Saturday 13 March 2010: The Editor of Open Your Eyes News, James Fairbairn, made a guest appearance on 720 ABC Radio in Perth, Western Australia to discuss with host, James Lush, some of the key news events of recent days. An introduction of Open Your Eyes News was followed by reports on the campaign to stop the Australian Internet Filter and recent comments by the the Shadow Treasurer: Hockey slams “unworkable” internet filter. Also discussed was UK Billboards Equipped with License Plate Spy Cameras and a “conspiracy theory” revealed to be true: Japan confirms secret pact on US nuclear transit
Listen to, or download (2.33Mb), the MP3 audio file of The Historian on 720ABC Radio.
Columbus Dispatch – The few hundred residents who live in a bucolic corner of Maryland’s Eastern Shore don’t object to the 400 jobs that might come from a new State Department facility funded with stimulus money. But they’re not really into the noise and commotion that would come from the high-speed chases, machine-gun fire and bomb blasts. Read article
The Register – Who remembers Echelon, the top-secret telecommunications spy network said to be run by the US and allied Anglophone nations, and to be triggered as soon as certain key words or phrases are spoken on the phone? A lot of you, we’d guess. So it’s interesting to note that Pentagon boffins have now stated that perhaps the most intriguing reputed capability of Echelon – the ability to automatically pick out words of interest and flag that conversation up as important to its human masters – doesn’t work. Or anyway, it only works on good, clear lines: a noisy or degraded signal frustrates it. Read article
CBC – Australia’s foreign minister has summoned Israel’s ambassador to investigate the use of forged Australian passports in a Dubai assassination. Stephen Smith called Yuval Rotem to his office in Canberra, the capital, on Thursday. He warned him any involvement of Israel in the use of the passports — used in the Jan. 19 killing of a senior Hamas figure — would not be seen as the “act of a friend.” “I made it crystal clear to the ambassador that if the results of that investigation cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of the Australian passports was in any way sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, then Australia would not regard that as the act of a friend,” Smith told reporters. Read Article
Ed – Using the principles of Problem, Reactuion, Solution, expect the Australian Government to soon announce the introduction of bio-metric data and RFID chips in all Australian passports, so to ‘prevent this kind of thing happening again’
Press TV – Israel’s air force has introduced a fleet of large surveillance UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles), claiming they can fly as far as Iran and the Persian Gulf. The Israeli military says the Heron TP drones, with a wingspan of 86 feet (26 meters), will primarily be used for surveillance, implying that they also can be used for other applications. Read article
Wired – The U.S. intelligence community wants to master the art of BS-detection. But instead of improving on pre-existing methods, like polygraph tests or voice-stress analysis, they want to amplify our own, intuitive, “pre-conscious human assessment of trustworthiness.” Read article
Guardian – Message boasts of Israeli player’s ‘hit on Dubai target’ amid mounting row over Hamas chief’s killing. Amid the mounting diplomatic row over Mossad’s alleged assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai, the Israeli embassy has turned to Twitter to comment. A tweet issued by the embassy today read: “@israeluk You heard it here first: Israeli tennis player carries out hit on #Dubai target http://ow.ly/18A79″. It links to a story about the Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer, who beat the top-ranked Caroline Wozniacki yesterday to reach the quarter-finals of the Dubai Championship. Read article
Times Online – The attack on Poona will again raise questions over the role of David Coleman Headley, an American who went from being a American government informer to an alleged reconnaissance agent for the group that carried out the Mumbai attacks in 2008. Mr Headley, 49, had visited the area of Poona devastated by Saturday’s blast at least twice while checking out potential terrorist targets – most recently in March 2009 – Indian officials allege. Read article
The Guardian – The prime minister of New Zealand angrily denounced Israel and imposed diplomatic sanctions on it after two suspected Mossad agents were jailed for six months for trying on false grounds to obtain a New Zealand passport. The plot, which involved obtaining a passport in the name of a tetraplegic man who had not spoken in years, provoked a furious reaction yesterday.”The breach of New Zealand laws and sovereignty by agents of the Israeli government has seriously strained our relationship with Israel,” said the prime minister, Helen Clark.”This type of behaviour is unacceptable internationally by any country. It is a sorry indictment of Israel that it has again taken such actions against a country with which it has friendly relations.” Read Article
New York Times – Britain said today that Israel had admitted using fake British passports, and a newspaper said the documents were intended to help agents of the Israeli secret service attack foes abroad. The Foreign Office said it made a strong protest last October to the Israeli Ambassador, Yehuda Avner, about ”misuse by the Israeli authorities of forged British passports.” It said Israel later apologized and promised not to do it again. Read Article
Guardian – Police in Dubai are to issue arrest warrants for 11 “agents with European passports” suspected of assassinating a top Hamas official last month. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was murdered in his hotel room in Dubai on 20 January. Reports have suggested that he was in Dubai to buy weapons for Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas. It has accused Israeli agents of killing him. Read article
Reuters – Iran said on Sunday it had arrested seven people accused of stoking unrest after last year’s disputed election, including some who it said were employed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Read article
Examiner – It’s likely that Al-Qaeda will launch an attack on the United States in the next three to six months, senior U.S. intelligence officials told Congress. The terrorist organization is deploying operatives to the United States to carry out new attacks from inside the country, including “clean” recruits with a negligible trail of terrorist contacts, CIA Director Leon Panetta told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during a hearing. Read article
Ed – are they simply playing the ‘fortune-teller’s’ game of making a broad claim in the hope that chance proves them right? Their intel hasn’t been proven to be worth much to date.
Times Online – A video has emerged showing a bungled CIA operation that led to the shooting down of a light plane carrying American missionaries in Peru. The dramatic footage, taken from a CIA surveillance aircraft and shown on America’s ABC News, shows Peruvian fighter jets opening fire on the missionaries’ seaplane even as its pilot screamed for help. Read article
Politico – In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned. In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation. Read Article
Press TV – A secret meeting between the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Leon Panetta and Israeli officials has reportedly centered on Iran’s nuclear program. In a secret flying visit to Israel on Thursday, the head of the CIA reportedly discussed Iran’s nuclear issue in a sit-down with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Mossad Chief Meir Dagan. Read article
Ed – Any report that starts off with the words “A secret meeting … ” should ring alarm bells, especially when it also uses words like “reportedly”. A complete fail in credibility, but we report it just the same and ask you to take it with a pinch of salt. The content may be genuine despite the poor journalism.
Reuters – The Pentagon said on Monday it would expand secretive Special Operations units, deploy more unmanned aerial drones and increase aid to countries like Yemen to fight al Qaeda in a shift away from Cold War priorities. In unveiling the Pentagon’s proposed $708 billion budget for the 2011 fiscal year that begins in October, Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared that decades of Pentagon planning, focused on waging two major conventional wars at the same time, had been “overtaken by events.” Read article
Press TV – Revelations of a secret Israeli spy base, which was allegedly set up in Ankara to gather classified information on Iran and Syria, has dragged Tel Aviv into a new spy scandal. Sources in Turkey’s ruling party told Russia’s Mignews that Israeli spy agents ran an advanced electronic monitoring station from the Ankara military headquarters to keep tabs on communication networks in Iran and Syria. Read article
The Age – CANADA’S former ambassador to Iran, Kenneth Taylor, has said he worked as a CIA spy during the 1979 hostage crisis in the wake of the Islamic revolution. Mr Taylor broke his silence in an interview published in the daily Globe and Mail on Saturday, as a book detailing his involvement hit bookstores. Read article
The Register – A UN watchdog has called for a new international agreement on privacy following a review of the expanding global array of surveillance measures and databases advanced by governments in the cause of counter-terrorism. The special rapporteur on human rights, Martin Scheinin, said the UN should create a “a global declaration on data protection and data privacy” in response. Read article
DW World – US intelligence agencies at home and around the world are suffering from endemic failures in communication and information gathering which are threatening to undermine Washington’s pursuit of al Qaeda and its affiliates. Read article
Telegraph – US remote-controlled spy drones used over Afghanistan and Iraq are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up with it, according to The New York Times. The newspaper said the Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. Read article
Press TV – Venezuela has scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to ward off a US ‘military plane’ amid reports of “US trespassing the country’s airspace.” President Hugo Chavez has ordered the fighters to confront a US P-3 maritime patrol aircraft that had purportedly violated Venezuela’s airspace, Reuters quoted the Venezuelan president as saying on Friday. Read article
ABC – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has approved plans to erect a barrier along part of Israel’s border with Egypt and install advanced surveillance equipment to keep out illegal migrants and militants. “I took the decision to close Israel’s southern border to infiltrators and terrorists,” Mr Netanyahu said in a statement. “This is a strategic decision to secure Israel’s Jewish and democratic character.” Read article
Reuters – A U.S. contractor detained last month in Cuba for distributing satellite communications equipment to dissidents worked for American “secret services” and is being investigated, a top Cuban official said on Wednesday. Read article
