Secret Hill Meeting ‘Major War’ Looming In The Middle East

By James P. Tucker Jr.

Members of the Trilateral Commission’s North American Group and congressmen who attended the gathering struggled hard to hide their meeting in Washington, D.C.,  November 30-December 3. They wanted no public viewing of their efforts to get yet another war started in the Mideast.

The North American Group is a regional subgroup of the Trilateral Commission (TC), founded in 1973 by billionaire David Rockefeller to expand ties among North America, Europe and Asia.

Attendees to the secretive gathering met upstairs in the main lobby of the Library of Congress, which, though usually open to the public, was partially sealed off. Unless you had a TC pass, you were barred from entry.

As AMERICAN FREE PRESS goes to press, we have been unable to confirm whether all members of TC’s North American Group attended the confab. However, some of the best-known figures in this regional group include former United States Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the neoconservative warmongering academic Eliot Cohen, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.).

Those current senators and congressmen who attended the gathering slipped into the meeting by means of an underground railway that connects several congressional office buildings with the U.S. Capitol.

Some legislators walked above ground on their return because their offices were more convenient. At night, they were impossible to identify by their small congressional tags and their TC badges. But several were overheard telling their staff escorts that war was looming in the Middle East despite calls for spending cuts, tax increases and the so-called “fiscalcliff.” They anticipated much bloodshed.

“It could be the biggest [war] we ever had over there,” one was overheard saying.

“We’ll get into the fighting, too,” said another, but he appeared unhappy at the prospect.

If so, the war will “spill the life’s blood of our young men and the heart’s blood of our women,” he added, and it will be mostly financed with your tax dollars.

3 Unbelievably Creepy Surveillance Tactics

Since the erosion of Americans' civil liberties depends on high levels of public apathy, some of the most dangerous privacy breaches take place incrementally and under the radar; if it invites comparisons to Blade Runneror Orwell, then someone in the PR department didn't do their job. Meanwhile, some of the biggest threats to privacy, like insecure online data or iPhone GPS tracking, are physically unobtrusive and therefore easily ignored. And it'll be at least a year or two until the sky is overrun by spy drones. 

So when a method of surveillance literally resembles a prop or plot point in a sci-fi movie, it helps to reveal just how widespread and sophisticated commercial and government monitoring has become.  Here are five recent developments that seem almost unreal in their dystopian creepiness. 

1. Buses and street cars that can hear what you say .

You can't really go anywhere in America without being tracked by surveillance cameras. But seeing what people do is not enough; according to a report by the Daily, cities all over the country are literally bugging public transportation. 

In San Francisco, city officials have plans to install surveillance cameras that record sound on 357 buses and trolley cars, the Daily reported. Eugene, Oregon and Columbus, Hartford and Athens, Georgia, also have audio recording plans in the works. The systems have the capacity to filter background noise and hone in on passengers' conversations.

Officials have said that the system is merely intended to help resolve disputes between bus riders. San Francisco officials did not comment, but the Daily found a similar justification in procurement documents for the technology. “The purpose of this project is to replace the existing video surveillance systems in SFMTA’s fleet of revenue vehicles with a reliable and technologically advanced system to increase passenger safety and improve reliability and maintainability of the system.”

It's nice that the Department of Homeland Security, which covered the entire cost of San Francisco's system, is so committed to ensuring pleasant bus rides for passengers. 

2. Mannequins that can see you.

A handful of retailers in the US and Europe are installing mannequins in their stores that can determine customers' age, gender and race, Bloomberg reported last month. Don't worry, the face recognition-equipped camera is hidden, so there is no way to tell whether the giant plastic dolls in the store are watching you as you shop. The company that developed the mannequins (named EyeSee) sells their attributes thusly: 

This special camera installed inside the mannequin's head analyzes the facial features of people passing through the front and provides statistical and contextual information useful to the development of targeted marketing strategies. The embedded software can also provide other data such as the number of people passing in front of a window at certain times of the day.

They are also developing audio technology that can pick up key words from customer conversations to help them tailor their marketing plans. A screen that displays advertising geared specifically to each customers' demographic is also in EyeSee's future.

Really, wouldn't the ideal marketing scenario be if human customers were replaced by mannequins programmed to buy everything the other mannequins were selling?

3. Biometric time clocks.

For too long, employers lacked the ability to extract every second of labor from their workers with scientific precision. Thanks to the wonders of face recognition technology, many employees in low-wage workplaces are now required to log in to work on face recognition readers instead of using key cards or codes . Biometric time clocks like FaceIn, most commonly used at construction sites, create an avatar of the workers' face that the machine keeps forever and that ages alongside the employee. Allegedly, it can tell twins apart. 

China-Japan exchange diplomatic blows after Chinese ‘airspace violation’

Japan launched 8 fighter jets in response to an airspace “violation” by a Chinese plane that strayed into territory above disputed islands in East China Sea. Japan slammed the move as “deplorable” and lodged a formal complaint against the Chinese.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry issued a statement, saying a Chinese state aircraft had strayed into airspace over the disputed archipelago, prompting the scrambling of eight F-15 fighters. Japanese spokesman, Osamu Fujimori branded the incident as “extremely deplorable” and said that Chinese ships had also been spotted violating Japanese territory earlier on Thursday.

The Chinese ambassador in Tokyo has been formally summoned to account for the apparent violation and hear the Japanese government’s protest.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Hong Lei responded immediately, saying the plane’s flight path was“completely normal.” Lei went on to state that Japan needed to stop entering the sea and airspace surrounding the disputed islands.

"The Diaoyu islands and affiliated islands are part of China's inherent territory," said Lei. "The Chinese side calls on Japan to halt all entries into water and airspace around the islands."

The territorial row over the Senkaku are a source of constant simmering tensions between the two nations. China calls them the Diaoyus and slammed the Japanese government for its purchase of three of the islands from their private owner in September, sparking an escalation in the dispute.

The islands are uninhabited, but the area surrounding them is believed to hold significant oil and natural gas deposits. Taiwan also claims sovereignty over the archipelago but has been largely ignored in the diplomatic row between its Asian neighbors.

The rise in tensions comes days before the Japanese general elections on December 16, in which the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been tipped for victory. Leader of the LDP, Shinzo Aba has resolved to take a harsh stance regarding the island dispute.

He has previously slammed Japan’s current Democratic ruling Party for its poor handling of the territorial dispute, claiming their weak stance has emboldened the Chinese.

Abe has pledged that he will increase spending on defense and the coastguard should he be elected.

December 13 marks the 75th anniversary of the Nanjing massacre when the Japanese army occupied the old Chinese capital for six weeks, massacring tens of thousands of civilians.

The UN asks for Control over the World’s Internet

Members of the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) have agreed to work towards implementing a standard for the Internet that would allow for eavesdropping on a worldwide scale.

At a conference in Dubai this week, the ITU members decided to adopt the Y.2770 standard for deep packet inspection, a top-secret proposal by way of China that will allow telecom companies across the world to more easily dig through data passed across the Web.

According to the UN, implementing deep-packet inspection, or DPI, on such a global scale will allow authorities to more easily detect the transferring and sharing of copyrighted materials and other protected files by finding a way for administrators to analyze the payload of online transmissions, not just the header data that is normally identified and interpreted.

“It is standard procedure to route packets based on their headers, after all it is the part of the packet that contains information on the packet's intended destination,” writes The Inquirer’s Lawrence Lati, “but by inspecting the contents of each packet ISPs, governments and anyone else can look at sensitive data. While users can mitigate risks by encrypting data, given enough resources encryption can be foiled.”

Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist widely regarded as the ‘Father of the Internet,’ spoke out against proposed DPI implementation on such a grandiose scale during an address earlier this year at the World Wide Web Consortium.

Somebody clamps a deep packet inspection thing on your cable which reads every packet and reassembles the web pages, cataloguing them against your name, address and telephone number either to be given to the government when they ask for it or to be sold to the highest bidder – that's a really serious breach of privacy,” he said.

Blogger Arthur Herman writes this week for Fox News online that the goal of the delegates at the ITU “is to grab control of the World Wide Web away from the United States, and hand it to a UN body of bureaucrats.”

“It’ll be the biggest power grab in the UN’s history, as well as a perversion of its power,” he warns.

The ITU’s secretary general, Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, has dismissed critics who have called the proposed DPI model invasive, penning an op-ed this week where he insists his organization’s meeting in Dubai poses “no threat to free speech.”

“It is our chance to chart a globally-agreed roadmap to connect the unconnected, while ensuring there is investment to create the infrastructure needed for the exponential growth in voice, video and data traffic,” Dr. Toure claims of the conference, adding that it presents the UN with “a golden opportunity to provide affordable connectivity for all, including the billions of people worldwide who cannot yet go online.”

Despite his explanation, though, some nation-states and big-name businesses remain opposed to the proposal. The ITU’s conference this week has been held behind closed doors, and representatives with online service providers Google, Facebook and Twitter have been barred from attending.

In a report published this week by CNet, tech journalist Declan McCullagh cites a Korean document that describes the confidential Y.2770 standard as being able to identify "embedded digital watermarks in MP3 data," discover"copyright protected audio content," find "Jabber messages with Spanish text," or "identify uploading BitTorrent users."

On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a Senate resolution that asks for the American government to oppose any efforts by the United Nations to control the Internet.

US military facing fresh questions over targeting of children in Afghanistan

Outrage grows after senior officer claimed troops in Afghanistan were on the lookout for 'children with potential hostile intent'

Karen McVeigh

The US military is facing fresh questions over its targeting policy in Afghanistan after a senior army officer suggested that troops were on the lookout for "children with potential hostile intent".

In comments which legal experts and campaigners described as "deeply troubling", army Lt Col Marion Carrington told the Marine Corp Times that children, as well as "military-age males", had been identified as a potential threat because some were being used by the Taliban to assist in attacks against Afghan and coalition forces.

"It kind of opens our aperture," said Carrington, whose unit, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was assisting the Afghan police. "In addition to looking for military-age males, it's looking for children with potential hostile intent."

In the article, headlined "Some Afghan kids aren't bystanders", Carrington referred to a case this year in which the Afghan national police in Kandahar province said they found children helping insurgents by carrying soda bottles full of potassium chlorate.

The piece also quoted an unnamed marine corps official who questioned the "innocence" of Afghan children, particularly three who were killed in a US rocket strike in October. Last month, the New York Times quoted local officials who said Borjan, 12, Sardar Wali, 10, and Khan Bibi, eight, from Helmand's Nawa district had been killed while gathering dung for fuel.

However, the US official claimed that, before they called for the strike on suspected insurgents planting improvised explosive devices, marines had seen the children digging a hole in a dirt road and that "the Taliban may have recruited the children to carry out the mission".

Last year, Human Rights Watch reported a sharp increase in the Taliban's deployment of children in suicide bombings, some as young as seven.

But the apparent widening of the US military's already controversial targeting policy has alarmed human rights lawyers and campaigners.

Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah specialising in counter-terrorism, said Carrington's remarks reflected the shifting definitions of legitimate military targets within the Obama administration.

Guiora, who spent years in the Israel Defence Forces, including time as a legal adviser in the Gaza Strip, said: "I have great respect for people who put themselves in harm's way. Carrington is probably a great guy, but he is articulating a deeply troubling policy adopted by the Obama administration.

"The decision about who you consider a legitimate target is less defined by your conduct than the conduct of the people or category of people which you are assigned to belong to ... That is beyond troubling. It is also illegal and immoral."

Guiora added: "If you are looking to create a paradigm where you increase the 'aperture' – that scares me. It doesn't work, operationally, morally or practically."

Guiora cited comments made by John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism chief, in April, in which he "talked about flexible definitions of imminent threat."

Pardiss Kebriaei, senior attorney of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a specialist in targeted killings, said she was concerned over what seemed to be an attempt to justify the killing of children.

Kebriaei said: "This is one official quoted. I don't know if that standard is what they are using but the standard itself is troubling."

The US is already facing criticism for using the term term "military-aged male" to justify targeted killings where the identities of individuals are not known. Under the US definition, all fighting-age males killed in drone strikes are regarded as combatants and not civilians, unless there is explicit evidence to the contrary. This has the effect of significantly reducing the official tally of civilian deaths.

Kebriael said the definition was reportedly being used in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. "Under the rules of law you can only target civilians if they are directly participating in hostilities. So, here, this standard of presuming any military aged males in the vicinity of a war zone are militants, already goes beyond what the law allows.

"When you get to the suggestion that children with potentially hostile intent may be perceived to be legitimate targets is deeply troubling and unlawful."

Children in conflict zones have additional protections under the law.

Kebriael, who is counsel for CCR in a lawsuit which seeks accountability for the killing of three American citizens – including a 16 year old boy – in US drone strikes in Yemen last year, said that the piece also raised questions over how those killed in that incident were counted. "Were they counted as military-aged males or were they counted as children with potentially hostile intent or were they counted as the innocent bystanders they were?"

In a speech in April setting out the context for the US programme of targeted killings, White House counter-terrorism chief John Brennan spoke about a threshold of "significant threat', which was widely seen as introducing a lower criteria than "imminent threat".

Brennan said: "Even if it is lawful to pursue a specific member of al-Qaida, we ask ourselves whether that individual's activities rise to a certain threshold for action, and whether taking action will, in fact, enhance our security. For example, when considering lethal force we ask ourselves whether the individual poses a significant threat to US interests. This is absolutely critical, and it goes to the very essence of why we take this kind of exceptional action."

An Isaf spokesman, Lt Col Jimmie Cummings, told the Marine Corp Times that insurgents continue to use children as suicide bombers and IED emplacers, even though Taliban leader Mullah Omar has ordered them to stop harming civilians.

There have been more than 200 children killed in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen by the CIA and Joint Special Operating Command, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

3,000 US troops secretly return to Iraq via Kuwait

Over 3,000 US troops have secretly returned to Iraq via Kuwait for missions pertaining to the recent developments in Syria and northern Iraq, Press TV reports.

According to our correspondent, the US troops have secretly entered Iraq in multiple stages and are mostly stationed at Balad military garrison in Salahuddin province and al-Asad air base in al-Anbar province.

Reports say the troops include US Army officers and almost 17,000 more are set to secretlyreturn to Iraq via the same route.

All US troops left Iraq by the end of 2011, after nine years of occupation, as required by a 2008 bilateral security agreement between the two countries. The troops left Iraq for the neighboring Kuwait.

Washington decided to pull out all its troops from Iraq after Baghdad refused to grant legal immunity to the remaining US soldiers.

Washington claims that the only US military presence left in Iraq now is 157 soldiers responsible for training at the US Embassy, as well as a small contingent of marines protecting the diplomatic mission.

US-led forces attacked Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam Hussein on the pretext of possessing weapons of mass destruction. But no WMD was ever discovered in Iraq. At the peak of the US-led military operation in Iraq, there were 170,000 US troops and more than 500 bases in Iraq.

More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.

Vulture spying for Israel’ caught in Sudan

Officials in Sudan say they have captured an electronically-tagged vulture suspected of being dispatched by Israel on a spying mission.

The avian discovery was made in Kereinek, a town in the Darfur region of western Sudan, Israeli media have reported.

Sudanese officials are said to have concluded that the bird was a secret agent after discovering it was fitted with GPS and solar-powered equipment capable of broadcasting images via satellite, according to Haaretz newspaper, which cited an Egyptian website, El Balad.

The vulture also had a tag attached to its leg with "Israel Nature Service" and "Hebrew University, Jerusalem", leading to accusations that it was on an Israeli surveillance mission.

The reports follow allegations by Sudan that Israel carried out the bombing of a munitions depot near the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, in October, after jamming the country's radar defences.

Israel has made no comment on the raid, which left two people dead. The arms depot was said to be supplying weapons to the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli officials have acknowledged that the bird, which can fly up to 375 miles a day, had been tagged with Israeli equipment but insisted it was being used to study migration patterns.

Ohad Hazofe, an ecologist with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, told the website, Ynet, that it was one of 100 vultures fitted in October with a GPS system equipped to take distance and altitude readings but not surveillance images.

"That's the only way we knew something had happened to the bird – all of a sudden it stopped flying and started travelling on the ground," he said.

A similar discovery in Saudi Arabia last year prompted local media to report that a bird, later identified as a Griffon, had been "arrested" under suspicion of spying as part of a suspected "Zionist plot".

Saudi officials later dismissed the speculation and criticised journalists for jumping to conclusions after accepting Israeli explanations that the bird was part of a migration study.