Key components in the USA Patriot Act are set to expire at the end of the year, but President Barack Obama is seeking to extend them, reversing his stark opposition in the past to the same provisions.

“The president’s reversal on Patriot Act reform is a major travesty,” said Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel for the leading civil rights group ACLU, in an interview with Raw Story. “There have been many, many abuses of power in the last four years.”

These three main aspects in question allow the government to acquire private information about civilians through warrantless wiretapping of phone calls and emails, as well as seizure of records from credit reporting companies, banks, internet service providers and libraries. Another component includes the loosening of conditions under which an individual can be accused of providing “material support” to terrorists.

In 2005, then-Senator Obama pledged to filibuster a Bush-sponsored bill that included several of these exact components, calling it “just plain wrong” in a Senate speech.

Read more at Raw Story

Documents long classified but scheduled to be released at the end of 2009 will not see the light of day just yet thanks to the Obama administration, according to a published report.

Under pressure to grant an extension to intelligence agencies that have reviewed only a fraction of the “millions of pages,” the administration is allowing an undetermined amount of time for additional consideration of the materials, a report in The Boston Globe notes.

“The documents in question – all more than 25 years old – were scheduled to be declassified on Dec. 31 under an order originally signed by President Bill Clinton and amended by President George W. Bush,” wrote reporter Bryan Bender. Both presidents Clinton and Bush also granted the agencies extensions, in 2000 and 2003.

However, Bender added, “because [the Obama] administration has been unable to prod spy agencies into conformance,” no such release is scheduled any time soon and it may be years before they are disclosed.

This, in spite of the president’s repeated assurances of increased transparency. The decision to extend declassification deadlines for the agencies “would run counter to the Obama administration’s push for more openness in the federal government, including the declassification process,” noted ProPublica. “In May, the Globe points out, Obama ‘ordered a 90-day review by the National Security Council” of the classification process.”

Read more at Raw Story

Fighting has intensified in a region in northwestern Pakistan where the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters dodging the South Waziristan operation have regrouped.

Meanwhile, the Taliban are continuing their campaign against pro-government tribal leaders. One leader was assassinated in Bajaur and another was kidnapped in Mohmand.

Kurram

In recent days, the Kurram Militia, a unit assigned to the paramilitary Frontier Corps, has conducted operations to secure the towns of Badama and Taindo, and has taken control of a Taliban training camp in the Shaho region. The military also said it cut off routes to and from the neighboring tribal agency of Arakzai, another Taliban stronghold, to prevent the Taliban from fleeing or reinforcing, Dawn reported.

The Kurram Militia launched the operation after a military convoy was ambushed by the Taliban in the Shaho region. The military claimed to have captured “a number of local and foreign militants” in the counterattack. The Shaho camp is said to be operated by Taliban leader Hakeemullah Mehsud and was used to train fighters from South Waziristan and elsewhere.

“This was major centre comprising several hideouts and tunnels which were completely destroyed,” Colonel Touseef Akhtar of the Kurram Militia told reporters.

Kurram is known to be used by the Afghan Taliban to train fighters for operations against NATO and Afghan forces. On March 12, 2009, the US killed 14 Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in an airstrike on a Taliban compound and training camp in the Barjo region in Kurram.

Taliban fighters, along with al Qaeda and Central Asian fighters, have been resettling in Kurram while the military is conducting operations in the Mehsud tribal areas in South Waziristan. Local Taliban leaders and tribal elders are setting aside homes for the terrorists. “The newcomers have established hide-outs in the foothills and mountains skirting the villages, and have been seen digging trenches in mountainsides,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

“From their faces we can see they are foreigners,” Jaleel Rahman, a resident of central Kurram told the Los Angeles Times. “Sometimes they speak in Arabic, sometimes in English. Their leaders stay at the houses of influential people in our area. And we can’t do anything about it.”

“They are in the hundreds here,” Sher Muhammad, a tribesman in central Kurram said. “They tell us to do what they do. And whatever they like, they get by force.”

“They come to our houses and terrorize us,” said Fareed Ullah, a student in Weedara. “They are kidnapping our elders and stealing our cars. We have no way of rising up against them, and there’s no government here to help us. … Kurram is in trouble because of them.”

The Pakistani military had billed the South Waziristan offensive, which was launched in the eastern half of the Taliban-controlled tribal agency on Oct. 17, as the decisive battle that would break the back of the group. Instead, the leadership of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, including its leader Hakeemullah Mehsud and its South Waziristan commander Waliur Rehman Mehsud, have escaped to neighboring tribal areas, and the terror attacks in Pakistan continue.

The military has claimed that more than 550 Taliban fighters and 70 soldiers have been killed during fierce fighting in South Waziristan. The information cannot be confirmed, as it is filtered through the Army’s Inter-Services Public Relations branch because reporters have been barred from the battle zone, save for escorted day trips.

The South Waziristan operation has involved more than 30,000 regular Army and Frontier Corps troops backed by artillery, attack helicopters, and Pakistani Air Force ground attack fighters. At the outset of the operation, the Army claimed that more than 10,000 Taliban fighters backed by 1,500 foreign fighters, largely from Central Asia, were dug into the region and prepared to wage a pitched battle to defend their turf.

But instead, the Taliban chose to preserve their forces rather than sacrifice them to the advancing Pakistani Army, US military and intelligence officials who closely monitor the region told The Long War Journal. Previous operations in South Waziristan have involved fewer forces and were often led by the poorly trained and equipped paramilitary Frontier Corps, which allowed the Taliban to stand and fight.

“This time, it was clear the Army meant business, and like any smart guerilla force, the Taliban decided not to blunt their best forces while fighting a losing battle,” one official said. “They learned from Swat,” the official continued, referring to the Army’s spring and summer offensive that resulted in thousands of Taliban fighters killed or captured.

US intelligence officials are concerned that Syria is becoming an al Qaeda haven, as the terror group becomes increasingly intertwined with Ba’athist groups operating from Iraq’s neighbor to the west.

Al Qaeda has refocused its efforts to build an infrastructure in eastern Syria after its network in Iraq was decimated by Iraqi and US security forces from 2007 to 2009, and now the organization is partnering with former Ba’athists from Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“A major concern is that eastern Syria will begin to look like northwestern Pakistan,” where al Qaeda has joined forces with the Taliban and directs attacks to destabilize Afghanistan, a senior US military intelligence official told The Long War Journal.

In late 2008, the situation in eastern Syria came to a head when US special operations forces struck at al Qaeda’s facilitation network in the town of Sukkariya near Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, just five miles from the Iraqi border. US troops killed Abu Ghadiya, al Qaeda’s senior facilitator, and his senior staff during the October 2008 raid.

After Ghadiya was killed, al Qaeda sent a senior ideologue from Pakistan to Syria to partner with a dangerous operative who runs the network that funnels foreign fighters, cash, and weapons into western Iraq. Sheikh Issa al Masri is thought to have entered Syria in June 2009, where he paired up with Abu Khalaf, a senior al Qaeda operative who has been instrumental in reviving al Qaeda in Iraq’s network in eastern Syria and directing terror operations in Iraq, a US intelligence official told The Long War Journal.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has opened a new training camp in the South. The new camp highlights Yemen’s value to al Qaeda in waging its global terror campaign.

The camp is based in the Al Jaza area in the district of Mudiyah in the southern province of Abyan. The camp is said to house more than 400 local and foreign fighters. Yemenis, Saudis, and Somalis make up the vast majority of the fighters.

The camp was established with the approval of the central government, according to a report in Saru Hamyir, an Arabic-language Yemeni news website. The existence of the camp was confirmed by US military and intelligence officials familiar with the region.

The weak Yemeni government is known to support al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula while targeting jihadi groups that do not adhere to a peace agreement signed in January.

The government supports the group in exchange for trained fighters to battle the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Sa’dah in the North. The government is currently battling the Houthi rebels in a fight that dragged in the Saudis when the Houthis attacked and took control of a border checkpoint.

Doctors and officials in Fallujah are appealing to the international community for an investigation into the unnatural increase in birth defects, 5 years after two major battles between the U.S. military and Sunni militia groups took place there.

The war-ravaged population center has seen an increase of up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants since pre-war levels, according to a report by the UK’s Guardian. Documented statistics for birth defects in Fallujah have only emerged in recent months, but the rate of abormalities, including early-life cancers, is high enough to cause alarm at Fallujah’s General Hospital.

“We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies,” the hospital’s director, Dr Ayman Qais, told the Guardian. “Before 2003 I was seeing sporadic numbers of deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities has increased dramatically.”

“Most are in the head and spinal cord, but there are also many deficiencies in lower limbs,” he said. “There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of less than two years with brain tumors. This is now a focus area of multiple tumors.”

Fallujah was the site of the only two ‘set-piece’ battles to take place after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Fighter jets bombed the city and heavy artillery was used in conjunction with the controversial incendiary white phosphorus.

Read more at Rawstory

By Mike Lillis 11/21/09 6:45 AM

The Democrats downplaying the gravity of new recommendations for breast cancer screening have left out an inconvenient fact: their health care bills would automatically adopt them.

Both the House and Senate health reform proposals would force insurance plans to follow the new mammogram guidelines as part of a minimum swath of services deemed by the legislation to be medically essential. The recommendations were an unexpected wildcard in the middle of an already contentious health reform debate, and they’ve caused Democrats to de-emphasize their significance at the same time that some in the party are calling for a legislative fix to nullify them.

The animated reaction to the recommendations follows several weeks in which women’s reproductive health had been at the forefront of the health reform debate, after the House passed a provision limiting coverage of abortion under private plans. The saga has been a distraction to Democrats as they aim to enact the most sweeping health care reform in generations, and it’s complicated their defense against GOP-fueled charges that their proposals would lead to a rationing of care. House leaders have already passed their version of the bill, but the debate in the Senate is just beginning, with upper-chamber leaders scheduled to vote Saturday on a procedural measure to bring their bill to the floor.

The mammogram episode has also revealed the influence of a previously obscure preventive-medicine panel, raised questions about the effectiveness of the Democrats’ reform proposals to weed out unnecessary medical procedures, and highlighted the potential complications when the entrenched habits of patients and providers are called into question by medical science.

“These new recommendations,” breast cancer specialist David Gorski wrote this week, “are a classic example of what happens when the shades of gray that characterize the messy, difficult world of clinical research meet public health policy, where simple messages are needed in order to motivate public acceptance of a screening test.”

Read more at Washington Independent

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

Obama is expected to announce a decision on an escalation of troop levels for Afghanistan shortly after returning from his trip to Asia on Friday, which would be the second such escalation of his young presidency. That decision follows a request issued in September from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in which McChrystal delivered the Obama administration with a palette of different troop-level options to turn around a faltering war effort. While White House officials have cautioned reporters that Obama has made no final choice on the size of a troop increase, a widely re-reported McClatchy story claimed that the administration was likely to send 34,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, which would raise U.S. troop levels in the eight-year war to an all-time high of 102,000. It is likely that Obama would include members of the other military services, especially the Marines, in any troop increase, but the vast majority of any new troop complement will come from the Army.

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

Click to Enlarge: Army National Guard combat brigade deployment data. (Source: U.S. Army)

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.

Click to Enlarge: U.S. Army combat brigade deployment information. (Source: U.S. Army)

Furthermore, not all brigades are the same. Some are built around heavy equipment like tanks, while others are primarily light, mobile infantrymen. According to a September report by the Institute for the Study of War, a pro-escalation think-tank in Washington, no so-called “heavy” brigades have been sent to Afghanistan to date, a condition likely owing to Afghanistan’s lack of paved roads, high elevations and uneven rural terrain, all of which are inhospitable to tanks and other heavy vehicles. But of the 14 brigades available as of December 2009, five of them are heavy brigades, according to the information provided by the Army to TWI, accounting for 19,000 of the available 50,600 active-duty soldiers. There is precedent in Iraq for re-tasking heavy brigades as light brigades by deploying them without their heavy vehicles, as the Institute for the Study of War’s report points out. But there is no precedent for such a thing in Afghanistan. If the Obama administration decides not to re-task heavy brigades as light brigades, the pool of active-duty soldiers immediately available for Afghanistan shrinks to 31,600 soldiers.

Read more at Washington Independent

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 22, 2009

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.

While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world’s climate — nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal — public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.

In one e-mail, the center’s director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones writes. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Read more at Washington Post