outcomes and the South African Army were routed by Angolan and Cuban troops during Angola’s long and bloody civil war, a conflict that was fueled in large part by apartheid Pretoria and the US, along with help from Zaire and the People’s Republic of China.

But the defeat was hardly a major setback for the mercenary industry. It’s hard to keep jackals down.

Cold War conflicts created a growth market, and, coupled with the Reagan Administration’s passion for privatization, mercenary organizations like the U.S. Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) and DynCorp became players in Latin America and the Balkans conflict.

While Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s administrations generally get the credit for this privatization drive, as Tim Shorrock points out in his book, “Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” it was Bill Clinton who really brought private enterprise into the business of gathering intelligence and fighting wars.

According to Shorrock, Clinton “picked up the cudgel where the conservative Reagan left off,” and by the end of his last term, had cut 360,000 federal jobs, while spending on private contractors had jumped 44 percent over 1993.

The right-wing Heritage Foundation, a major force in the current Bush Administration, called Clinton’s 1996 budget the “boldest privatization agenda put forth by any president to date.”

One obvious advantage to hiring Blackwater, DynCorp, MPRI, and Triple Canopy was that it short circuits Congressional oversight, bypasses pesky obstacles like the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and hides the cost of the wars.

Now the mercenaries are returning to their old haunts in Africa to train “peacekeepers.” The problem is that today’s “peacekeeper” may become tomorrow’s thug. An examination of training programs by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute found that “Every armed group that plundered Liberia over the past 25 years had at its core” U.S. trained soldiers.

Addressing the current training of Liberian soldiers by DynCorp, the study warns there is a definite downside “to creating an armed elite.” If the U.S. withdraws its training funds, “Liberia will be sitting on a time bomb; a well-trained and armed force of elite soldiers who are used to good pay and conditions of service, which may be impossible for the government of Liberia to sustain on its own.”

MPRI is training militaries in Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda and Senegal. DynCorp is doing the same in Darfur and Somalia. While the cover story is fighting terrorism and ensuring stability, U.S. military intervention—direct and through mercenaries and its client state, Ethiopia—has thoroughly destabilized Somalia, creating a crisis that rivals Darfur.

While the malnutrition rate in Darfur is 13 percent, in some areas of Somalia it is 19 percent. The UN considers 15 percent to be the “emergency threshold.

“The situation in Somalia is the worst on the continent,” says the UN’s top official in Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah.

According to Eric Laroche, the head of the UN’s humanitarian services in Somalia, conditions were much better under the Islamic Courts Union that the U.S-sponsored invasion overthrew. “It was much more peaceful and much easier for us to work. The Islamist s didn’t cause us any problems,” he said.

In spite of Blackwater’s reputation as trigger-happy cowboys who gunned down 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians last year, the company may soon see action in the Sudan. Actress and Darfur activist Mia Farrow recently met with the corporation’s owner, Erik Prince, to discuss using the company in a military role in the western Sudan.

According to a 2007 study by the industrial College of the Armed Forces, “Africa may do for the mercenary industry in the next 20 years what Iraq has done in the past four years, provide a significant growth engine.”

The U.S. has established a military command for the region—Africom—but no nation has agreed to host it yet. While suspicions about U.S. goals in Africa run high, those doubts apparently don’t extend to U.S.-based mercenary organizations. While countries are holding Africom at arm’s length, those same countries are embracing Blackwater, DynCorp. Triple Canopy, and MPRI.

Mercenaries are not just an American phenomena. Israel has begun privatizing its security checkpoints using the Israeli mercenary company Modiin Ezrahi According to a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, “By the end of the year all the people guards at the checkpoints will be civilians.”

Israel claims it is replacing the army with mercenaries because it wants to demilitarize the checkpoints, but peace activists say that argument is nonsense. Hanna Barag of the human rights organization Machsom Watch says the civilian security guards are “Rambos” who behave no differently than Israeli soldiers.

The UN reports an increase in “significant difficulties” since the mercenaries took over.

Daniel Levy, a former advisor to current Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, says the real reason is that it walls off the Israeli population from the burdens of trying to control 2.5 million Palestinians. “It separates the occupation from Israeli society,” he told the Financial Times, “these guys mercenaries don’t go home and tell their mothers what they are doing.”

In the end, the bottom line is the bottom line. Private contractors in Iraq—190,000 strong—will cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $100 billion by the end of 2008.

http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan09102008.html

Russians seized U.S. equipment

Pentagon says no ’sensitive items’ taken with Humvees

Bill Gertz (Contact)

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Russian troops broke open two large shipping containers in the Georgian port of Poti and “pilfered” the contents. Sensitive communications and electronics equipment used by U.S. forces during a joint U.S.-Georgia military exercise prior to the Aug. 8 incursion had already been shipped out of the port, he added.

One of the containers belonged to the Marines, which also lost five Humvees to the Russians. Mr. Whitman said he did not know who owned the other container.

The Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that the captured equipment included Global Positioning System equipment used in weapons targeting, identification, friend-or-foe electronic gear and classified radio and reconnaissance equipment.

DELIVERY: The USS Mount Whitney unloads aid in Poti, Georgia, on Saturday. Russian forces that invaded Georgia seized more than just U.S. Humvees. (Associated Press)

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, Evgeny Khorisko, said he had no knowledge of such equipment being seized or containers being opened. “I only know about the Humvees,” Mr. Khorisko said.

Mr. Whitman insisted that high-intelligence-value equipment had not been compromised, while at the same time acknowledging he did not know exactly what the Russians now had in their possession.

“We can’t tell what was in them, and we’re still doing an assessment, but none of them had sensitive items in them,” he said. The disclosure came as the Bush administration announced that it was pulling from Congress an agreement with Russia for peaceful cooperation in the civilian nuclear field.

“We make this decision with regret,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement. “Unfortunately, given the current environment, the time is not right for this agreement.”

Russia reacted with ambivalence. The Interfax news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry official as saying, “Such a step is regrettable,” but “Russia does not need civilian nuclear cooperation with the United States more than Washington.”

The Pentagon has also announced a review of U.S.-Russia military cooperation and promised Georgia $1 billion in economic aid and an unspecified amount of military help.

The U.S. European Command will soon conduct a major security assessment of Georgia to determine what U.S. weapons and training will be sent to the former Soviet republic as part of increased U.S. aid, Mr. Whitman said.

“In the days to come, we’ll start doing a security assessment in terms of what Georgia needs in terms of its internal and external security,” he said.

While Mr. Whitman said he could not identify what was in the seized containers, officials at the European Command, which was in charge of the military exercises, said they suspected that the equipment was crew gear.

The equipment and Humvees were sent to Georgia in July as part of a monthlong military-training exercise with U.S. and Georgian forces and was being returned through the port of Poti when the Russians seized it Aug. 19. The vehicles and equipment were being shipped back to the United States following the exercise, which involved about 1,000 U.S. soldiers and 600 Georgian troops.

Mr. Whitman said Russia has not responded to a U.S. diplomatic protest made two weeks ago demanding that the equipment and five Marine Corps Humvees be returned. “We’ve seen no positive response to the demarche,” he said.

“We are trying to determine what equipment was taken and under what conditions and how to get it back,” said a U.S. defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We know about the Humvees. All the other equipment was left over from the exercise that had taken place. We don’t think it was extensive. Some had already left the country.”

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James T. Conway told reporters Aug. 27 that four of the Humvees were conventional vehicles and one was an armored vehicle.

“None of those had anything like secret satellite communications; in fact, no radios at all,” Gen. Conway said. “They had radio mounts only … that’s traditionally how we ship.”

Gen. Conway said, “I think we’re going to send the Russians a bill and tell them, you know, either pay up or give us back our vehicles, guys. You know, that’s not the way we do business.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/09/russians-pilfer-us-equipment/

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Russian strategic bombers land in Venezuela

Two Russian Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bombers have landed at a military airfield in Venezuela, Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

The Tu-160 Blackjack is a supersonic, variable-geometry heavy bomber, designed to strike strategic targets with nuclear and conventional weapons deep in continental theatres of operation.

The bombers will conduct a number of training flights over neutral waters in the next few days and later return to their home base in Russia, the ministry said in a statement.

The planes landed at Venezuela’s Libertador airfield and during the flight to the South American country were accompanied by NATO fighters.

“The flight itinerary extended over neutral waters in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. The Russian bombers were accompanied by NATO fighters,” the statement said.

Russia earlier announced it would send a naval task force from the Northern Fleet on a tour of duty in the Atlantic Ocean and participate in joint naval drills with the Venezuelan navy in November.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on September 1 that Venezuela welcomed the Russian Navy and Air Force on its territory.

“If the Russian Navy arrives in the Caribbean or the Atlantic it may certainly visit Venezuela, we have no problems with that and would warmly welcome it,” Chavez said.

“And if Russian long-range bombers should need to land in Venezuela we would not object to that either. We will also welcome them,” he said.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080910/116695660.html

2 Russian strategic bombers land in Venezuela

The Associated Press

Two Russian strategic bombers landed in Venezuela on Wednesday as part of military maneuvers, the government said, announcing an unprecendented deployment to the territory of a new ally at a time of increasingly tense relations with the U.S.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said the two Tu-160 bombers flew to Venezuela on a training mission. It said in a statement carried by the Russian news wires that the planes will conduct training flights over neutral waters over the next few days before heading back to Russia.

Also Wednesday, NATO said it ended a routine exercise by four naval ships in the Black Sea. Russia had denounced the exercise as part of a Western military buildup sparked by the Georgia conflict.

The alliance said the four ships – U.S. frigate USS Taylor and three similar vessels from Spain, Germany and Poland – were moving back to the Mediterranean Sea after the 18-day mission.

In Moscow, Defense Ministry spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky refused to say how long the Venezuela deployment will last or say whether the planes carried any weapons.

The military said NATO fighters escorted the two Russian bombers on their way to Venezuela.

The apparently retaliatory move follows the U.S. deployment of warships to deliver aid to the former Soviet nation of Georgia, barely a month after Russian armor and aircraft crushed the Georgian military in a five-day war.

Earlier this week, Russia said it will send a naval squadron and long-range patrol planes to Venezuela in November for a joint military exercise in the Caribbean.

The deployment of planes will be certain to anger Washington. Relations between the U.S. and Russia have been badly strained by the short war last month between Russia and U.S.-allied Georgia.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/680525.html

Tu-160 Blackjack Strategic Bomber, Russia

Crew4Wingspan, Wings Forward55.7mWingspan With Wings Swept35.6mLength54.1mHeight13.1mMaximum Take-Off Weight275tNormal Combat Load Weight9,000tFull specifications

The Tu-160 supersonic strategic bomber was manufactured by the Tupolev Aircraft Research and Engineering Complex Joint Stock Company in Moscow and the Kazan based Gorbunov Aircraft Production Association in Tatarstan from 1980 to 1992. Production has since been restarted and a Tu-160 was delivered to the Russian Air Force in May 2000. 14 aircraft are now in service in Russia.

One unarmed aircraft crashed in September 2003, the first crash since the aircraft entered service. Two aircraft are under construction and the first is to be delivered to the Russian Air Force in 2007. The Ukraine destroyed the last of its fleet in February 2001.

“The Tu-160 Blackjack can carry nuclear and conventional weapons including long-range nuclear missiles.”The purpose of the aircraft is the delivery of nuclear and conventional weapons deep in continental theatres of operation. The aircraft has all-weather, day-and-night capability and can operate at all geographical latitudes.

The performance of the Russian Tu-160 is often compared to the US B-1B. The aircraft has an operational range of 14,000km and a service ceiling of 16,000m. The maximum flight speed is 2,000km/h at high altitude and 1,030km/h at low altitude.

Kazan Aircraft Production Organisation (KAPO) has been given a contract to upgrade the Russian Air Force’s 15 Tu-160 bombers. The Tupolev upgrade package will include new targeting systems, upgraded cruise missiles and electronic warfare suite. The first upgraded aircraft was delivered in July 2006.

BOMBER DESIGN
The bomber’s airframe has a distinctive appearance, with the wing and fuselage gradually integrated into a single-piece configuration. The airframe structure is based on a titanium beam, all-welded torsion box. Throughout the entire airframe, all the main airframe members are secured to the titanium beam.

The variable geometry outer tapered wings sweep back from 20° to 65° in order to provide high-performance flight characteristics at both supersonic and subsonic speeds. The tail surfaces, both horizontal and vertical, are one piece and all-moving.

The Tu-160 uses fly-by-wire controls. The aircraft is equipped with three-strut landing gear, a tail wheel and a brake parachute. For take-off, the aircraft requires a concrete runway of 3,050m.

TU-160 COCKPIT
The crew of the Tu-160 comprises a pilot and co-pilot, a navigator, and an operator. The four crew are equipped with zero / zero ejection seats, which provide the crew with the option of ejecting safely throughout the entire range of altitudes and air speeds, including when the aircraft is parked.

In the cockpit and cabins, all the data is presented on conventional electro-mechanical indicators and monitors, and not head-up displays or cathode ray tube displays. The Tu-160 has a control stick for flight control as used in a fighter aircraft – rather than control wheels or yokes, which are usually used in large transporter or bomber aircraft.

WEAPONS
The Tu-160 can carry nuclear and conventional weapons including long-range nuclear missiles. The missiles are accommodated on multi-station launchers in each of the two weapons bays.

The Tu-160 is capable of carrying the strategic cruise missile Kh-55MS, which is known in the West by the NATO designation and codename AS-15 Kent. Up to 12 Kh-55MS missiles can be carried, six in each bay. The Kh-55MS is propelled by a turbofan engine. The maximum range is 3,000km, and it is armed with a 200kt nuclear warhead.

“The purpose of the Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bomber is the delivery of nuclear and conventional weapons deep in continental theatres of operation.”The weapons bays are also fitted with launchers for the Kh-15P, which has the NATO designation and codename AS-16 Kickback. The Kh-15P Kickback has solid rocket fuel propulsion, which gives a range up to 200km. The Kickback can be fitted with a conventional 250kg warhead or a nuclear warhead. The aircraft is also capable of carrying a range of aerial bombs with a total weight up to 40t.

TU-160 AVIONICS
The aircraft is highly computerised, and the avionics systems include an integrated aiming, navigation and flight control system, with a navigation and attack radar, an electronic countermeasures system, and automatic controls.

TURBOFAN ENGINES

The aircraft propulsion system consists of four NK-32 augmented turbofan engines, which each provide a maximum thrust of 25,000kg. The engines are installed in two pods under the shoulders of the wing. The air intake incorporates an adjustable vertical wedge.

The bomber has an in-flight refuelling system. In the inoperative position, the refuelling probe is retracted into the nose of the fuselage in front of the pilot’s cabin. The aircraft fuel capacity is 160,000kg.

http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/tu160/

Russian TV Prime Time To Air 9-11 Truth Film

Italian film-maker Giulietto Chiesa, who was in Berlin for a screening of his documentary which questions the official US version of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has called for an international tribunal to probe events.

Chiesa was in Berlin at the weekend for a screening of his film which features, among others, novelist Gore Vidal and playwright Dario Fo as well as retired American professor of philosophy David Ray Griffin who advances conspiracy theories that contradict mainstream accounts of events of 11 September, 2001.

Federal Aviation Administration controllers, US Air Force pilots, military commanders and physicists also appear in the critical documentary, which the director hopes will create “political awareness” of the “faulty” official investigation into the events by the 9/11 Commission.

“Some of the individuals appearing in the film are former FBI and CIA agents, people who have in a sense taken a very big risk in speaking out. I am very grateful to them because they have done a big job,” said Chiesa.

“The film would not have been possible without them,” he said, adding that ZERO had been seen in France and Belgium at individual screenings, and by more than 20,000 people in Italy. But the film so far has not gained a distributor in Europe.

Pushing for an international tribunal

Chiesa, one of Italy’s most respected journalists and a La Stampa foreign correspondent for more than 20 years, told his Berlin audience an 9/11 international tribunal could serve a useful purpose.

“If feelings were strong enough a positive result could be obtained, but it would not happen immediately. So far it’s been the US administration that has won the information fight and obtained their result — unfortunately,” Chiesa said.  “Our task is to inform millions of people of the true situation.

Everybody should be involved in this struggle with a tribunal or commission helping once we win approval for the idea,” he said.

In an interview with German news agency dpa, Chiesa, a European parliamentary deputy, said Russian television is to give prime time airing to his film on the eve of this week’s seventh anniversary of the attacks in New York and Washington.

“That means that some 30 million Russian citizens will learn the truth about what happened, which is a very big result for me.”

Chiesa, whose documentary was first screened to a large German audience at the Goethe Institute in Munich in May, was clearly delighted at his reception in Berlin. “It’s important that so many people have shown up,” he said.

One of a panel of six experts debating the 9/11 topic in Berlin, Chiesa said he was eager for his film to gain more public support and become a “multiplicator” across Germany. “If that happens it means we are making politics in the right sense of the word.”

Critics question government version of attacks

Andreas von Buelow, a controversial former German minister of technology, and ex-state secretary in the Defense Ministry, was among the Berlin participants who said further investigation was needed into 9/11.

He told dpa it was “one of life’s characteristics that governments are prone to lie in order to achieve their agendas. The Americans told us that in Iraq, Saddam Hussein had something to do with al-Qaeda, which was absolutely untrue. Even the CIA knew this,” he said.

“Then, they told us that Saddam Hussein was preparing weapons of mass destruction, which was also untrue, so they have been lying all over the place and are still fighting there. Meanwhile a million people have been killed.”

Asked if there was any prospect of a policy change once the next US president was elected, he replied bluntly “No!”

Juergen Elsaesser, 51, a Berlin-based journalist and author whose latest book is titled “Terror Target Europe: The Dangerous Double Game of the Secret Services,” spoke of the huge contradictions in the official US version of the 9/11 events.

“Critics find themselves accused of conspiracy theories, but the biggest conspiracy is to be found in the official 9/11 version of the US government which maintains that Osama bin Laden, from a cave in Afghanistan, along with 19 young Arabs, combined to carry out the most perfidious attack in the history of mankind,” he said.

“That just doesn’t add up. For me the most important contradiction is how the air defences of the greatest military power on the planet failed to prevent such attacks occurring and that no interceptor fighter planes or rocket systems were ever activated.”

DPA News Agency (sp)

Ivashov, Chiesa, Meyssan, Russian Experts To Debate 9-11

 On Russian TV Friday

Sep 9, 2008 Source: Attack on Iran within two days

Many speculations about when the Israeli – American forces will attack and bomb Iran, so put this one in the list.

But is it not strange that Ayman al-Zawahiri appeared yesterday attacking Iran for the first time, was it coincidence? And Iran Daily reported the Iranian army – Revolution Guards three days maneuvers in the Gulf in Ramdan is it also coincidence?

A Source who would like to stay anonymous told the Egyptian Resistance Voice that the U.S. – Israel would attack the Iranian nuclear facilities within few days.

The attack which is also approved by European countries will start from the American – Israeli military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, Bahrain and Palestine.The source expected the attack to be between 10 and 11 September which coincides with several events including such as the attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Islamic Badr battle. He mentioned that Arab and Islamic countries Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Iraq and Afghanistan are informed in advance about this attack.

The website says that Hezbollah is on full alert and Syria along with the Palestinian factions postponed their negotiations with Israel for the same reason.

One other thing to add, Egyptian political analyst and strategic expert, Major General Mahmoud Zaher broke his oath of “not to write about politics during Ramadan” and said the following in his article “A Time ruled by the devil’s spirit“:The information made me break my intention oath is wrapped in a question says:

What will the 9/11 of this year 2008 holds for us…?? Has it been done and planted as the new pretext, global Zionists can harvest again …From my information, the answer is “Yes”.

In his article Zaher warns Arab leaders and especially Mubarak of Egypt of the consequences of following the American – Israeli plans.

http://www.roadstoiraq.com/2008/09/09/source-attack-on-iran-within-two-days/

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Israel’s senior ministers confer urgently on Iran as US masses air-naval might in Middle East waters

USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier joins American Middle East armada

Prime minister Ehud Olmert summoned defense minister Ehud Barak and foreign minister Tzipi Livni for an urgent consultation on Iran Wed. Sept. 10, as the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier headed out to the Mediterranean for missions “in support of maritime security.”

Its arrival will bring the number of US aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea to four, compared with two Russian warships. Most of the Russian fleet in the region is concentrated in the Black Sea whence it has easy and rapid access to Middle East waters.

The Roosevelt will be followed by its strike force, which includes the guided missile cruiser Monterey , the guided missile destroyers Mason and Nitze , with 7,300 sailors and marines aboard, and the attack submarine Springfield .

Our sources report that the USS Ronald Reagan carrier and its strike group began engaging in assault and support missions for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan on Aug. 28.

The Iwo Jima carrier group, whose decks carry 6,000 sailors, air crews and marines, supports the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and Fifth Fleet in the Gulf with a massive amphibious capability.

The USS San Antonio amphibious transport dock ship is the first vessel of its class to be deployed in the region as a platform for supporting Marine movements and operations ashore.

The USS Peleliu carrier patrols the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. It is escorted by vessels carrying a large Marine contingent.

Monday, Iran launched a three-day naval-air-missile exercise to practice defense tactics for its nuclear sites.

http://debka.com/headline.php?hid=5572

Debka is an Israel propaganda News and Psywar

Simon Aronowitz: ThoughtCrimeNews.com

Shocking new details about the death of Dr David Kelly emerged exclusively today on the Alex Jones radio show . Michael Shrimpton, a UK national security lawyer who was a guest on the show, revealed that sources within MI5 and MI6 are `furious’ that Kelly was murdered.

Shrimpton spoke in depth about the details of Kelly’s murder on 17th July 2003, information which has been withheld by the British press.

With apparent backing from the organisations whose members he claims to speak for, Shrimpton presented their view that Dr Kelly had been murdered by a team of assassins and the charade of an apparent suicide was then played out to cover this up.

Speaking with impeccable credentials, including contributions to the Journal for International Security Affairs and having previously given a closed-doors confidential briefing the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Shrimpton exploded the much-reported myth that Dr Kelly had taken his own life.

He spoke of the probable method of Kelly’s death, the group which most likely carried out the assassination, who arranged it and finally where the responsibility lies. Additionally, he explained the political context and motive for Kelly’s murder.

David Kelly went missing on 17th July 2003 and was found dead on 18th July. In the previous days, Kelly had testified before Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee that he was not the source of a BBC story which had accused the Government of making false claims about Iraq’s WMD. When Kelly’s body was found, the British press quickly reported it as a suicide, though several analysts had their doubts.

On Jones’ show, Shrimpton explained how he had learned that David Kelly was the BBC’s source before the BBC disclosed this fact. He went on to explain that his source from within the intelligence community knew David Kelly personally, and did not believe that he had committed suicide. After making their own enquiries, says Shrimpton, this source determined that Dr Kelly had not committed suicide, but rather had been assassinated.

Apparently at ease to discuss these explosive disclosures, Shrimpton explained that there was advance knowledge of Kelly’s death in Whitehall, but that the deed itself was most likely carried out by the French external security organisation, DGSE. There was no indication that anybody in MI5 or MI6 had been involved. He went further by suggesting that the hit squad itself was composed of Iraqis from the former regime’s Mukhabarat intelligence organisation, recruited from Damascus with the help of Syria’s own intelligence apparatus. They were apparently then flown into Corsica, seven days prior to the murder. He doubts that any of the hit-squad are still alive.

Officially, Kelly’s body was said to have been found in a copse, in a wood, but the forensic tents were set up in the adjacent field, suggesting, says  Shrimpton, that the body was found in the field. This has not been explained to his satisfaction.

The incision in Kelly’s wrist was probably to conceal the injection of both Dextroprypoxythene, the active ingredient in Co-Proxamol, and Succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant, rather than as evidence of his bleeding to death, as highlighted by a group of six doctors in letters published in the British press . Shrimpton further agreed with the doctors by pointing out that Kelly only had one Co-Proxamol tablet in his body and that this was not sufficient to kill him.

According to Shrimpton, Kelly was murdered because he had been talking to the press and there was a fear of what else he might discuss with journalists. Furthermore, Kelly was due to return to Iraq and may have learned fresh information on that trip which Whitehall could not afford to trust him with.

Shrimpton’s appearance on Jones’ show gave him the first public opportunity to bring forward his information, since the story has been effectively censored by the British Press, who according to Shrimpton are concerned about losing the pro-Euro Tony Blair as Prime Minister were they to publish details of Kelly’s assassination. Blair’s departure, he says, could threaten Britain’s proposed adoption of the Euro as the national currency.

Whilst this story begins to circulate in the USA, the coverage in the UK may well remain nil, whilst maneuvering behind the scenes attempts to pre-empt Shrimpton’s accusation of government-sanctioned murder of one of its own operatives.

Only with public support, and a belief that this information should be widely known, can this information be brought into the wide open and covered by the mainstream media.

Read also:

Ten things you don’t know about the Earth

Look up, look down, look out, look around.

— Yes, “It Can Happen”

Good advice from the 70s progressive band. Look around you. Unless you’re one of the Apollo astronauts, you’ve lived your entire life within a few hundred kilometers of the surface of the Earth. There’s a whole planet beneath your feet, 6.6 sextillion tons of it, one trillion cubic kilometers of it. But how well do you know it?

Below are ten facts about the Earth — the second in my series of Ten Things You Don’t Know (the first was on the Milky Way). Some things I already knew (and probably you do, too), some I had ideas about and had to do some research to check, and others I totally made up. Wait! No! Kidding. They’re all real. But how many of them do you know? Be honest.

1) The Earth is smoother than a billiard ball.

Maybe you’ve heard this statement: if the Earth were shrunk down to the size of a billiard ball, it would actually be smoother than one. When I was in third grade, my teacher said basketball, but it’s the same concept. But is it true? Let’s see. Strap in, there’s a wee bit of math (like, a really wee bit).

OK, first, how smooth is a billiard ball? According to the World Pool-Billiard Association, a pool ball is 2.25 inches in diameter, and has a tolerance of +/- 0.005 inches. In other words, it must have no pits or bumps more than 0.005 inches in height. That’s pretty smooth. The ratio of the size of an allowable bump to the size of the ball is 0.005/2.25 = about 0.002.

The Earth has a diameter of about 12,735 kilometers (on average, see below for more on this). Using the smoothness ratio from above, the Earth would be an acceptable pool ball if it had no bumps (mountains) or pits (trenches) more than 12,735 km x 0.00222 = about 28 km in size.

The highest point on Earth is the top of Mt. Everest, at 8.85 km. The deepest point on Earth is the Marianas Trench, at about 11 km deep.

Hey, those are within the tolerances! So for once, an urban legend is correct. If you shrank the Earth down to the size of a billiard ball, it would be smoother.

But would it be round enough to qualify?

2) The Earth is an oblate spheroid

The Earth is round! Despite common knowledge, people knew that the Earth was spherical thousands of years ago. Eratosthenes even calculated the circumference to very good accuracy!

But it’s not a perfect sphere. It spins, and because it spins, it bulges due to centrifugal force (yes, dagnappit, I said centrifugal). That is an outwards-directed force, the same thing that makes you lean to the right when turning left in a car. Since the Earth spins, there is a force outward that is a maximum at the Earth’s equator, making our Blue Marble bulge out, like a basketball with a guy sitting on it. This type of shape is called an oblate spheroid.

If you measure between the north and south poles, the Earth’s diameter is 12,713.6 km. If you measure across the Equator it’s 12,756.2 km, a difference of about 42.6 kilometers. Uh-oh! That’s more than our tolerance for a billiard ball. So the Earth is smooth enough, but not round enough, to qualify as a billiard ball.

Bummer. Of course, that’s assuming the tolerance for being out-of-round for a billiard ball is the same as it is for pits and bumps. The WPA site doesn’t say. I guess some things remain a mystery.

3) The Earth isn’t an oblate spheroid.

But we’re not done. The Earth is more complicated than an oblate spheroid. The Moon is out there too, and the Sun. They have gravity, and pull on us. The details are complicated (sate yourself here), but gravity (in the form of tides) raises bulges in the Earth’s surface as well. The tides from the Moon have an amplitude (height) of roughly a meter in the water, and maybe 30 cm in the solid Earth. The Sun is more massive than the Moon, but much farther away, and so its tides are only about half as high.

This is much smaller than the distortion due to the Earth’s spin, but it’s still there.

Other forces are at work as well, including pressure caused by the weight of the continents, upheaval due to tectonic forces, and so on. The Earth is actually a bit of a lumpy mess, but if you were to say it’s a sphere, you’d be pretty close. If you held the billiard-ball-sized Earth in your hand, I doubt you’d notice it isn’t a perfect sphere.

A professional pool player sure would though. I won’t tell Allison Fisher if you won’t.

4) OK, one more surfacey thing: the Earth is not exactly aligned with its geoid

If the Earth were infinitely elastic, then it would respond freely to all these different forces, and take on a weird, distorted shape called a geoid. For example, if the Earth’s surface were completely deluged with water (give it a few decades) then the surface shape would be a geoid. But the continents are not infinitely ductile, so the Earth’s surface is only approximately a geoid. It’s pretty close, though.

Precise measurements of the Earth’s surface are calibrated against this geoid, but the geoid itself is hard to measure. The best we can do right now is to model it using complicated mathematical functions. That’s why ESA is launching a satellite called GOCE (Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer) in the next few months, to directly determine the geoid’s shape.

Who knew just getting the shape of the Earth would be such a pain?

5) Jumping into hole through the Earth is like orbiting it.

I grew up thinking that if you dug a hole through the Earth (for those in the US) you’d wind up in China. Turns out that’s not true; in fact note that the US and China are both entirely in the northern hemisphere which makes it impossible, so as a kid I guess I was pretty stupid.

You can prove it to yourself with this cool but otherwise worthless mapping tool.

But what if you did dig a hole through the Earth and jump in? What would happen?

Where my own hole through the Earth ends up.

Well, you’d die (see below). But if you had some magic material coating the walls of your 13,000 km deep well, you’d have quite a trip. You’d accelerate all the way down to the center, taking about 20 minutes to get there. Then, when you passed the center, you’d start falling up for another 20 minutes, slowing the whole way. You’d just reach the surface, then you’d fall again. Assuming you evacuated the air and compensated for Coriolis forces, you’d repeat the trip over and over again, much to your enjoyment and/or terror. Actually, this would go on forever, with you bouncing up and down. I hope you remember to pack a lunch.

Note that as you fell, you accelerate all the way down, but the acceleration itself would decrease as you fell: there is less mass between you and the center of the Earth as you head down, so the acceleration due to gravity decreases as you approach the center. However, the speed with which you pass the center is considerable: about 7.7 km/sec (5 miles/second).

In fact, the math driving your motion is the same as for an orbiting object. It takes the same amount of time to fall all the way through the Earth and back as it does to orbit it, if your orbit were right at the Earth’s surface (orbits slow down as the orbital radius increases). Even weirder, it doesn’t matter where your hole goes: a straight line through the Earth from any point to any other (shallow chord, through the diameter, or whatever) gives you the same travel time of 42 or so minutes.

Gravity is bizarre. But there you go. And if you do go take the long jump, well, your trip may be a wee bit unpleasant.

6) The Earth’s interior is hot due to impacts, shrinkage, sinkage, and radioactive decay.

A long time ago, you, me, and everything else on Earth was scattered in a disk around the Sun several billion kilometers across. Over time, this aggregated into tiny bodies called planetesimals, like dinky asteroids. These would smack together, and some would stick, forming a larger body. Eventually, this object got massive enough that its gravity actively drew in more bodies. As these impacted, they released their energy of motion (kinetic energy) as heat, and the young Earth became a molten ball. Ding! One source of heat.

As the gravity increased, its force tried to crush the Earth into a more compact ball. When you squeeze an object it heats up. Ding ding! The second heat source.

Since the Earth was mostly liquid, heavy stuff fell to the center and lighter stuff rose to the top. So the core of the Earth has lots of iron, nickel, osmium, and the like. As this stuff falls, heat is generated (ding ding ding!) because the potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, which in turn is converted to thermal energy due to friction.

And hey, some of those heavy elements are radioactive, like uranium. As they decay, they release heat (ding ding ding ding!). This accounts for probably more than half of the heat inside the planet.

So the Earth is hot in the inside due to at least four sources. But it’s still hot after all this time because the crust is a decent insulator. It prevents the heat from escaping efficiently, so even after 4.55 billion years, the Earth’s interior is still an unpleasantly warm place to be.

Incidentally, the amount of heat flowing out from the Earth’s surface due to internal sources is about 45 trillion Watts. That’s about three times the total global human energy consumption. If we could capture all that heat and convert it with 100% efficiency into electricity, it would literally power all of humanity. Too bad that’s an insurmountable if.

7) The Earth has at least five natural moons. But not really.

Most people think the Earth has one natural moon, which is why we call it the Moon. These people are right. But there are four other objects — at least — that stick near the Earth in the solar system. They’re not really moons, but they’re cool.

The biggest is called Cruithne (pronounced MRPH-mmmph-glug, or something similar). It’s about 5 kilometers across, and has an elliptical orbit that takes it inside and outside Earth’s solar orbit. The orbital period of Cruithne is about the same as the Earth’s, and due to the peculiarities of orbits, this means it is always on the same side of the Sun we are. From our perspective, it makes a weird bean-shaped orbit, sometimes closer, sometimes farther from the Earth, but never really far away.

That’s why some people say it’s a moon of the Earth. But it actually orbits the Sun, so it’s not a moon of ours. Same goes for the other three objects discovered, too.

Oh– these guys can’t hit the Earth. Although they stick near us, more or less, their orbits don’t physically cross ours. So we’re safe. From them.

8) The Earth is getting more massive.

Sure, we’re safe from Cruithne. But space is littered with detritus, and the Earth cuts a wide path (125 million square km in area, actually). As we plow through this material, we accumulate on average 20-40 tons of it per day! [Note: your mileage may vary; this number is difficult to determine, but it’s probably good within a factor of 2 or so.] Most of it is in the form of teeny dust particles which burn up in our atmosphere, what we call meteors (or shooting stars, but doesn’t “meteor” sound more sciencey?). These eventually fall to the ground (generally transported by rain drops) and pile up. They probably mostly wash down streams and rivers and then go into the oceans.

40 tons per day may sound like a lot, but it’s only 0.0000000000000000006% the mass of the Earth (in case I miscounted zeroes, that’s 2×10^-26 6×10^-21 times the Earth’s mass). It would take 140,000 million 450,000 trillion years to double the mass of the Earth this way, so again, you might want to pack a lunch. In a year, it’s enough cosmic junk to fill a six-story office building, if that’s a more palatable analogy.

I’ll note the Earth is losing mass, too: the atmosphere is leaking away due to a number of different processes. But this is far slower than the rate of mass accumulation, so the net affect is a gain of mass.

9) Mt. Everest isn’t the biggest mountain.

The height of a mountain may have an actual definition, but I think it’s fair to say that it should be measured from the base to the apex. Mt. Everest stretches 8850 meters above sea level, but it has a head start due to the general uplift from the Himalayas. The Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea is 10,314 meters from stem to stern (um, OK, bad word usagement, but you get my point), so even though it only reaches to 4205 meters above sea level, it’s a bigger mountain than Everest.

Plus, Mauna Kea has telescopes on top of it, so that makes it cooler.

10) Destroying the Earth is hard.

Considering I wrote a book about destroying the Earth a dozen different ways (available for pre-order on amazon.com!), it turns out the phrase “destroying the Earth” is a bit misleading. I actually write about wiping out life, which is easy. Physically destroying the Earth is hard.

What would it take to vaporize the planet? Let’s define vaporization as blowing it up so hard that it disperses and cannot recollect due to gravity. How much energy would that take?

Think of it this way: take a rock. Throw it up so hard it escapes from the Earth. That takes quite a bit of energy! Now do it again. And again. Lather, rinse, repeat… a quadrillion times, until the Earth is gone. That’s a lot of energy! But we have one advantage: every rock we get rid of decreases the gravity of the Earth a little bit (because the mass of the Earth is smaller by the mass of the rock). As gravity decreases, it gets easier to remove rocks.

You can use math to calculate this; how much energy it takes to remove a rock and simultaneously account for the lowering of gravity. If you make some basic assumptions, it takes roughly 2 x 10³² Joules, or 200 million trillion trillion Joules. That’s a lot. For comparison, that’s the total amount of energy the Sun emits in a week. It’s also about a trillion times the destructive energy yield of detonating every nuclear weapon on Earth.

If you want to vaporize the Earth by nuking it, you’d better have quite an arsenal, and time on your hands. If you blew up every nuclear weapon on the planet once every second, it would take 160,000 years to turn the Earth into a cloud of expanding gas.

And this is only if you account for gravity! There are chemical bonds holding the Earth’s matter together as well, so it takes even more energy.

This is why Star Wars is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. The Death Star wouldn’t be able to have a weapon that powerful. The energy storage alone is a bit much, even for the power of the Dark Side.

Even giant collisions can’t vaporize the planet. An object roughly the size of Mars impacted the Earth more than 4.5 billion years ago, and the ejected debris formed the Moon (the rest of the collider merged with the Earth). But the Earth wasn’t vaporized. Even smacking a whole planet into another one doesn’t destroy them!

Of course, the collision melted the Earth all the way down to the core, so the damage is, um, considerable. But the Earth is still around.

The Sun will eventually become a red giant (Chapter 7!), and while it probably won’t consume the Earth, it’ll put the hurt on us for sure. But even then, total vaporization is unlikely (though Mercury is doomed).

Planets tend to be sturdy. Good thing, too. We live on one.

Conclusion

Well, that cheery thought brings us to the end of my list of things you may or may not have known about the Earth. I had lots more. How much does the atmosphere weigh? What’s the average mass of a cloud? Stuff like that, but these are the ten I liked best. If you’ve got more, feel free to leave them in the comments!

But remember the main point here: you live on a planet, and you may not know all that much about it. The only cure for that is learning, and that’s driven by wonder. Keep wondering, and keep learning. And don’t forget to look around.

GOCE image courtesy ESA.

Cruithne animation from Wikipedia.

Mt. Everest original from Joe Hastings.

LINK

Shock video shows bodies of children ‘killed in US attack’

By Jerome Starkey

in Kabul

THE United States’ most senior soldier in Afghanistan has called for the Pentagon to investigate claims that more than 90 civilians were killed in a US air strike, after harrowing video footage emerged showing the broken bodies of children among the dead.

One grim, eight-minute clip, filmed on a mobile phone in the aftermath of the bombing, shows rows of bodies laid side-by-side in a makeshift morgue. Among them are at least 11 children, many of them toddlers.

The footage handed over to the UN mission in Kabul, shows two long rows of bodies apparently killed in the raid, laid on a mosque floor, awaiting burial.

One video, apparently taken by a mobile phone, is grainy and details, including a precise body count, are difficult to make out. However, there appear to be several dozen bodies, all covered by blankets.

A second video shows three young children wrapped in white shrouds. A fourth child has gruesome head wounds.

General David McKiernan, the US commander of Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), ordered a fresh investigation led by a Pentagon general, after the footage was released.

The top-level review comes just days after he admitted there were “large discrepancies” among conflicting accounts of the death toll.

American officials claim there were just seven civilians killed, but the UN, the Afghan government, and human rights groups say its closer to 90.

The damning footage was shot by a doctor who visited the morgue, in a building normally used as a mosque, on the morning after the 22 August attack.

At one point a blanket is pulled back to show the grey, lifeless face of an infant. The dead child’s head is no bigger than a man’s hand. A large section of skull is missing. Women can be heard wailing in the background. One mourner is heard crying for his mother.

Locals said most of the dead were women and children.

The bombs were called in by US Special Forces after their patrol was ambushed in Azizabad, in Herat province, shortly before dawn on 22 August. Officials said they were trying to arrest a suspected Taleban commander.

Days after the attack US officials remained adamant just 30 Taleban insurgents had been killed, including their commander, despite detailed claims by Afghan officials that at least 76 people had been killed, including 50 children.

Four days after the air strike the UN top official in Kabul, Kai Eide, claimed he had “convincing evidence … that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15 men”.

Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, said relations with the US had “worsened” in the wake of the raid, which prompted a grovelling phone call from the US president, George Bush.

It comes amid growing criticism of international troops for failing to curb civilian killings. A Human Rights Watch report, published yesterday, said civilian deaths, as a result of US and Nato air strikes, tripled from 2006 to 2007.

Brad Adams, the group’s Asia director, said: “Mistakes by the US and Nato have dramatically decreased public support for the Afghan government and the presence of international forces.”

American officials eventually revised their initial body count, on 2 September, but this was still nowhere close to the numbers reported elsewhere. A spokesman said: “The investigation found that between 30 and 35 Taleban militants were killed. In addition five to seven civilians were killed, two civilians were injured and subsequently treated.”

Mr Eide summoned Gen McKiernan to his office in Kabul last Friday, to see the evidence for himself.

He was furious that the UN had released such an uncompromising statement condemning the raid.

However, a source close to the ISAF commander revealed he was moved almost to tears when he finally saw the images for himself. “He was shocked and humbled. He left like a little boy,” a military aide said.

If the 90 dead are confirmed, it would be the worst incident of “collateral damage” in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.

http://news.scotsman.com/world/Shock–video–shows.4470573.jp

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”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””’

Coalition: 3 soldiers die in Afghan roadside blast

The U.S. coalition says a roadside bomb in eastern Afghanistan has killed three coalition soldiers and an Afghan contractor.

The coalition on Tuesday did not release any other details of the attack, including the soldiers’ nationalities, but the overwhelming majority of coalition soldiers in the east are American.

The three deaths bring to 208 the number of international soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year. Last year a record 222 international soldiers died in Afghanistan. 

 Two separate airstrikes in Afghanistan’s south and east have killed more than 27 militants, including Chechen fighters, officials said Tuesday.

Authorities clashed with Taliban fighters and requested airstrikes from foreign troops in the southern Uruzgan province on Tuesday, which killed 15 militants, said provincial police chief Juma Gul Himat.

Two wounded Taliban fighters were wounded, Himat said. Authorities recovered the bodies of dead militants, he said.

In the eastern Paktika province, meanwhile, another airstrike hit a group of foreign fighters and killed 12 militants, including nine Chechen fighters, said Ruhulla Samon, the spokesman for the provincial governor.

There were no casualties among Afghan forces in either clash.

Afghan and Western officials have warned that higher number of foreign militants have joined the fight inside Afghanistan, which is seeing record levels of violence.

More than 4,000 people have died in insurgency-related violence this year, according to an Associated Press tally of figures from Western and Afghan officials.

http://www.examiner.com/a-1577619~Coalition__3_soldiers_die_in_Afghan_roadside_blast.html

French cabinet row over ‘Big Sister’ database

An embarrassing row has erupted within the French cabinet over a controversial “Big Sister” database in which the intelligence services will store details on millions of citizens, including their health, social life or sexual orientation.

“You will be to on police files my son”

Hervé Morin, the defence minister, broke ranks to join an army of associations, the main judges’ union, civil liberty groups, unionists and opposition figures all opposed to Edvige – the acronym for the computer system.

Edvige, also a woman’s Christian name, was created by decree in July to collect information on anyone aged 13 or above who is “likely to breach public order”.

But it can also list anyone in politics or trade unions or with a significant role in business, the media, entertainment or social or religious institutions.

“Surely this is a curious mix-up of categories,” said Mr Morin, a centrist party MP who joined President Nicolas Sarkozy’s “rainbow” cabinet last year.

“Is it useful to gather data such as telephone numbers, sexual orientation, and details of taxes and assets and the like without knowing exactly what the point is?”

Mr Morin was firmly rebuked by the prime minister François Fillon.

“I don’t think it is necessary to create suspicion when none exists and I had the occasion to tell him so,” he said.

Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister, who is tasked with pushing through Mr Sarkozy’s tough law-and-order agenda that helped him win last year’s presidential election, was equally vociferous.

“It is odd that Mr Morin has not managed to find my telephone number. I would have set his mind at rest,” she said.

Edvige, according to the government, is simply a spruced-up version of a file system already used by the Renseignements Généraux (RG), a police intelligence service which civil liberties groups claim has files on 20 million people.

The RG has spied on French citizens since it was founded by Napoleon Bonaparte’s police chief, Joseph Fouché and was merged this year with the DST, France’s MI5 responsible for counter-espionage and anti-terrorism.

Edvige is to be the tool of the new merged agency called the DCRI (Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence).

The campaign to dump Edvige – dubbed “Sarkozy’s Big Sister” by the French press – began after France’s data privacy watchdog, the National Commission on Information Technology and Freedom (CNIL), obliged the government to go public on the system.

Since then, the anti-Edvige revolt has gathered pace. More than 120,000 people have signed a petition to have it dropped and more than dozen lawsuits have been filed against it at the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest civil court.

Unionists and left-wing groups were the first to complain.

Laurence Parisot, the head of the Medef employer’s union, has demanded an “explanation” from the interior ministry while Michel Pezet, a former member of the CNIL agency, described the system as an “electronic Bastille”.

“There is nothing to be worried about,” countered Brice Hortefeux, minister for immigration and national identity.

“Today there’s a debate. Complaints have been filed, let them be examined.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/