Calderon calls for bringing back assault weapons ban

The Houston Chronicle (Blog)

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Mexican President Felipe Calderon today linked the spike in drug-related violence in Mexico to the 2004 expiration of the U.S. ban on the sale of assault weapons.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, Calderon said U.S. guns have contributed to the bloody narco-terror wars on Mexican soil. He praised President Obama for attempting to crack down on the smuggling of American weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

At a joint press conference with U.S. President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Mexican leader declared the end of the assault weapons ban coincided with “the beginning of the harshest period” of the drug war and that “the vast majority of these weapons were sold” in the U.S.

Saying that the flow of weapons from north of the Rio Grande is “one of the greatest obstacles” to the Mexican government’s anti-cartel efforts, Calderon noted that there are nine weapons stores in the U.S. for each Walmart store in the U.S. and Mexico.

 

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Member of Los Zetas among five arrested for South Texas Casino Robbery

valleycentral.com

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An alleged member of the Zetas drug cartel is among five men arrested for the recent robbery of an 8-liner casino in Olmito.

Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio said Monday that alleged Zeta Drug Cartel member Rodolfo Casarez is in custody without bond.

Lucio said the arrest happened following an aggravated robbery at an 8-liner casino near Olmito on Friday.

He said four men allegedly went into the business armed with high-powered rifles and made off with $10,000 dollars in cash as well as jewelry belonging to the business and customers.

Authorities said Casarez is believed to be a former Gulf Cartel member, and is now a Zetas Drug Cartel member. They said he served as a look-out.

The other men arrested for the crime were Jose Manuel Sanchez Cepeda, Eduardo Perez Melendez, Manuel De Leon Rodriguez and Jose Aberto Fuentes.

 

CIA Spy Complex Being Built in Pakistan

kashmirwatch.com

 

At this crucial moment, the joint session of the Parliament has been considering the recommendations of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security (PCNS) about Pakistan’s foreign policy in general and the new terms of engagement with the United States including NATO and ISAf in particular in the backdrop of deadly Salala attacks, killing 24 Pakistani troops on November 26 last year. Despite the rejection of US investigation report, suspension of NATO supply, vacation of Shamsi Airbase and boycott of the second Bonn Conference, America has not retreated from expanding its espionage network in the country.

For this purpose, US has decided to extend its embassy building in Islamabad with a height of seven storeys. In this respect, even The Washington Post reported recently that the US embassy in Islamabad, which already houses the largest CIA contingent in the world, is being expanded without approval of Pakistan’s foreign ministry or input from the country’s intelligence agencies.

It is notable that in January 16 this year, the building blueprint was approved by a committee consisting of the officials of the Capital Development Authority (CDA), representatives of Planning, Emergency and Disaster Management and members nominated by the Pakistan Council of Architects and Town Planners.

In this regard, an official of the CDA told a daily newspaper that the site plan of the US embassy was approved under new building by-laws enforced since 2007 in Islamabad under which ground plus seven storeys are allowed for the buildings in Diplomatic Enclave. Earlier only four storeys were allowed there.

However, without raising any objection and taking note of the security consequences, the committee which was satisfied with various features presented in the construction plan, blindly gave approval of constructing seven storeys.

According to media reports, when a local intelligence agency raised concerns on March 21 this year, the city managers of the CDA have decided to limit the height of the new US embassy complex to four storeys instead of seven. The spy agency asked the CDA “to explain as to how it could approve a seven-storey structure in the Diplomatic Enclave, and urged the CDA to take appropriate action.” Two weeks ago, the related secret agency had also written a letter to the CDA in which it termed the “building plan of the US embassy a security hazard.”

Although taking cognisance of the security concerns, the CDA has reportedly been left in a fix because on the one side, it could not afford to defy the genuine apprehensions of the intelligence agency, while on the other, it had no courage to unilaterally revoke or revise the approved plan of the embassy of the sole super power.

In this context, CDA Chairman Farkhand Iqbal told a daily newspaper, “We will definitely take appropriate action and will ask US authorities to stop construction of the embassy complex till further decision is taken by the CDA in this matter.”

Now, apparently it looks that instead of seven storeys, four storeys will be allowed for the US embassy’s complex. But the real scheme of the seven storeys will remain intact because the CDA cannot take any action on its own behalf to revise the US building plan unless the issue is being settled by the higher forum like the Foreign Office.”

Nevertheless, the clandestine aims behind the proposed height of the US embassy building is to fix surveillance devices and the sophisticated electronic monitoring system at the rooftop in order to enable the American officials and CIA agents to watch movements and activities inside important buildings such as the Presidential House, Prime Minister Secretariat, Parliament House, the ministries and government offices including the headquarter of Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

 
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Inside Utah’s New Massive NSA Spy Center

Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA

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wired.com

 

Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a busy year — hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network.

In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.

Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7, 47 conference rooms and VTCs, and “22 caves,” according to an NSA brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within two miles of the ceremony.

Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA’s giant satellite listening post in Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68 million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf course to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot expansion of the NSA’s headquarters, including a cybercommand complex and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion. The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA’s mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The centerpiece in the agency’s decade-long building boom, it will be the “cloud” where the trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls, e-mails, and data trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.

Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA says that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and that it takes the Constitution and the nation’s privacy laws seriously.

But one of the agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and analysis.

And with some of the key companies building the U.S.’s surveillance infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services, it’s not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency, even if its current agency chief claims he doesn’t approve of extrajudicial spying on Americans. His predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, made similar claims while secretly conducting the warrantless wiretapping program.

Until now, the actual mechanics of how the agency constructed its highly secret U.S. eavesdropping net, code-named Stellar Wind, has never been revealed. But in the weeks following 9/11, as the agency and the White House agreed to secretly ignore U.S. privacy laws and bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, J. Kirk Wiebe noticed something odd. A senior analyst, he was serving as chief of staff for the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC), a sort of skunkworks within the agency where bureaucratic rules were broken, red tape was cut, and innovation was expected.

 
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Retired Marine Accused in Plot to Smuggle Gaddafi’s Son into Mexico

nationalpost.com
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MEXICO CITY — When he retired to San Diego after 28 years in the U.S. Marines, Gregory Gillispie thought his working days were behind him, but he soon got bored.

To keep busy, he launched an airplane brokerage, which was hired last July to transport Canadian Cynthia Vanier and her entourage to wartime Libya for a fact-finding mission.

Eight months later, two of Mr. Gillispie’s business associates are in a Mexico jail, accused of conspiring with Ms. Vanier to smuggle members of Libya’s Gaddafi family to an oceanfront hideaway near Puerto Vallarta.

 

And Mr. Gillispie has himself been dragged into it, identified by Mexican authorities as a suspect in the bizarre international plot to allegedly relocate Saadi Gaddafi and his family as the Libyan dictatorship fell.

In an interview, the 51-year-old said he didn’t know if Ms. Vanier was guilty of the charges, but he insisted he had nothing to do with smuggling Gaddafis. “I can tell you 110% sure I had nothing to do with any of that crap,” he said.

 

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Drug Lords Who Received ATF Weapons Worked For The FBI

latimes.com

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March 21, 2012|By Richard A. Serrano, Washington BureauReporting from Washington —

 

When the ATF made alleged gun trafficker Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta its primary target in the ill-fated Fast and Furious investigation, it hoped he would lead the agency to two associates who were Mexican drug cartel members. The ATF even questioned and released him knowing that he was wanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

But those two drug lords were secretly serving as informants for the FBI along the Southwest border, newly obtained internal emails show. Had Celis-Acosta simply been held when he was arrested by theBureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in May 2010, the investigation that led to the loss of hundreds of illegal guns and may have contributed to the death of a Border Patrol agent could have been closed early.

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Documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau show that as far back as December 2009 — five months before Celis-Acosta was detained and released at the border in a car carrying 74 live rounds of ammunition — ATF and DEA agents learned by chance that they were separately investigating the same man in the Arizona and Mexico border region.

ATF agents had placed a secret pole camera outside his Phoenix home to track his movements, and separately the DEA was operating a “wire room” to monitor live wiretap intercepts to follow him.

In May 2010, Celis-Acosta was briefly detained at the border in Lukeville, Ariz., and then released by Hope MacAllister, the chief ATF investigator on Fast and Furious, after he promised to cooperate with her.

The ATF had hoped he would lead them to two Mexican cartel members. But records show that after Celis-Acosta finally was arrested in February 2011, the ATF learned to its surprise that the two cartel members were secret FBI informants.

 

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U.S. Army Officers Busted by Feds in Drug Cartel Sting Operation

courthousenews.com

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LAREDO, Texas (CN) – An Army officer offered to supply guns and training to the Zetas drug cartel and kill rival drug dealers in exchange for money and cocaine, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in announcing the arrest of the officer and five other men. Kevin Corley, 29, of Colorado Springs, Colo., was arrested Saturday afternoon in Laredo and charged in a drug trafficking conspiracy and murder-for-hire plot, prosecutors said in a statement.

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The U.S. Attorney’s Office did not state Corley’s rank, nor military assignment. But the Colorado Springs Gazette reported on Monday that 1st Lt. Kevin Corley was discharged from the Army this month. The Gazette did not state whether the discharge was honorable, or why he was discharged.  The Gazette reported that Kevin Corley and co-defendant Sgt. Samuel Walker were both assigned to the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, in Colorado Springs.

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Also arrested Saturday in Laredo were Walker, 28; and Shavar Davis, 29, of Denver, Colo., prosecutors said.  Arrested in South Carolina were Marcus Mickle, 20, and Calvin Epps, 26, both of Hopkins, S.C. The sixth defendant, Mario Corley, 40, of Saginaw, Texas, was arrested in Charleston, S.C., according to the U.S. attorney’s statement.

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“The investigation began in January 2011, when Mickle began negotiations with whom he thought were members of the Los Zetas Cartel, actually undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, to purchase marijuana in return for stolen weapons,” prosecutors said in the statement. “The criminal complaint indicates that as they began discussions about the distribution of marijuana in the Columbia, S.C., area, Mickle and Epps allegedly told undercover agents about a friend in the military who could provide military weapons to them.

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“The agents were later introduced to Corley, who allegedly identified himself as an active duty officer in the Army responsible for training soldiers. He offered to provide tactical training for cartel members and to purchase weapons for the cartel under his name.”

 

 

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EXCLUSIVE: French police were alerted about Toulouse shooter and did NOTHING!

By Mario Andrade
DeadlineLive.info
March 22, 2012

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How much did French authorities know about Mohamed Merah, the confessed author of the Toulouse and Montauban shootings? After the cold blooded shooting of four Jewish civilians and three soldiers, the shocking tragedy leaves more unanswered questions, including the questions of a mother who does not understand why the authorities did not take seriously the threats of this young Islamist, who had beaten her children after he failed to recruit them.

In an interview with the French news agency, Le Télégramme , she calls herself Aisha. She does not understand why the French police did not stop the young Frenchman of Algerian origin Mohamed Merah, who confessed to seven murders, including the killing of three children in front of a Jewish school. During this interview, Aisha said that in June of 2010, her then 15-year-old son had been invited by Merah to his apartment to watch “Al-Qaeda videos,” that included images of women being executed by being shot in the head, and men being decapitated.

The day before her 15-year-old son was attacked by Merah, the teenager was riding around with him in his car. Her son says that Merah would listen to a CD believed to be songs and calls to go into battle. “He drove my son to his home, the same home where he was entrenched when the police arrived. In his apartment, there was a huge Koran in his living room and several large swords hanging on the wall. He then forced my son to watch Al-Qaeda videos in his room from 5PM till midnight,” she said.

“I filed a police complaint against Mohamed Merah twice and insisted (to authorities) during many occasions…  for nothing,” says the mother and witness.

In her account, Aisha said that Merah retaliated against her son for having told her mother about the video images he had seen in the apartment. “He came out to the street wearing a black robe with a hood, carrying a big sword, shouting ‘Allah Akbar.’ He then hit my son, and my daughter tried to intervene. However, he struck her too. There were many people, but nobody did anything,” said Aisha, who after filing a complaint (against Merah) was also beaten and threatened by him, according to her lawyer.

Aisha kept all evidence related to this incident, including, photos, medical certificates, and her daughter’s bloody dress, but for some reason, no action was taken against Merah. The incident, however, was reported by some local media.

“During the attack, he accused me of being an atheist and had to pay like all the French. He kept repeating that he was Mujahedeen and he would die as a martyr, and would erase from the earth all those who kill Muslims …” according to her account.

One peculiar detail that emerges from the interview is that Aisha mentioned that Mohamed’s older brother, Abdelkader, was the real “brain” of the operation (Mohamed’s handler). “He filled his head with ideas. He was the one who traveled frequently abroad, particularly to Egypt,” she recalls.

She mentions that Merah used to be an ordinary boy until a group of ‘extremists’ came to the neighborhood, insinuating that he had been brainwashed by them. She also describes that there were some inconsistencies with Merah’s behavior: ‘While there were rumors of him going to Afghanistan, sometimes he would wear traditional clothing, and sometimes he was seen wearing western attire, riding a motorcycle, with his hair dyed blond and a fake Maori-style tattoo on his head,” she said.

“Why, despite all my information, Mohamed Merah was not arrested? We even saw him last week, threatening us. I told the police and the prefecture several times about this series of incidents, and look at where we are now. This is incomprehensible and outrageous,” said the woman.

Chiapas Governor 6 minutes before earthquake: “We’re ready for the mega earthquake drill”

By Mario Andrade
DeadlineLive.info
March 22, 2012

The Mexican State of Chiapas held a ‘mega earthquake drill’ just minutes before the 7.8 Richter scale earthquake registered in Southern Mexico, according to the news website ADNPolitico.com. Governor Juan Sabines Guerrero sent a message from his Twitter account just six minutes before the actual earthquake. The translation of the message is the following:

“We’re at the State of Chiapas Civil Protection Center. Everything is ready for the 7.9 Richter scale earthquake simulation.”

Six minutes later, and about 500 kilometers west of Chiapas, in the neighboring southern state of Guerrero, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake was registered. The earthquake was so massive that over a hundred aftershocks were felt throughout the following day.

The Chiapas Civil Protection ‘mega earthquake simulation’ was planned since last February, according to state officials. The purpose of this drill was to test the responsiveness of the State Civil Protection System and the general public upon the occurrence of a large scale earthquake, and to allow the exercise participants to evaluate and provide feedback on first response protocol.

The Chiapas state government said that this geographical area is located in a region between three tectonic plates: The Cocos Plate, the Caribbean Plate and North American Plate.

State officials also emphasized that earthquakes are very common in that region. “Just in January, there were 188 earthquakes with epicenter in this state, over 50% of registered earthquakes in the country. That’s why we must be prepared to avoid or reduce undesirable effects of these earthquakes.” said a Chiapas state official.

The mega earthquake drill involved nearly 43,000 public officials and more than 19,600 school facilities. A list of documents, details of the simulation, location, and the drill schedule can be found on the Chiapas Civil Protection Website.

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Claim: Oswald told Cuban embassy staff in Mexico City that he was going to kill JFK

www.dailymail.co.uk

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Fidel Castro had advance knowledge that President John F Kennedy was about to be killed, according to an explosive new book about the 1963 assassination soon to be published by a retired CIA agent.

Rumours about the Cuban dictator’s involvement in a plot to murder his fierce adversary have swirled for almost half a century since communist sympathiser Lee Harvey Oswald shot the US president during a trip to Dallas in November that year.

Now author Brian Latell, who studied Cuban affairs as a CIA analyst in the 1960s and later became the agency’s chief intelligence officer for Latin America, says he is certain that Castro at least knew the attack was going to happen.

On the morning of November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was killed, Castro ordered a senior intelligence officer in Havana to stop listening for non-specific CIA radio communications and concentrate instead on ‘any little detail, any small detail from Texas,’ Mr Latell claims in his new book Castro’s Secrets – the CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine, set for release next month. Four hours later, the airwaves came alive with news that Kennedy was dead.

Mr Latell also claims that Castro was aware that Oswald, who had been denied a visa to visit Cuba at the country’s embassy in Mexico City, told staff there that he was going to murder Kennedy to prove his allegiance to the communist cause.

‘Fidel knew of Oswald’s intentions and did nothing to deter the act,’ Mr Latell writes in the book.

In an interview published today in The Miami Herald, Mr Latell, now a respected senior lecturer on Cuba at the University of Miami, says he discovered the information in interviews with former Cuban intelligence officers, backed up by declassified US government documents.

‘I don’t say Fidel Castro ordered the assassination, I don’t say Oswald was under his control. He might have been, but I don’t argue that, because I was unable to find any evidence for that,’ he said.

 
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