New reports reveal Iran believes the United States will use the Boston bombings as a pretext for attacking the Islamic regime.
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The most important fact is that through new collaboration between Russia and America, the Boston bombings can become another Sept. 11 scenario leading up to a confrontation with Iran, said Dr. Motahreh Hosseini, a researcher and analyst of the Islamic Republic. This collaboration will have grave implications for the world, he said.
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“My personal belief is that such activity (terrorism) is not possible but with the collaboration of elements in America,” said Hosseini, who added that America’s own security organizations must have played a role in the bombings.
“If we look at it with an international view … this scenario (Boston bombings as a pretext) is designed for the purpose of buying Russia in a collaboration against Syria and Iran,” Hosseini said. Its main goal, he said, was for America to target Iran and put the revolutionary Middle East in a tight spot, have a U.S. presence in Russia’s backyard and further pressure China.
A new report presents overwhelming evidence that sophisticated spying software is being abused by governments around the world.
The findings by The Citizen Lab, a digital research laboratory at the University of Toronto, detail how the software marketed to track criminals is being used against dissidents and human rights activists.
Titled “For Their Eyes Only: The Commercialization of Digital Spying,” the report focuses on a type of surveillance software called FinSpy that can remotely monitor webmail and social networks in real time as well as collect encrypted data and communications of unsuspecting targets.
WASHINGTON – Not long after Adm. William H. McRaven led the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, he was put in charge of the nation's entire contingent of Special Operations forces, and set to work revamping them to face a widening array of new threats as America's combat role in the Middle East and southwest Asia winds down.
His efforts to apply the lessons learned from more than a decade of fighting in the shadows of the larger wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have high-level support from a White House and Pentagon eager to avoid large-scale foreign interventions and to encourage allies to assume more of the burden of combating extremism and instability.
Admiral McRaven's goal is to recast the command from its popular image of commandos killing or capturing terrorists, and expand a force capable of carrying out a range of missions short of combat – including training foreign militaries to counter terrorists, drug traffickers and insurgents, gathering intelligence and assessing pending risk, and advising embassies on security.
But along the way, the ambitious Admiral McRaven has run into critics who say he is overreaching, or as one Congressional critic put it, “empire building” at a time when the military is shrinking its footprint in Afghanistan and refocusing on other hot spots around the world. Congress has blocked, at least temporarily, an idea to consolidate several hundred of the command's Washington-based staff members in a $10 million-a-year satellite office here, saying it would violate spending limits on such offices.
At the same time, Admiral McRaven has also faced criticism that he is encroaching on the turf of the military's traditionally powerful regional commanders.
Shortly before leaving the Pentagon, former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta granted Admiral McRaven new authority to make staffing decisions in the Special Operations units assigned to the regional commanders. While they will still have the final say on missions in their region, Admiral McRaven will now have the ability to allocate the much sought-after 11,000 deployed
Special Operations forces where he determines intelligence and world events indicate they are most needed.
Indeed, in the past year, the command has conducted three classified exercises to determine where it can expand Special Operations forces in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
An attorney who represented prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay was found dead last week in what sources said was a suicide.
Andy P. Hart, 38, a federal public defender in Toledo, Ohio, apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Hart left behind a suicide note and a thumb drive, believed to contain his case files. It is unknown where Hart died, what the suicide note said or whether an autopsy was performed.
Hart’s death comes amid escalating chaos that has engulfed Guantanamo over the past three months—from a mass hunger strike to military commissions and renewed pressure on the White House to shut down the prison facility. Hart was one of three-dozen Guantanamo attorneys who signed a letter in March urging Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to take immediate action and bring about an end to the hunger strike.
Because Hart was a federal employee working on sensitive legal issues the FBI was contacted about his death. It is unknown if the agency has been investigating the circumstances surrounding his death.
Neither the FBI nor local law enforcement officials in Toledo, Ohio returned calls for comment. A phone number listed for Hart was disconnected Wednesday.
Twitter has closed down Posterous.com, the former host of my blog “Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge”.
We decided to make this problem into an opportunity. So Co-Intelligence Institute board member John Abbe and I have moved my blog to a new site where it has its own memorable domain name:
I really like the new look that we've created. You will see that more posts are now visible on the home page. There is also a tag cloud to make it easier to find what you are looking for and to give you an overview of the topics covered.
The new blog contains all the posts from the previous site at Posterous and all my new posts will be found at this new site.
Over 90% of my blog posts are also mailed to my list (the one you're getting this bulletin on) – and vice versa. So you can subscribe to the blog's RSS feed or simply continue to get my posts via this email list.
