Command the Raven

From News Yahoo

Game show contestants turn torturers in a new psychological experiment for French television, zapping a man with electricity until he cries for mercy — then zapping him again until he seems to drop dead.

“The Game of Death” has all the trappings of a traditional television quiz show, with a roaring crowd and a glamorous and well-known hostess urging the players on under gaudy studio lights.

But the contestants did not know they were taking part in an experiment to find out whether television could push them to outrageous lengths, and which has prompted comparisons with the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

“We were amazed to find that 81 percent of the participants obeyed” the sadistic orders of the television presenter, said Christophe Nick, the maker of the documentary for the state-owned France 2 channel which airs Wednesday.

“They are not equipped to disobey,” he added. “They don’t want to do it, they try to convince the authority figure that they should stop, but they don’t manage to,” he told AFP.

Nick and a team of psychologists recruited 80 volunteers, telling them they were taking part in a pilot for a new television show.

The game: posing questions to another “player” and punishing him with up to 460 volts of electricity when he gets them wrong — even until his cries of “Let me go!” fall silent and he appears to have died.

Not knowing that the screaming victim is really an actor, the apparently reluctant contestants yield to the orders of the presenter and chants of “Punishment!” from a studio audience who also believed the game was real.

Nick said 80 percent of the contestants went all the way, zapping the victim with the maximum 460 volts until he appeared to die. Out of 80 players, just 16 walked out.

One contestant interviewed afterwards said she went along with the torture despite knowing that her own grandparents were Jews who had been persecuted by the Nazis.

“Since I was a little girl, I have always asked myself why they (the Nazis) did it. How could they obey such orders? And there I was, obeying them myself,” said Sophie, quoted in a book by the film makers.

“I was worried about the contestant,” said another contestant. “At the same time, I was afraid to spoil the programme.”

The experiment was modelled on an infamous study at Yale University in the 1960s, which used similar methods to examine how obedient citizens could come to take part in mass murder.

Some observers were sceptical of the manipulative way the participants were handled.

Jacques Semelin, a psychologist and historian who studies genocide and totalitarianism, pointed out that the participants were made to sign a contract obliging them to obey the presenter’s instructions.

“There are elements of manipulation from the start,” said Jacques Semelin, a psychologist and historian who studies genocide and totalitarianism.

“They are obedient, but it’s more than mere obedience — there is the audience, the cameras everywhere.”

But for the film makers, the manipulative power of television was exactly the point.

“The questioners are … in the grip of the authority of television,” said Jean-Leon Beauvois, a psychologist who took part in the documentary.

“When it decides to abuse its power, television can do anything to anybody,” said Nick. “It has an absolutely terrifying power.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

From News CNet

Two U.S. senators met with President Obama on Thursday to push for a national ID card with biometric information such as a fingerprint, hand scan, or iris scan that all employers would be required to verify.

In an opinion article published in Friday’s edition of the Washington Post, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) say the new identification cards will “ensure that illegal workers cannot get jobs” and “dramatically decrease illegal immigration.”

Schumer and Graham pitched the idea to President Obama during a private meeting Thursday at the White House. Graham said afterward that Obama “welcomed” their proposal for a new ID card law; the White House said in a statement that the senators’ plan was “promising.”

This push for a national ID is part of what the senators say is a necessary overhaul of immigration law, including additional border security, more temporary workers, and a form of amnesty for illegal immigrants already in the United States. It comes just two days before a rally in Washington, D.C. sponsored by groups including the AFL-CIO, Farmworker Justice, and the National Council of La Raza that also calls for amnesty.

Linking national ID cards to immigration reform is a popular idea in Washington political circles. After all, if every U.S. citizen has a biometric-equipped cards, the thinking goes, it’s easy to order employers not to give a job to someone without one.

But concerns about privacy, security, and federalism have torpedoed each one of these proposals so far. A similar national ID plan–which also required that employers do verifications–sunk President Bush’s broader proposal for immigration reform in 2007. A proposal three years earlier by Rep. David Drier (R-Calif.) to create federal ID cards with Americans’ photograph, Social Security number, and an “encrypted electronic strip” with additional information was even less successful.

Then there was the controversial Real ID Act, which tried unsuccessfully to compel states to standardize their drivers’ licenses. But a libertarian grassroots revolt, including an anti-Real ID vote a few weeks ago in the Utah legislature, has halted Homeland Security’s plans.

Under the Schumer-Graham proposal, extracting biometric information from hundreds of millions of Americans is no trivial task. It could mean extraordinary lines at regional Social Security offices–and an inconvenience for Americans switching jobs who haven’t had their retina or DNA scanned in and stored on the ID card.

“We would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card,” the senators’ opinion article says. “Each card’s unique biometric identifier would be stored only on the card; no government database would house everyone’s information. The cards would not contain any private information, medical information or tracking devices.”

A Wall Street Journal article published March 8 included an interview with Schumer during which he said: “It’s the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking…If you say they can’t get a job when they come here, you’ll stop it.” It said the most likely type of biometric data to be included would be a scan of the veins in the top of the hand.

“Our framework remains a work in progress,” Graham said in a statement after Thursday’s meeting. “The president welcomed the framework and indicated that he needs time to review the structure. We will share our ideas with our colleagues in the weeks ahead, so we can finally solve this difficult problem.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

From Media Rice Edu

Long lines at store checkouts could be history if a new technology created in part at Rice University comes to pass.

Rice researchers, in collaboration with a team led by Gyou-jin Cho at Sunchon National University in Korea, have come up with an inexpensive, printable transmitter that can be invisibly embedded in packaging. It would allow a customer to walk a cart full of groceries or other goods past a scanner on the way to the car; the scanner would read all items in the cart at once, total them up and charge the customer’s account while adjusting the store’s inventory.

More advanced versions could collect all the information about the contents of a store in an instant, letting a retailer know where every package is at any time.

The technology reported in the March issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices is based on a carbon-nanotube-infused ink for ink-jet printers first developed in the Rice lab of James Tour, the T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science. The ink is used to make thin-film transistors, a key element in radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be printed on paper or plastic.

“We are going to a society where RFID is a key player,” said Cho, a professor of printed electronics engineering at Sunchon, who expects the technology to mature in five years. Cho and his team are developing the electronics as well as the roll-to-roll printing process that, he said, will bring the cost of printing the tags down to a penny apiece and make them ubiquitous.

RFID tags are almost everywhere already. The tiny electronic transmitters are used to identify and track products and farm animals. They’re in passports, library books and devices that let drivers pass through tollbooths without digging for change.

The technology behind RFID goes back to the 1940s, when Léon Theremin, inventor of the self-named electronic music instrument heard in so many ’50s science fiction and horror movies, came up with a spy tool for the Soviet Union that drew power from and retransmitted radio waves.

RFID itself came into being in the 1970s and has been widely adopted by the Department of Defense and industry to track shipping containers as they make their way around the world, among many other uses.

But RFID tags to date are largely silicon-based. Paper or plastic tags printed as part of a package would cut costs dramatically. Cho expects his roll-to-roll technique, which uses a gravure process rather than ink-jet printers, to replace the bar codes now festooned on just about everything you can buy.

Cho, Tour and their teams reported in the journal a three-step process to print one-bit tags, including the antenna, electrodes and dielectric layers, on plastic foil. Cho’s lab is working on 16-bit tags that would hold a more practical amount of information and be printable on paper as well.

Cho came across Tour’s inks while spending a sabbatical at Rice in 2005. “Professor Tour first recommended we use single-walled carbon nanotubes for printing thin-film transistors,” Cho said.

Tour’s lab continues to support the project in an advisory role and occasionally hosts Cho’s students. Tour said Rice owns half of the patent, still pending, upon which all of the technology is based. “Gyou-jin has carried the brunt of this, and it’s his sole project,” Tour said. “We are advisers and we still send him the raw materials” — the single-walled carbon nanotubes produced at Rice.

Printable RFIDs are practical because they’re passive. The tags power up when hit by radio waves at the right frequency and return the information they contain. “If there’s no power source, there’s no lifetime limit. When they receive the RF signal, they emit,” Tour said.

There are several hurdles to commercialization. First, the device must be reduced to the size of a bar code, about a third the size of the one reported in the paper, Tour said. Second, its range must increase.

“Right now, the emitter has to be pretty close to the tags, but it’s getting farther all the time,” he said. “The practical distance to have it ring up all the items in your shopping cart is a meter. But the ultimate would be to signal and get immediate response back from every item in your store – what’s on the shelves, their dates, everything.

“At 300 meters, you’re set – you have real-time information on every item in a warehouse. If something falls behind a shelf, you know about it. If a product is about to expire, you know to move it to the front – or to the bargain bin.”

Tour allayed concerns about the fate of nanotubes in packaging. “The amount of nanotubes in an RFID tag is probably less than a picogram. That means you can produce one trillion of them from a gram of nanotubes – a miniscule amount. Our HiPco reactor produces a gram of nanotubes an hour, and that would be enough to handle every item in every Walmart.

- From Prophecy News Watch

From Wired

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

“We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,” says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.”

The dealership used a system called Webtech Plus as an alternative to repossessing vehicles that haven’t been paid for. Operated by Cleveland-based Pay Technologies, the system lets car dealers install a small black box under vehicle dashboards that responds to commands issued through a central website, and relayed over a wireless pager network. The dealer can disable a car’s ignition system, or trigger the horn to begin honking, as a reminder that a payment is due.
The system will not stop a running vehicle.

Texas Auto Center began fielding complaints from baffled customers the last week in February, many of whom wound up missing work, calling tow trucks or disconnecting their batteries to stop the honking. The troubles stopped five days later, when Texas Auto Center reset the Webtech Plus passwords for all its employee accounts, says Garcia. Then police obtained access logs from Pay Technologies, and traced the saboteur’s IP address to Ramos-Lopez’s AT&T internet service, according to a police affidavit filed in the case.

Ramos-Lopez’s account had been closed when he was terminated from Texas Auto Center in a workforce reduction last month, but he allegedly got in through another employee’s account, Garcia says. At first, the intruder targeted vehicles by searching on the names of specific customers. Then he discovered he could pull up a database of all 1,100 Auto Center customers whose cars were equipped with the device. He started going down the list in alphabetical order, vandalizing the records, disabling the cars and setting off the horns.

“Omar was pretty good with computers,” says Garcia.

The incident is the first time an intruder has abused the no-start system, according to Jim Krueger, co-owner of Pay Technologies. “It was a fairly straightforward situation,” says Krueger. “He had retained a password, and what happened was he went in and created a little bit of havoc.”

First rolled out about 10 years ago, remote immobilization systems are a controversial answer to delinquent car payments, with critics voicing concerns that debtors could suffer needless humiliation, or find themselves stranded during an emergency. Proponents say the systems let financers extend credit to consumers who might otherwise be ineligible for an auto loan.

- From Prophecy News Watch

From NY Times

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?

Probably not.

Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.

Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.

“Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,” said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division. “You can find out who an individual is without it.”

In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male.

So far, this type of powerful data mining, which relies on sophisticated statistical correlations, is mostly in the realm of university researchers, not identity thieves and marketers.

But the F.T.C. is worried that rules to protect privacy have not kept up with technology. The agency is convening on Wednesday the third of three workshops on the issue.

Its concerns are hardly far-fetched. Last fall, Netflix awarded $1 million to a team of statisticians and computer scientists who won a three-year contest to analyze the movie rental history of 500,000 subscribers and improve the predictive accuracy of Netflix’s recommendation software by at least 10 percent.

On Friday, Netflix said that it was shelving plans for a second contest — bowing to privacy concerns raised by the F.T.C. and a private litigant. In 2008, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the customer data released for that first contest, despite being stripped of names and other direct identifying information, could often be “de-anonymized” by statistically analyzing an individual’s distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations.

In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual’s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.

You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say.

The power of computers to identify people from social patterns alone was demonstrated last year in a study by the same pair of researchers that cracked Netflix’s anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Narayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University.

By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.

“When you link these large data sets together, a small slice of our behavior and the structure of our social networks can be identifying,” Mr. Shmatikov said.

Even more unnerving to privacy advocates is the work of two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. In a paper published last year, Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross reported that they could accurately predict the full, nine-digit Social Security numbers for 8.5 percent of the people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003 — nearly five million individuals.

Social Security numbers are prized by identity thieves because they are used both as identifiers and to authenticate banking, credit card and other transactions.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers used publicly available information from many sources, including profiles on social networks, to narrow their search for two pieces of data crucial to identifying people — birthdates and city or state of birth.

That helped them figure out the first three digits of each Social Security number, which the government had assigned by location. The remaining six digits had been assigned through methods the government didn’t disclose, although they were related to when the person applied for the number. The researchers used projections about those applications as well as other public data, like the Social Security numbers of dead people, and then ran repeated cycles of statistical correlation and inference to partly re-engineer the government’s number-assignment system.

To be sure, the work by Mr. Acquisti and Mr. Gross suggests a potential, not actual, risk. But unpublished research by them explores how criminals could use similar techniques for large-scale identity-theft schemes.

More generally, privacy advocates worry that the new frontiers of data collection, brokering and mining, are largely unregulated. They fear “online redlining,” where products and services are offered to some consumers and not others based on statistical inferences and predictions about individuals and their behavior.

The F.T.C. and Congress are weighing steps like tighter industry requirements and the creation of a “do not track” list, similar to the federal “do not call” list, to stop online monitoring.

But Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies social networks, is skeptical that rules will have much impact. His advice: “When you’re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you’re doing it in public — because increasingly, it is.”

-From Prophecy News Watch

From Guardian UK

Tony Blair is preparing to launch a “faith offensive” across the United States over the next year, after building up relationships with a network of influential religious leaders and faith organisations.

With Afghanistan and Iraq casting a shadow over his popularity at home in Britain, Blair’s focus has increasingly shifted across the Atlantic, to where the nexus of faith and power is immutable and he is feted like a rock star.

According to the annual accounts of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, a UK-based charity that promotes cohesion between the major faiths, the foundation is to develop a US arm that will pursue a host of faith-based projects. The accounts show that his foundation has an impressive – and, in at least one case, controversial – set of faith contacts. Sitting on some £4.5m in funds as of April last year, mostly gathered through donations, it is now well placed to make its voice heard.

The foundation’s advisory council of religious leaders includes Rick Warren, powerful founder of the California-based Saddleback church. It attracts congregations of nearly 20,000 and is reportedly one of the largest in the US. Warren, who has addressed the UN and the World Economic Forum in Davos, has been named one of the “15 world leaders who matter most” and one of the “100 most influential people in the world”.

His influence was confirmed in December 2008 when Barack Obama chose him to give the invocation at his presidential inauguration. But the decision angered many liberals, who see Warren as an opponent of gay rights and abortion on demand; a prominent alliance with Warren is likely to attract similar attacks on the former British prime minister.

Also on the council is David Coffey, president of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA), a Virginia-based network of churches that spans the globe and is particularly active in the US.

Another initiative has been to team up with the Belinda Stronach Foundation in Toronto. Unknown in the UK, Stronach, daughter of a Canadian billionaire, is hugely influential in Canada where as a philanthropist, businesswoman and former politician she has served in both the Conservative and Liberal parties. Attractive and barely into her 40s, media commentators have dubbed her “bubba’s blonde”, a reference to her friendship with Bill Clinton.

According to the accounts, Blair intends to open an office in Toronto to develop the relationship.

His desire for North America to be the focus of his faith-based operations was confirmed by the decision to hold his foundation’s inaugural event in May 2008 in New York, for the “charity’s key partners and religious stakeholders”.

The accounts also shine a light on the close connections the foundation now enjoys with major political institutions in the US. “With the Washington-based Centre for Interfaith Action, the foundation supported a meeting of major international organisations active in faith-based approaches to combating malaria (plus the White House, World Bank, UN, World Health Organisation) to co-ordinate international efforts,” the accounts state.

That Blair, a charismatic politician driven by faith, should be at home across the Atlantic is no surprise to political analysts. “He comes across as confident and persuasive,” said Professor Shawn Bowler, of the University of California at Riverside. “He does not talk like a modern robo-candidate in the way so many US political figures do.” Unlike in the UK, Blair’s religious fervour is seen as a strength. “Blair is very open about his faith and that plays a lot better in the US than in Britain,” Bowler said.

But the overtly religious dimension has drawn criticism. “The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is a fundamentally flawed concept,” said Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society. “If religion is constantly at the fore, then the old suspicions and hatreds will continue to fester.”

Other North American faith-based initiatives endorsed by the foundation include the New York-based Global Nomads Group, which brings together young people through video conferences “to discuss the global issues that affect their lives”, and the Faiths Act Fellowship, which selects “30 young leaders aged 18-25, drawn from the different faiths from the US, UK and Canada, to embark on a 10-month journey of interfaith service”.

Blair’s status is such that he is now called on to sprinkle stardust at religious gatherings, such as a speech he delivered at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Even his autobiography, The Journey, for which he was paid a £4.6m advance, appears to be aimed at the US market. “Tony Blair is an extremely popular figure in North America,” said Sonny Mehta, his publisher. “His memoir is refreshing, both for its candour and vivid portrayal of political life.”

So embedded is he that Blair regularly crops up in Washington society diaries. Last September, the former Republican vice-president, Dick Cheney, was dining in the same restaurant. Blair got top billing in the gossip columns.

- From Prophecy News Watch

From Debka

Iran’s Lebanese proxy, the Hizballah militia, has set up a Palestinian operations unit for 2,000 new recruits from the Lebanese Fatah, who came over in recent days full armed with their commander Col. Munir Maqdah, an important handler of the Fatah terrorist apparatus on the West Bank.

Reporting this, debkafile’s military sources add: The first major Palestinian defection to the Shiite Hizballah has given Iran and its proxy a large foot inside Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization and swelled Hizballah’s fighting strength by some 15 percent.

Most of the defectors came from the big Ain Hilwa refugee town near the southern Lebanese port of Sidon.

Col. Munir Maqdah, commander of Fatah units in Ain Hilwa, carried the formal title of Commander of the Armed Struggle Units of Palestinian Forces in Lebanon.

Mahmoud Abbas reacted to the blow by signing orders expelling Maqdah from the Fatah along with dozens of Palestinians officers who followed him. He was forced to accept that Fatah-Lebanon’s 5,000-man fighting strength has been pared down to 3,000 and its top officer ranks depleted.

The biggest loss was Maqdah, who maintained close ties with the Palestinian terrorist sleeper cells in the West Bank towns of Nablus and Jenin - mainly by means of large dollops of cash. His networks and contacts are now available to Tehran.

The renegade officer also acted as liaison between Fatah and al Qaeda’s affiliates in Lebanon, such as Fatah al-Islam. His men took active part in more than one Katyusha rocket bombardment of northern Israel from South Lebanon.

- From Prophecy News Watch

From Debka

“Israel is one of our closest allies and we and the Israeli people have a special bond that’s not going to go away,” said President Barack Obama to Fox News Wednesday, March 17, after denying any crisis in the relationship. debkafile’s Washington sources note that denial makes a lot of sense for the president because it lets him off the hook for dealing with it.

However, in Jerusalem, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu called his inner cabinet into its second session on the crisis that same night. The seven ministers were asked to review the situation after President Obama and secretary of state Hillary Clinton turned down their initial proposals for easing the upset and laid down three pre-conditions for restoring normal relations with Jerusalem:

1. The Netanyahu government must extend the 10-month freeze on West Bank settlement construction to include East Jerusalem;
2. When the moratorium runs out in September, it must be renewed for the duration of peace negotiations with the Palestinians;
3. Israeli must make more concessions to the Palestinian Authority and its chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

The Israeli government was informed that until those conditions were met, its ministers would not be received in Washington by high-level American officials - a virtual boycott, which downgrades the normal diplomatic, strategic and security exchanges between the two administrations to the level of senators and the special Middle East envoy George Mitchell.

Netanyahu tried offering the Obama administration a number of compromise proposals, such as the suspension of construction in East Jerusalem and the city’s outlying Jewish suburbs until September, but they were rejected, as was an offer to prohibit further Jewish purchases of land and buildings in Jerusalem’s Arab districts during peace negotiations.

Obama and Clinton made it clear they would brook no departures from their three demands, which Israel is required to treat as an ultimatum.

Neither party to the difference has mentioned the US administration’s fourth condition for resuming normal relations: an Israeli commitment to refrain from attacking Iran’s nuclear program without prior US consent. Because that commitment has not been offered, administration officials are continuing to hammer Israel in every possible arena. Indeed, the gloves are now off in earnest for insinuations that Israel’s settlement policy is the root-cause of Iran’s drive for a nuclear bomb and of the conflicts endangering American lives in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Vice President Joe Biden launched this drive, when he reportedly attacked Netanyahu for the announcement of 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem by saying: “What you are doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

A much-admired American military figure, CENTCOM chief, Gen. David Petraeus, was the next US official to put this linkage into words. In his briefing to a Senate panel, he said Wednesday, March 16: Clearly the tensions on these issues with Israel have enormous effect on the strategic context in which we operate in the Central Command’s area of responsibility.”

The general denied he had as yet formally asked for the Palestinian territories to be transferred to his command, but added: “In fact, staff members at various times have discussed asking for the Palestinian territories to be added to CENTCOM’s turf.”

debkafile’s military sources explain that, if approved, this step would be tantamount to providing the Palestinians with an American military umbrella against Israel.

More than one friend of Israel demurred against the Petraeus suggestion.

Former presidential candidate, Republican Senator John McCain, caught on fast to the way the wind is blowing in Obama’s Washington: During his testimony, he put in: “Isn’t the issue not the issue of settlements as much as it is the existence of the state of Israel…? So maybe you could put it all into the larger context of what needs to be done to reduce tensions on the US’s closest ally and friend in many respects.”

The general did not rise to the senator’s challenge, except for a polite: “Absolutely true.”

Some of the more respectable US and British media are playing up the theme that Israel has shot itself in the foot and therefore deserves what’s coming, namely escalating punishment from the Obama administration.

- From Prophecy News Watch

From Jerusalem Post

The stupidest program the US government has ever undertaken”; that’s how I last year called American efforts to improve the Palestinian Authority military force. Slightly hyperbolic, yes, but the description fits because those efforts enhance the fighting power of enemies of the US and its Israeli ally.

First, a primer about the program, drawing on a recent Center of Near East Policy Research study by David Bedein and Arlene Kushner: Shortly after Yasser Arafat died in late 2004, the US government established the Office of the US Security Coordinator to reform, recruit, train and equip the PA militia (called the National Security Forces or Quwwat al-Amn al-Watani) and make them politically accountable.

For nearly all of its existence, the office has been headed by Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton. Since 2007, American taxpayers have funded it to the tune of $100 million a year. Many agencies of the US government have been involved in the program, including the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the Secret Service and branches of the military.

The PA militia has in total about 30,000 troops, of which four battalions comprising 2,100 troops have passed scrutiny for lack of criminal or terrorist ties and undergone 1,400 hours of training at an American facility in Jordan. There they study subjects ranging from small-unit tactics and crime-scene investigations to first aid and human rights law.

With Israeli permission, these troops have deployed in areas of Hebron, Jenin and Nablus. So far, this experiment has gone well, prompting widespread praise. Sen. John Kerry calls the program “extremely encouraging,” and Thomas Friedman of The New York Times discerns in the US-trained troops a possible “Palestinian peace partner for Israel” taking shape.

Looking ahead, however, I predict that those troops will more likely be a war partner than a peace partner for Israel. Consider their likely role in several scenarios:

• No Palestinian state: Dayton proudly calls the US-trained forces “founders of a Palestinian state,” a polity he expects to come into existence by 2011. What if – as has happened often before – the Palestinian state does not emerge on schedule? Dayton himself warns of “big risks,” presumably meaning that his freshly-minted troops would start directing their firepower against Israel.

• Palestinian state: The PA has never wavered in its goal of eliminating Israel, as the briefest glance at documentation collected by Palestinian Media Watch makes evident. Should the PA achieve statehood, it will certainly pursue its historic goal – only now equipped with a shiny new American-trained soldiery and arsenal.

• The PA defeats Hamas: For the same reason, in the unlikely event that the PA prevails over Hamas, its Gaza-based Islamist rival, it will by incorporating Hamas troops into its own militia and then order the combined troops to attack Israel. The rival organizations may differ in outlook, methods and personnel, but they share the overarching goal of eliminating Israel.

• Hamas defeats the PA: Should the PA succumb to Hamas, it will absorb at least some of “Dayton’s men” into its own militia and deploy them in the effort to eliminate the Jewish state.

• Hamas and PA cooperate: Even as Dayton imagines he is preparing a militia to fight Hamas, the PA leadership participates in Egyptian-sponsored talks with Hamas about power sharing – raising the specter that the US trained forces and Hamas will coordinate attacks on Israel.

The law of unintended consequences provides one temporary consolation: As Washington sponsors the PA forces and Teheran sponsors those of Hamas, Palestinian forces are more ideologically riven, perhaps weakening their overall ability to damage Israel.

Admittedly, Dayton’s men are behaving themselves at present. But whatever the future brings – state, no state, Hamas defeats the PA, the PA defeats Hamas or the two cooperate – these militiamen will eventually turn their guns against Israel. When that happens, Dayton and the geniuses idealistically building the forces of Israel’s enemy will likely shrug and say, “No one could have foreseen this outcome.”

Not so. Some of us foresee it and are warning against it. More deeply, some of us understand that the 1993 Oslo process did not end the Palestinian leadership’s drive to eliminate Israel.

The Dayton mission needs to be stopped before it does more harm. Congress should immediately cut all funding for the Office of the US Security Coordinator.

- From Prophecy News Watch

From News Max

FBI Director Robert Mueller warned Congress on Wednesday of ongoing al-Qaida efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack the United States.

“Al-Qaida remains committed to its goal of conducting attacks inside the United States,” Mueller told a House appropriations subcommittee. “Further, al-Qaida’s continued efforts to access chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear material pose a serious threat to the United States.”

To accomplish its goals of new attacks on the American homeland, al-Qaida “seeks to infiltrate overseas operatives who have no known nexus to terrorism into the United States using both legal and illegal methods of entry,” Mueller said.

In February, Sheikh Abdullah al-Nasifi, a known al-Qaida recruiter in Kuwait, boasted on al Jazeera television that Mexico’s border with the United States was the ideal infiltration point for terrorists seeking to attack America.

“Four pounds of anthrax – in a suitcase this big – carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the U.S., are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour if it is properly spread in population centers there,” al-Nasifi said.

“There is no need for airplanes, conspiracies, timings and so on. One person, with the courage to carry four pounds of anthrax, will go to the White House lawn, and will spread this ‘confetti’ all over them, and then will do these cries of joy. It will turn into a real ‘celebration,’” al-Nasifi said. “9/11 will be small change in comparison. Am I right?”

Mueller echoed those threats in his congressional testimony Wednesday, reminding lawmakers that a 2008 National Intelligence Estimate on the threat of a terrorist WMD attack “concluded that it remains the intent of terrorist adversaries to seek the means and capability to use WMD against the United States at home and abroad.”

Citing the final report of the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism issued in December 2008, he warned that “the risks are growing faster than our multilayered defenses” to prevent such an attack.

The WMD commission report warned that without urgent and decisive action, “it was more likely than not that terrorists would attack a major city somewhere in the world with a weapon of mass destruction by 2013.”

Although not discounting a possible terrorist nuclear attack, the commission concluded that “terrorists are more likely to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon,” and noted that this “conclusion was publicly affirmed by then Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.”

“Osama bin Laden has said that obtaining WMDs is a ‘religious duty’ and is reported to have sought to perpetrate a ‘Hiroshima’ on United States soil,” Mueller told lawmakers. “Globalization makes it easier for terrorists, groups, and lone actors to gain access to and transfer WMD materials, knowledge, and technology throughout the world.”

The Obama administration is asking for major increases in funding to detect illicit nuclear material overseas and to help Russia to continue securing its nuclear weapons facilities, in an effort to prevent terrorists from gaining access to nuclear weapons material.

Mueller warned that “the margin of safety is shrinking, not growing.”

Mueller’s testimony is only the latest in a series of warnings from top intelligence officials that the threat of a terrorist WMD attack on America is growing.

At the annual global threats hearings on Feb. 2, the directors of the five major U.S. intelligence organizations told Sen. Diane Feinstein they were certain that terrorists would attempt another attack on the United States within three to six months.

Former CIA director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden told Newsmax recently that his former agency has taken it as “a matter of faith” that, if al-Qaida obtained a nuclear weapon, they wouldn’t hesitate to use it against the United States. “If they had the ability, they would do it,” he told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview in March.

- From Prophecy News Watch