End of Issue #28 |

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Editorial and Rants
These same Eurosavage assholes complain about Gitmo, but then turn away African immigrants - who promptly return to countries where there isn't any fucking food! Now that's torture!
Madrid Seeks to Stem Tide of African Immigrants
May 19, 2006 - From: www.breitbart.com
Spain has put the last touches to initiatives, including a strengthened presence in Africa, to try to stem the swelling tide of immigrants from the continent heading for its shores.
The government's plan was agreed as it was announced that a total of 656 African illegal immigrants had arrived in Spain's Canary Islands in the space of 24 hours.
In Madrid Deputy Prime Minister Maria-Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said after a cabinet meeting she would be going to Brussels next week to discuss the issue with, among others, European Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso.
She said that "more Europe" had to be one of the weapons in the battle against would-be illegal immigration.
An "Africa plan" was to be implemented within the space of 48 hours, said de la Vega. The headquarters will be in the Senegalese capital Dakar, under the supervision of a specially appointed ambassador, Miguel Angel Mazarambroz.
His staff will cover the west African states Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Niger and Senegal.
The Spanish official said embassies would be opened in Mali and Cape Verde and the mission in Sudan would be reopened to reinforce Spain's diplomatic presence in sub-Saharan Africa, at present limited to embassies in eight states (Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Senegal).
The diplomats will seek over a three to six month period to reach deals on the repatriation of illegal immigrants similar to accords already concluded with Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Nigeria.
Illegal immigrants can only be expelled if such agreements exist and above all if their countries of origin can be determined. Otherwise the Spanish authorities have to free them after 40 days with a notice of expulsion that cannot be implemented.
The scale of the problem is illustrated by figures showing that with well over 1,000 arrivals in the Canary Islands this week alone, the total for the year to date is now 7,384. That compared with 4,751 for the whole of last year and 8,500 in 2004.
According to the Red Cross, hundreds of would-be immigrants have drowned in seas off Spain since the end of last year. Many travel in overcrowded makeshift boats not suited to the high seas.
Red Cross workers on the Canaries say they are overwhelmed with the "avalanche" of people arriving every day, many of whom are in need of immediate medical treatment.
In all, around 2,400 immigrants without papers are awaiting processing in the archipelago.
The Canary Islands, Spanish territory and therefore part of the European Union, have been targeted by would-be immigrants since passage became more difficult from Morocco to Europe via the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the scene last year of violent attempts by would-be immigrants to storm them. Sixteen people died in the incidents after which prospective immigrants were rounded up and dumped in the desert. Since then security measures have been tightened on both sides of the Mediterranean.
There have been cases of the Spanish navy turning back boatloads of would-be immigrants off the coast of the Canary Islands.
More proof those Nazi Eurosavages are in bed with the terrorists.
Pressed by U.S., European Banks Limit Iran Deals
May 22, 2006 - From: www.nytimes.com
By Steven R. Weisman
WASHINGTON, May 21 -- Prodded by the United States with threats of fines and lost business, four of the biggest European banks have started curbing their activities in Iran, even in the absence of a Security Council resolution imposing economic sanctions on Iran for its suspected nuclear weapons program.
Top Treasury and State Department officials have intensified their efforts to limit Iran-related activities of major banks in Europe, the United States and the Middle East in the past six months, invoking antiterrorism and banking laws. They have also traveled to Europe and the Middle East to drive home the risky nature of dealing with a country that has repeatedly rebuffed Western demands over suspending uranium enrichment, and to urge European countries to take similar steps.
Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said: "We are seeing banks and other institutions reassessing their ties to Iran. They are asking themselves if they really want to be handling business for entities owned by a government engaged in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism."
The four European banks -- the UBS and Credit Suisse banks of Switzerland, ABN Amro of the Netherlands, and HSBC, based in London -- have made varying levels of disclosure about the limits on their activities in Iran in the past six months. Almost all large European banks have branches or bureaus in the United States, units that are subject to American laws.
American officials said the United States had informed its European allies about the new pressure exerted on the banks, and indeed had asked these countries to join the effort. At the same time, the Americans have not publicized the new pressure, partly out of concern it could complicate efforts by European negotiators, who were still talking with Iran about a package of incentives to suspend uranium enrichment.
It is not clear how curbed business with four of Europe's biggest banks could adversely affect Iran. But some outside political and economic experts say it is unlikely to do much damage considering Iran is one of OPEC's leading producers and is earning hundreds of millions of dollars worth of windfall profits daily from $70-a-barrel petroleum.
The American prodding has not yet resulted in any fines or other punishment. But UBS and ABN Amro are no strangers to the sting of American financial penalties for dealing with countries that the United States has wanted to isolate. UBS was fined $100 million by the Federal Reserve two years ago for the unauthorized movement of dollars to Iran and other countries like Libya and Yugoslavia, which were subject to American trade sanctions at the time. Last December, ABN Amro was fined $80 million for failure to comply with regulations against money laundering and with economic sanctions against Libya and Iran from 1997 to 2004.
UBS now says it will no longer do direct business with any individuals, businesses or banks in Iran. UBS also says it will no finance exports or imports for any corporate clients in Iran. But the bank has said that it would not stop doing business with clients who use other means to transact business there. ABN Amro also says it has minimized its activities in Iran.
"We have no representation in Iran," said Sierk Nawijn, a spokesman for ABN Amro in Amsterdam. He added that although the bank does no dollar-based business with Iran, it was participating in "a fairly limited number of transactions" with it."
Georg Söntgerath, a spokesman for Credit Suisse in Zurich, said, "As of January, we have said that we will not enter into any new business relations with corporate clients in Iran." He said the decision, which applied to Syria and some other countries, resulted from an assessment of an "increased economic risk for our bank and our clients."
He said, however, that the bank would fulfill existing contracts with businesses in Iran.
A United Nations Security Council resolution might restrict some of those kinds of dealings.
The Americans have taken other steps to pressure Iran. With American encouragement, Iran's rating as a business risk was raised last month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 30 leading countries with market economies.
At the same time, the defiance of the West by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has unsettled markets, and American officials have said the climate of anxiety over the prospect of globally enforced sanctions -- or even military action -- was having its own effect.
"I think there is a real and growing sense that there's a risk associated with doing business with Iran, with lending Iran more money or providing it with a line of credit," said Robert G. Joseph, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security. "But I would argue that their motive is market forces, more than any American pressure."
Some European diplomats from countries with missions in Tehran say that there are signs of an impact, despite the rise in oil prices.
Whatever the cause, Iran's economic growth has slowed to less than 5 percent, its stock market has dropped more than 20 percent in the past year, new investments and construction have declined, and Iranians have been sending their money abroad, or buying gold.
Iran has recently tried to counter diplomatic pressures over its nuclear program with reminders to Europe that it was a good market, with a good work force. In a regular weekly news conference on Sunday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamidreza Assefi, urged Europe not to take any steps that would jeopardize economic links with Iran.
"We have good ties with Europe, and a bad decision by Europeans over Iran's nuclear program can undermine relations and will eventually harm the Europeans," he said.
Many experts said it would be difficult to bar banks from conducting the lucrative business of financing trade deals with Iran. Iran's largest trading partners are Japan, China, Italy, Germany and France. All of those nations have companies that use banks to finance letters of credit to export machinery, commodities and other goods to Iran.
The laws being applied against banks are varied, and many of them also apply to North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Sudan. A 1984 law requires a ban on activities with any country declared a sponsor of terrorism. Officials are also invoking the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 and a directive signed by President Bush last year banning transactions with those suspected of helping the spread of unconventional weapons.
Under that directive, the United States has identified six Iranian entities, including its Aerospace Industries Organization, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and several private industrial groups, as off limits to banks that operate under American protections and laws.
Mr. Joseph said the use of American banking regulations and antiterrorism laws against European banks had been effective against Iran and would have a greater effect "if we can get other countries to take similar actions."
Some experts say they doubt that anything short of a sweeping oil embargo, or a blockade of gasoline imports -- Iran imports about 40 percent of its gasoline -- could get Iran to change its behavior, and the West is not contemplating such steps.
"I don't see that the pullout of a few European banks doing a tremendous amount of damage," said Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, an advocacy organization. "They're making $300 million a day from oil revenues, and they can weather the storm."
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article.
Yes.
Does Diversity Make Us Unhappy?
May 22, 2006 - From: news.bbc.co.uk
By Mark Easton
It is an uncomfortable conclusion from happiness research data perhaps - but multicultural communities tend to be less trusting and less happy.
Research by the Home Office suggests that the more ethnically diverse an area is, the less people are likely to trust each other.
The Commission for Racial Equality has also done work looking at the effect of diversity on well-being.
Interviewed on The Happiness Formula, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips accepts that people are happier if they are with people like themselves.
"We've done work here which shows that people, frankly, when there aren't other pressures, like to live within a comfort zone which is defined by racial sameness.
"People feel happier if they're with people who are like themselves. But the question is: what does "like themselves" mean?"
Tapestry of Life
To an extent, new immigrants are always seen as outsiders and threatening. It is not necessarily a matter of ethnicity.
The arrival of the Huguenots or the Jews into Britain brought significant social tensions which have largely disappeared.
Cultural difference eventually became woven into the tapestry of British life.
Globalisation has brought new challenges - a diversity of culture and ethnicity never seen before.
There have been fierce arguments as to whether social well-being is enhanced by celebrating difference or encouraging integration, even assimilation.
Trevor Phillips believes the debate has become dangerously confused.
"Our multiculturalism which started out as a straightforward recognition of diversity became a sort of system which prized racial and ethnic difference above all other values and there lies the problem."
So, if we want happy, stable communities, where should the balance lie between diversity and integration?
Trevor Phillips believes getting it right is vital: "We need to respect people's ethnicity but also give them, at some point in the week, an opportunity to meet and want to be with people with whom they have something in common that isn't defined by their ethnicity."
"If we can find a moment, an idea, an activity which takes us out of our ethnicity and connects us to other people of different ethnicities and if only for an hour in a week then I think we can crack this problem."
Social science is also trying to help make sense of the challenges.
Building Bridges
In the jargon, they refer to the factors that bind similar people together in groups as "bonding social capital".
But it is argued that happy societies also need what they call "bridging social capital" - strong links between different groups.
"A society that has only bonding social capital and no bridging social capital looks like Beirut or Belfast or Bosnia, that is tight communities but isolated from one another."
So says Harvard professor Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community".
He argues that working out how to grow bridging capital is the great challenge for Western society.
"This is the crux of the problem. The kind of social capital that is most important for the success of a modern, pluralist, multicultural democracy - the bridging social capital - is the kind that's hardest to build.
"Therefore we've got to go about the task of creating new opportunities for people to make connections to people different from them.
When bonding social capital drowns bridging social capital, conflict is inevitable.
Shared Values
Trevor Phillips believes we saw it all too clearly in the disturbances in the Lozells area of Birmingham in the Summer of 2005.
A tight-knit Asian community came into conflict with a tight-knit black community because, Phillips argues, the ethnicity that binds each community together is stronger than the links between them.
"You have two communities who more or less faced each other across a single road. They are communities which have high levels of internal bonding.
"But actually there wasn't and is very little bridging between these two communities and I think this is a perfect demonstration of what happens when people who are very different, look very different and think they are very different never touch, never interact."
What is required is a sense of identity that overarches creed, culture or ethnic background.
Nation states take different views on how this might best be achieved. The French model is to have a strict definition of Frenchness that, for instance, prohibits religious head-scarves in schools.
In the UK, citizenship ceremonies for new arrivals and lessons in schools are built around the ideas of shared values including an understanding of and respect for our democratic institutions.
Among those values is a tolerance of diversity and cultural difference.
But it is, perhaps, in sport that the efforts to build bridging social capital are most obvious.
Whether it be two football teams from different local communities breaking down barriers or an Olympic squad reflecting the multi-racial reality of modern Western society, competitive sport is seen as an important tool in binding together diverse nations and making people happy.
Boyfucker won't be mentioning this!
Hysteria at the ACLU
May 29, 2006 - From: www.townhall.com
By Jeff Jacoby
There was something missing from the full-page advertisement that the American Civil Liberties Union ran in newspapers around the country last week.
The ad kicked off an ACLU campaign called "Don't Spy On Me," which is aimed at pressuring federal and state regulators into investigating the phone companies that supplied domestic call records to federal intelligence analysts.
Subtle the ad wasn't. "IF YOU'VE USED A TELEPHONE IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS, READ THIS," shouted the headline in end-of-the-world-sized type. "AT&T, Verizon, and other phone companies may have illegally sent your phone records to the National Security Agency." The ad went on to charge that "millions of Americans" have had "their privacy invaded" by an "illegal secret arrangement" that allows "instant government access to every single phone call." It raised the alarming specter of Bush administration officials prying not only into the phone records of "political opponents, news reporters, and potential whistle blowers," but even into *your* calls to "friends, family, associates, lovers."
"Stop this abuse of power now," the advertisement urged. "File a complaint." Readers were directed to the new "Don't Spy On Me" page at the ACLU web site, where they can sign a petition telling the Federal Communications Commission to "get the spies off the line."
You would never know from all this heavy breathing that the data supplied to the NSA consisted of phone numbers only, stripped of any identifying names or addresses. Or that the calls themselves weren't actually monitored -- no one was wiretapping any conversations. Or that the Supreme Court has ruled that the government doesn't need a warrant to collect phone records, since information voluntarily disclosed to a third party (such as the phone company) isn't protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Perhaps the ACLU would dismiss those facts. Perhaps it would say they don't change the central issue -- that the collection of this calling data represents a government encroachment into private behavior, with all the possibilities for abuse that entails.
But something even more important was omitted from the ACLU's ad -- something so crucial to this issue that only an organization suffering from acute moral myopia could ignore it:
Context.
Nowhere in its advertisement does the ACLU make any mention of terrorism or Sept. 11, or of the horrific price we paid that day for failing to "connect the dots" before the terrorists could strike. Nowhere does the ad acknowledge that we are at war with the forces of radical Islam, or that the jihadists have been able to murder thousands of innocent people by infiltrating free societies and attacking them from within. The ACLU is passionate about protecting Americans' privacy; it says nothing about protecting American lives. How can an organization committed to civil liberties simply disregard the threat posed to the foremost civil liberty of all? Before blasting the government for data-mining through anonymous telephone records, shouldn't it at least consider whether doing so has prevented any attacks or saved any lives?
It isn't just the ACLU's advertising that provides no context for the phone-records controversy. The ACLU's web site also appears to provide none. There is no mention of counterterrorism on its home page or on its "Don't Spy On Me" page. There is, however, an animated movie featuring an intrepid hero who charges, "Someone has been secretly spying on us -- tapping our phones, reading our e-mails, tracking every move we make." Naturally, the eavesdropping villains turn out to be George Bush and Dick Cheney.
To anti-Bush partisans, the administration cannot possibly have any legitimate interest in domestic telephone records, and it was an outrage for Verizon, BellSouth, and AT&T to have supplied them. "We cannot sit by while the government and the phone companies collude in this massive, illegal, and fundamentally un-American invasion of our privacy," the ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero, thundered last week. Funny -- that wasn't the way he spoke 18 months ago, when the ACLU itself was discovered to be using sophisticated data-mining to secretly amass information about its own members and donors. (Some ACLU board members were shocked by the revelation and publicly condemned it. "It is a violation of our values," board member Wendy Kaminer said at the time. "It is hypocrisy.") To be sure, the two cases are very different. The ACLU's data-mining was part of a fund-raising effort. The NSA's is part of the war effort.
Earlier this month, a British parliamentary committee issued its report on the terrorist attacks in London last July, and on what if anything could have been done to prevent them. It reached the obvious conclusion: "If we seek greater assurance against the possibility of attacks, some increase in intrusive activity by the UK's intelligence and security agencies is . . . inevitable." There is always some tradeoff between civil liberty and national security, and the point at which they balance is not fixed. Reasonable people understand what the ACLU seems to have forgotten: Before you can connect the dots, you have to collect them.
China refuses to take back their illegal aliens! Where is the fucking outrage from Canada, France, Mexico? They should be screaming in front of the U.N. demanding action! Round the little red bastards up and shoot them instead. They are probably spies anyway.
DHS Needs More Beds to Hold Illegals
April 18, 2006 - From: cajeproject.org
WASHINGTON, April 18 (UPI) - The Department of Homeland Security lacks enough beds and facilities to hold the number of illegal aliens it captures every week.
Even with its 28,000 beds, the DHS simply cannot hold the huge numbers of non-Mexican illegal aliens corralled near the Mexican border. As a result, it routinely resorts to what can aptly be called "catch and release," National Journal reported Friday.
At an April 6 hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky., noted, "The bed space we have is nowhere near a drop in the bucket compared to the people you stop." ICE chief Julie Myers responded, "We do have a problem with absconding, yes, sir."
To reduce the number of illegal immigrants who get the chance to disappear, the Department of Homeland Security has stepped up its expedited removals, thus denying the illegals the opportunity to see a judge. Immigrants in expedited removal are held for an average of 22 days, after which they are flown back to their countries. In contrast, it takes an average of 89 days for immigrants who get a court hearing, National Journal said.
By increasing the number of available beds and the number of expedited removals, the DHS aims to end "catch and release" by October.
But achieving that goal will be tough, in part because illegal immigrants' home countries often refuse to cooperate. China, for example, refuses to take its people back, and so American officials tend to simply release them. Some 39,000 illegal immigrants from China are living in the United States despite final deportation orders, National Journal said.
This is interesting.
Web Snooping Vital, Spy Agency Boss Says
October 22, 2005 - From: www.thestar.com
By Michelle Shephard
OTTAWA - The head of Canada's eavesdropping agency says it needs to own the Internet to combat terrorism.
John Adams, chief of Canada's little-known spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment, stressed in his first interview since taking the job in July that monitoring terrorists through cyberspace is as vital as tracking them on the ground.
That responsibility, plus monitoring all other forms of electronic communications and ensuring the security of the government's communications, falls to the CSE, which has quietly become one of Canada's most powerful agencies. With the exception of the Mounties, no other federal agency benefited more from the resources or powers doled out after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks crumbled New York's twin towers.
By 2007, CSE's budget is expected to grow to $220 million, more than double what it received pre-9/11.
But some security experts are starting to challenge the effectiveness of such agencies the Americans' National Security Agency among them as well as Adams's assertion that signals intelligence will help fight terrorism. Today's terrorists have become so computer savvy and the world has become so saturated with technology that allows information to travel at a staggering speed since these agencies came of age more than half a century ago.
Others are concerned about privacy rights coming up against the government's ability to snoop and of the fate of innocents caught in their net.
To understand the gathering of signals intelligence, known as SIGINT, it's easiest to think of a big vacuum. This giant suctioning device enables governments to scoop up billions of bits of information transmitted around the world in cyberspace or on airwaves. Feed that information into sophisticated computers that scan for key words, or read through hundreds of documents and if something jumps out, it lands on the desks of analysts. That intelligence, or chatter as it is sometimes known, is then weighed and either discarded, filed away or immediately becomes part of a larger threat warning.
Immediacy is essential as CSE's U.S. counterparts were reminded on Sept. 12, 2001, when a phone call made two days earlier by a suspected Al Qaeda operative was translated: "Tomorrow is zero hour."
Before his appointment July 1, Adams, like most Canadians, was unaware of CSE's role and admits trying to learn the trade has been like "drinking out of a firehose."
"It's very much a need to know business and so I didn't need to know, so I didn't know," Adams, 63, says.
Traditionally, CSE has been a stealth agency, its leader mute.
The organization's history reaches back to 1941 when Ottawa established a civilian agency to decode enemy telegraphy and radar during World War II. During the late 1940s, a formal information-sharing agreement was signed between CSE, the NSA, (the lead agency with headquarters based in Fort Meade, Md.), Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and signals intelligence services in Australia and New Zealand.
The agreement's details remain classified but are in play today. Eventually, an agreement, dubbed Echelon, essentially split the world into five geographical areas and each partner country was responsible for eavesdropping on one.
For 34 years, Canada gathered and shared information with its partners mainly under the radar. It wasn't until the CBC profiled their operations on the fifth estate and the ensuing outcry in the House of Commons, that the government admitted its existence.
But little changed as even basic facts such as the agency's budget and staffing numbers were protected for decades. Although, once the Cold War ended, budgets and support dwindled.
"When the wall came down, the Russians became our friends, the Soviet empire went away, and the German frontier withered, all of a sudden, governments are asking what are these guys for?" says Lawrence Surtees, a Toronto telecommunications analyst.
And as they waned, technology boomed. Radar domes, gigantic antennas, and submarines skimming the ocean floor no longer sufficed in the world of fibre optics. As one unnamed source told investigative journalist Seymour Hersh for a 1999 New Yorker magazine piece on signal intelligence: "The dirty little secret is that fibre optics and encryption are kicking Fort Meade in the nuts."
Adams agrees.
"That's why we're so hard at it and why we had to get the increased authorities in order that we could start catching up. The reality is that, yeah, we're behind the eight ball but remember the terrorist is not out there trying to move forward. They're simply exploiting known technologies."
That's where what Matthew Aid, a former NSA operative and author, calls the "boys versus the toys" debate comes in. The technology is keeping pace but what about the experience? At a security conference in Montreal this week, panellists frequently questioned effective analysis can analysts accurately digest and process the data?
As Adams describes these mathematicians, engineers, linguists and other professionals employed by CSE the "kids," as he calls them it's hard not to envision a nerdy frat party raging inside the windowless brick building where they work.
"They can't do what they do anywhere else. They're not allowed," he says. The toys keep them at a relatively low-paying job for their field, offering a challenge is far more alluring than cash.
He says they're among the brightest and most capable in the world.
But is intelligence, however expertly gathered, good intelligence? Had NSA analysts translated the "zero-hour" could they have stopped the attacks?
"As a medium, human communications whether spoken or written is a fickle and unreliable thing," Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the recently acclaimed book Chatter, told the conference yesterday.
The mandate of the CSE - as the code-makers to protect Canadian data and the code-breakers to dissect foreign communication - remained the same after 9/11 but its expanded powers now allow the collection of foreign communication that begins or ends in Canada, as long as the other party is outside the border. A call from Montreal to Islamabad could be monitored, a call from Vancouver to Halifax is off limits.
Adams says the law is strictly followed and the CSE commissioner (who declined to be interviewed for this story) closely monitors their work. But doubts have been raised.
Former CSE employee Mike Frost claims in his 1994 book that during his 19 years working there, the agency eavesdropped on Margaret Trudeau to find out if she smoked marijuana and CSE monitored two of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's dissenting cabinet ministers in London on behalf of Britain's secret service.
Adams says the service would never "dignify that with a comment."
David Kahn, who has since 1967 been writing about the CSE's American counterpart, the NSA, says he believes signals intelligence is sticking to the law these days but encouraged strict oversight just to make sure.
"Domestic things they would never do because if it ever came out that the NSA was wiretapping domestic conversations that would be the end of NSA, there would be such an uproar."
Adams stresses repeatedly that Canadians are not being monitored.
"I get very concerned about this Big Brother is watching me. Nothing could be further from the truth," he says. For one thing, the laws prevent it. And, even "with all of your fancy electronic filters" Big Brother couldn't keep up. "Big Brother would just be overwhelmed."