Blackwater reaches 42-million dollar settlement with US

AFP

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The US State Department said Monday that Xe, the controversial private security firm formerly known as Blackwater, has agreed to pay 42 million dollars in fines to settle alleged export violations.

It said the civil settlement was reached on Wednesday for 288 violations “involving the unauthorized export of defense articles and provision of defense services to foreign end-users” in a number of countries between 2003 and 2009.

“These violations did not involve sensitive technologies or cause a known harm to national security,” the State Department said in a statement.

Many of the alleged breaches occurred while Xe, which protects US officials in Iraq and Afghanistan, was “providing services in support of US government programs and military operations abroad,” it said

The State Department said that because the firm had taken steps to tackle the causes of its violations, it will not be considered ineligible for future contracts.

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Stolen U.S. Dollars exit Afghan airport controlled by Karzai brother

Jeff Stein
Washington Post Blog

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Afghan intelligence service reports in the hands of NATO-led forces say that the major exit point for stolen American dollars is through the airport in Kandahar, controlled by President Hamid Karzai’s brother.

According to a Washington Post report on Friday, U.S. and Afghan authorities, “alarmed by an exodus of money from Afghanistan … are trying to constrict a flow of cash through the country’s main airport,” in Kabul. The airport, according to the report, is “believed to be a major conduit for drug proceeds and diverted foreign aid.”

But a former CIA official who works with Afghanistan’s spy service said the airport at Kandahar dwarfs Kabul as an exit point for millions of dollars in pilfered U.S. aid money and drug proceeds. The president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, president of the provincial council in Kandahar, has been repeatedly accused of controlling the opium trade there.

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P2OG – Bomb kills head of Iran’s military drone program

Debka.com

On Aug. 1, Reza Baruni,the father of Iran’s military UAV program, died in a mighty explosion that destroyed his closely secured villa, debkafile’s military and intelligence sources reveal. He lived in the high-scale neighborhood secluded for high Iranian officials in the southern town of Ahwaz in oil-rich Khuzestan.

Very few people in the country outside the top leaders and air force knew about his job and so his death was not generally appreciated as fatally stalling Iran’s military drone program for many years.

The official version produced the old standby of an exploding gas canister as the cause of the blast. However, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence source report that bombs were planted in at least three corners of the building and expertly rigged to explode simultaneously and bring the ceilings crashing down on its occupants. The bomber must therefore have had access to the Baruni home.

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Judge dismisses Apache lawsuit against Skull and Bones

Nora Caplan-Bricker
yaledailynews.com

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It looks like the public will not be learning any times soon whether the secret society Skull and Bones keeps an Apache warrior’s skull in its tomb.
A District of Columbia judge on July 27 dismissed a case that had been brought against the mysterious society, as well as the University and senior members of the U.S. government, in February 2009. The plaintiffs are 20 descendants of the legendary Native American chieftain Geronimo hoping to reclaim their ancestor’s remains. But their lawyer, Ramsey Clark — who has represented controversial figures such as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milovich — said Monday that he is not giving up.

“We’re obviously disappointed,” Clark said in a phone interview. “We believe that [this case] is awfully important, not only to the wishes of Geronimo himself, but to the spirit of the Indian people and their relationships to the government of the United States.”

The objective of the original suit is to gather Geronimo’s remains and reinter them near his birthplace at the head of the Gila River in New Mexico, thereby fulfilling what plaintiff Harlyn Geronimo says were his great-grandfather’s wishes. Geronimo is reportedly buried in a prisoner of war cemetery in Fort Sill, Okla., but according to an old legend, Prescott Bush — Yale graduate, Bonesman, father of former President George H.W. Bush ’48 and grandfather of former President George W. Bush ’68 — looted that grave in 1918 or 1919 and took the chief’s skull, along with some of his other bones and artifacts buried with him, back to the Skull and Bones tomb on High Street in New Haven.

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Sidney Harman – The Newsweek Owner’s Intelligence Connection

by Tim Shorrock
thedailybeast.com

Sidney Harman, who just bought Newsweek magazine, has for years been influential in the area of national security—and not just through his marriage to Rep. Jane Harman.

It’s well-known that Sidney Harman, the electronics mogul who just bought Newsweek, is married to Rep. Jane Harman, one of Washington’s heavyweights on intelligence.

Rep. Harman, a Democrat, spent eight years on the House Intelligence Committee and is chairwoman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence & Terrorism. She has had an intimate, and sometimes controversial, relationship to America’s spy agencies during her eight terms in Congress.

But few in Washington are aware that the real intelligence insider of the Harman family may be Sidney himself, through his connections to an obscure but highly influential organization known as Business Executives for National Security.

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New low-budget Bollywood film about a ‘fake Bin Laden video’ becomes global blockbuster

guardian.co.uk

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A small budget film about a fake Osama bin Laden video has become one of India’s biggest box office hits of the year and is about to hit American cinema screens.

Tere Bin Laden Production year: 2010 Country: Rest of the world Directors: Abhishek Sharma More on this film Tere Bin Laden (Without You Laden) has grossed more than $2m in India, despite having a first-time director and initially only being shown on 344 screens.

The film tells the story of a young journalist from Pakistan whose repeated attempts to obtain a visa to the US to pursue his media career are thwarted. Finally he resorts to unscrupulous means by making a bogus Bin Laden video to sell to the news channels with disastrous results.

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New Bin Laden tape reveals entire point of 9/11 was to build a mosque in lower Manhattan (satire)

The Spoof

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NY-A new audio tape released yesterday by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden divulges that the planned Cordoba House Mosque in downtown Manhattan-a short distance from the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks-is the final cog in the international terrorist’s plan to destroy America.

“In the name of Allah, most merciful and most beneficent, the goal for which the 19 brothers martyred themselves for is at last at reach: a mosque on Manhattan Island, the lair of the Zionist murders and their puppets.”

The controversial mosque, which is set to be erected a mere 600 feet from Ground Zero, has been opposed by a majority of New Yorkers and Americans who feel that placing an Islamic house of worship within walking distance of the remains of a deadly terrorist act carried out by Muslims is insensitive. Some have even gone so far as to say that allowing the mosque to exist would be a moral victory for radical Islamists around the world. As the new bin Laden tape reveals, that is exactly what the hunted terrorist leader had been planning all along.

Full Satire

Bin Laden’s cook receives secret sentencing (not a satire)

denverpost.com

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A former cook for Osama bin Laden’s entourage in Afghanistan has reached a secret agreement with the U.S. government that lets him serve his sentence at a minimum-security facility at Guantanamo Bay, according to statements by lawyers at a military commission Monday.

Ibrahim al-Qosi, 50, a native of Sudan who worked for bin Laden for years before the Sept. 11 attacks, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy and material support for terrorism as part of a pretrial agreement. The case marked the first conviction at Guantanamo Bay under President Barack Obama, whose administration had promised that reformed military commissions would offer greater due process and more transparency.

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Russian scientist: U.S. may be using ‘climate weapons’ against Russia, Central Asia

Ashley Cleek
rferl.org

As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, “At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries.”

The article has been carried by publications throughout Russia, including “International Affairs,” a journal published by the Foreign Ministry and by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

In an telephone interview with RFE/RL, Areshev appeared to back off from claims he made in the article, saying that he was merely positing a theory.

“First of all, I would like to say that what I wrote in that article, even the citations, does not in any way claim to a be final truth. It is, if you will, speculation, in other words, the definition of an hypothesis,” Areshev said.

Moscow is currently sweltering under record temperatures. On July 29 Moscow suffered its hottest day ever, with temperatures hitting 39 degrees (celsius).

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DARPA Tests New ‘Cyborg’ Prosthetic Arm

dailytech.com

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A revolutionary advancement in artificial limbs will provide the first hard-wired brain-control of bionic body parts.  The John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have joined forces to develop the brain-interface Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL). 

The limb will be controlled by computer cursors implanted in the brain and will restore the sense of touch by sending electrical impulses from the limb back to the sensory cortex.

APL was awarded a $34.5 million contract with the government agency to begin testing the prototype on human subjects over the next two years, according to a Hopkins Applied Physics Lab press release and Singularity Hub.

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