***** Congress examines EMP threat *****

(Compiler's note: This is one of THE "big one" being discussed here. You'll want to follow this testimony and resulting action! Failure to act on the part of our Congress -- a nation at war -- could well result in destruction of this nation as we now know it!!! The recovery time from this type of attack is NOT short by any means. We are talking about really going back to "horse & buggy" times here people.)

WASHINGTON – More than four years after a stunning report about America's vulnerability to a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack was released to Congress, the House Armed Services Committee will hear testimony from the scientist who issued the warning and who believes Iran is pursuing such an option.

William R. Graham, President Reagan's top science adviser and the chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, will update the committee Thursday morning.

Graham warned in 2005 that Iran was not only covertly developing nuclear weapons, but was already testing ballistic missiles specifically designed to destroy America's technical infrastructure with the aim of neutralizing the world's lone superpower.

The radical Shiite regime has conducted successful tests to determine if its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, can be detonated by a remote-control device while still in high-altitude flight, Graham said in his report.

Graham said then there was no other plausible explanation for such tests than preparation for the deployment of electromagnetic pulse weapons – even one of which could knock out America's critical electrical and technological infrastructure, effectively sending the continental U.S. back to the 19th century with a recovery time of months or years.

Iran would have that capability – at least theoretically – as soon as it has one nuclear bomb ready to arm such a missile.

... Even primitive Scud missiles could be used for this purpose. And top U.S. intelligence officials reminded members of Congress that there is a glut of these missiles on the world market. They are currently being bought and sold for about $100,000 apiece.

Others agree with Graham's sobering assessment.

"A terrorist organization might have trouble putting a nuclear warhead 'on target' with a Scud, but it would be much easier to simply launch and detonate in the atmosphere," wrote Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., in the Washington Post in 2005 after reading Graham's report. "No need for the risk and difficulty of trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon over the border or hit a particular city. Just launch a cheap missile from a freighter in international waters – al-Qaida is believed to own about 80 such vessels – and make sure to get it a few miles in the air." ...

...The major impact of EMP weapons is on electronics, "so pervasive in all aspects of our society and military, coupled through critical infrastructures," explained the report.

"Their effects on systems and infrastructures dependent on electricity and electronics could be sufficiently ruinous as to qualify as catastrophic to the nation," Lowell Wood, acting chairman of the commission, told members of Congress.

The commission report went so far as to suggest, in its opening sentence, that an EMP attack "might result in the defeat of our military forces."...

... As Kyl put it: "Few if any people would die right away. But the loss of power would have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order." ...

...The commission said hardening key infrastructure systems and procuring vital backup equipment such as transformers is both feasible and – compared with the threat – relatively inexpensive. "But it will take leadership by the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and other federal agencies, along with support from Congress, all of which have yet to materialize,"

... this time we've been warned, and we'd better be prepared to respond."

Mailed to the Democrats standing in the way of the Patriot Act

Funny how hard it's been tracking down the person or persons who mailed the anthrax to Congress and managed to kill some postal workers, may have been closer than anyone imagined.

Indeed, 3 of the 4 suspects the FBI is investigating are employees of Fort Detrick, which is run by the Army.This new information verifies that

the anthrax came from the Fort Detrick military base

"Fort Detrick is run by the United States Army. It's the most secure biological warfare research center in the United States," a bioterrorism expert told FOX News."

It is not very likely that someone could steal anthrax from the most secure facility in the U.S., run by the Army.

Indeed, the FBI apparently knew in 2002 who mailed the anthrax letters. See this, this, and this.

And yet government investigators and prosecutors have covered up and refused to disclose who did it for 6 years. Initially, the FBI tried to frame an innocent man for the attacks.

War comes to Ingushetia

The border of Chechnya and Ingushetia used to mark the line between war and peace. Now the shootings, torture and disappearances have begun.

By Tanya Lokshina for openDemocracy/polit.ru

It used to be peaceful here. The border of Chechnya and Ingushetia marked the line between war and peace. Crossing this line, returning from war to peace, you sighed every time: "Now everything will be fine. It's safe here..." Of course, there's poverty, dirt, corruption, but people don't get killed, shot or kidnapped here. There it's part of everyday life.

When did this all change? It happened gradually. The realities which only used to exist "across the border," in Chechnya, seeped slowly into Ingushetia. The kidnappings began in 2002, though it's true that at first the Ingush themselves were not affected - only the Chechen refugees.

At the time, there were 150,000 of them in Ingushetia, equal to around half the population of this small republic. Militants from Chechnya began coming at night. They broke into the homes of refugees, grabbed their victims, put them into vehicles and drove them back to Chechnya.

Those kidnapped usually disappeared without trace. Numbers increased and soon they started taking Ingush as well, who also "disappeared." And they were tortured too. But until June 2004 this was a rare occurrence...

That "black June" was the turning point - war came into Ingushetia. ...

Sharia: “What’s in a name?” A lot – to help us understand our future

Comments by David G. Littman:

After the June 16 climacteric at the UN Human Rights Council, I explained at Jihad Watch that all “Criticism of Shari’a or fatwas in particular is now forbidden”. I provided facts and video evidence to prove that point. The two titles chosen (June 19 and 21) speak volumes:

UN Human Rights Council: Any mention of the word “sharia” is now taboo

UNHRC: Something is, indeed, rotten in the State of … the Council

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dOu-DNLec ...

Oil price shock means China is at risk of blowing up

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The great oil shock of 2008 is bad enough for us. It poses a mortal threat to the whole economic strategy of emerging Asia.

	An oil rig in China's Bohai Sea

The manufacturing revolution of China and her satellites has been built on cheap transport over the past decade. At a stroke, the trade model looks obsolete.

No surprise that Shanghai's bourse is down 56pc since October, one of the world's most spectacular bear markets in half a century.

Asia's intra-trade model is a Ricardian network where goods are shipped in a criss-cross pattern to exploit comparative advantage. Profit margins are wafer-thin.

Products are sent to China for final assembly, then shipped again to Western markets. The snag is obvious. The cost of a 40ft container from Shanghai to Rotterdam has risen threefold since the price of oil exploded.

"The monumental energy price increases will be a 'game-changer' for Asia," said Stephen Jen, currency chief at Morgan Stanley. The region's trade model is about to be "stress-tested".

Energy subsidies have disguised the damage. China has held down electricity prices, though global coal costs have tripled since early 2007. Loss-making industries are being propped up. This merely delays trouble.

"The true impact of the shock will only be revealed over time, as subsidies are gradually rolled back," he said. Last week, China raised internal rail freight rates by 17pc.

BP 's Statistical Review says China's use of energy per unit of gross domestic product is three times that of the US, five times Japan's, and eight times Britain's.

China's factories "were not built with current energy levels in mind", said Mr Jen. The outcome will be "non-linear". My translation: China is at risk of blowing up.

Middle East war threat rattles oil markets

Read more by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

More on energy | Economics

Any low-tech product shipped in bulk - furniture, say, or shoes - is facing the ever-rising tariff of high freight costs. The Asian outsourcing game is over, says CIBC World Markets. "It's not just about labour costs any more: distance costs money," says chief economist Jeff Rubin.

Xinhua says that 2,331 shoe factories in Guangdong have shut down this year, half the total.

North Carolina's furniture industry is coming back from the dead as companies shut plant in China. "We're getting hit with increases up and down the system. It's changing the whole equation of where we produce," said Craftsmaster Furniture.

China is being crunched by the triple effects of commodity costs, 20pc wage inflation, and sagging import demand in the US, Canada, Britain, Spain, Italy, and France.

Critics warn that Beijing has repeated the errors of Tokyo in the 1980s by over-investing in marginal plant. A Communist Party banking system has let rip with cheap credit - steeply negative real interest rates - to buy political time for the regime.

Whether or not this is fair, it is clear that Beijing's mercantilist policy of holding down the yuan to boost exports share has now hit the buffers.

	A worker on an oil field in China's northeastern Heilongjiang province

Foreign reserves have reached $1.8 trillion, playing havoc with the money supply. Declared inflation is just 7.7pc, but that does not begin to capture the scale of repressed prices, from fuel to fertilisers. "There is a lot more bottled-up inflation in this economy than meets they eye," says Stephen Green, from Standard Chartered.

Inflation merely steals growth from the future. It defers monetary tightening until matters get out of hand, which is where we are now. Vietnam has already blown up at 30pc. India is on the cusp at 11pc, so is Indonesia (11pc), the Philippines (11pc), Thailand (9pc) - leaving aside the double-digit Gulf.

Of course, oil prices may fall again. They plunged to $50 a barrel in early 2007 after the Saudis raised production. The scissor effect of slowing global growth and extra crude later this year from Brazil, Azerbaijan, Africa, and the Gulf of Mexico may chill the super-boom.

The US Commodities Futures Trading Commission is on an "emergency" footing, under orders from the Democrats on Capitol Hill to smash speculators. If it is really true that investment funds have run amok, we will soon find out.

I suspect that the energy markets have fallen prey to their own version of the "shadow banking system" that so astonished regulators when the credit bubble burst.

I also suspect that Hank Paulson and his EU colleagues have a surprise up their sleeve for the late-cycle über-bulls. Those who claim that derivatives (crude futures) cannot drive spot prices have overlooked a key point. The Saudis and others use the IPE Brent Weighted Average of futures contracts as their pricing mechanism. Futures now set the spot price.

But even if oil comes down for a year or two, the mid-term outlook of the International Energy Agency warns that crude markets will be tighter than ever by 2012. Call it Peak Oil, or just Peak Non-Cooperation by the dictatorships that control most of the world's remaining 5 or 6 trillion barrels (Mankind has used one trillion so far).

Come what may, globalisation has passed its high-water mark. The pendulum will now swing back from China to America. The mercantilists will have to reinvent themselves.

Mechanic Claims Car Gets 110 Miles Per Gallon

(Compiler's note: Maybe it is just a matter of time!)

To find the future of the auto industry, Doug Pelmear looked to the past. He says he's perfected an engine developed by his grandfather 60 years ago. An engine that gives his 1987 mustang 110 miles to the gallon. ...

... Pelmear won't show us under the hood. Some of his gizmos are still awaiting patents. But the secret lies in making engines more efficient. And with a little more work, developers believe they'll be getting 500 miles to the gallon and revolutionizing the auto industry.

Department of Homeland Security sends letters to high-risk facilities

The Department of Homeland Security has preliminarily labeled more than 200 chemical facilities, including university laboratories, at highest risk for a potential terrorist attack. DHS has winnowed this number from a pool of about 7,000 facilities under review in its chemical plant security program.

The agency had identified these facilities from a larger pool of 32,000 and ranked them according to a four-tier system. The highest risk facilities will be subject to the most stringent federal regulation and may be fined for noncompliance or even shuttered (C&EN, April 9, 2007, page 13). For now, the designation by DHS means that these facilities must complete a more detailed security and vulnerability assessment.

Many companies with high-risk facilities are concerned about the ranking. Jeff Gunnulfsen, senior manager of government relations for the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA), a trade group, tells C&EN that members have been ringing his phone off the hook. He says he has had to remind them that these rankings are preliminary and that final rankings have yet to be determined.

C&EN has learned from several sources the breakdown of the notified facilities into the four-tier system: 219 in tier 1, the highest risk level; 756 in tier 2; and 1,712 and 4,319 in tiers 3 and 4, respectively. DHS will neither confirm this exact breakdown of the preliminary tier rankings nor release the names of any of the facilities. ...

Iran and Brazil Can Do It. So Can We.

By Gal Luft
Washington Post, Sunday, July 6, 2008; B01

When the founding fathers declared our independence, they could not have imagined that, 232 years later, the United States would be so spectacularly dependent on foreign countries. It would be roughly eight more decades before oil gushed from a well in Titusville, Pa., marking the beginning of the global oil economy; it took eight decades more for the United States to become a net oil importer. But the republic's disastrous dependence on foreign oil has increased by leaps and bounds ever since.

In 1973, when OPEC imposed its oil embargo, U.S. oil imports composed 30 percent of our
needs; today, they make up more than 60 percent, with a growing proportion of that crude coming from the world's least stable regions. At around $145 a barrel, the United States, by my calculations, will spend more on imported oil this year than it will spend on its own defense budget, and much of that money will flow into the coffers of those who wish us ill.

Since oil dependence is so unappealing, you'd think that energy independence would be an easy sell, especially on this Fourth of July weekend. But in fact, very few policy ideas have been so ridiculed. A 2007 report by the National Petroleum Council, a privately funded group that offers advice from the oil and gas industries to the federal government, calls energy independence "unrealistic"; a recent book, "Gusher of Lies," by Robert Bryce, a former fellow at a think tank funded in part by energy interests, described energy independence as a "dangerous delusion"; and a 2006 Council on Foreign Relations task force went so far as to accuse those promoting energy independence of "doing the nation a disservice by focusing on a goal that is unachievable over the foreseeable future."

Ignore them. Energy independence does not mean that the United States must be entirely self sufficient. It simply means reducing the role of oil in world politics -- turning it from a strategic commodity into merely another thing to sell. ...

Khalid Yasin: Terrorist Mastermind -- And Con Man?

In May, I had two reports published here at FrontPage concerning international hate sheikh Khalid Yasin’s recent tour through the state of Ohio, “Islamic Hatred in the Heartland” and “The Hate Sheikh’s Tour” with an appearance in Dayton and a weeklong schedule of events at mosques all around the Columbus area and the Ohio State University.

But the issue raising concerns amongst some Muslim leaders in the US is not just Yasin’s cross-country tours promoting his toxic blend of rancid theology and conspiracy-mongering, but also about his fraudulent fundraising and questionable business practices. These Muslim leaders are also concerned that some Islamic institutions have willing looked the other way and ignored these scams as long as Yasin continues to regularly rake in substantial sums on their behalf.

Others have also expressed outrage that while Yasin has taken home as much as a hundred thousands dollars in an evening, thanks to his usual 50/50 split of all funds raised at an event, his wife and child live on public welfare in their home in Sheffield, England. ...

Think about 911 before ditching your landline

..."911 is sometimes an afterthought," said Daniel Dunlap, Okaloosa County's 911 coordinator.

When a call comes through a landline, a 911 dispatch center can see the caller's physical address at the least, Dunlap said. If you're choking and can't speak, rescuers will still know where to go.

A cell phone call, on the other hand, uses global positioning technology to create a map that helps rescuers locate a caller. Triangulation between three towers pinpoints the location, but even then the result may be off by about 300 meters.

"It might just give me a general location," Dunlap said. "Sometimes, we get the location of the nearest cell tower instead of the cell phone."...

Al-Qaeda Targeting US

The leader of an Algerian-based offshoot of al-Qaeda warned in an interview published on Tuesday that his group “will not hesitate” to target US interests across the world.

Abdelmalek Droukdal, leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, gave what is thought to be his first interview with a Western journalist to the New York Times, replying via a cassette recording to the paper’s written questions.

“If the US administration sees that its war against the Muslims is legitimate, then what makes us believe that our war on its territories is not legitimate?” he said when asked if his group would target US interests.

“Everyone must know that we will not hesitate in targeting it whenever we can and wherever it is on this planet.” ...

How Oil Prices Could Collapse

The price of oil plummeted once before and it can do so again — if we play our cards right. ...

Speaker Pelosi Was Sending Messages to FARC Terrorists While Undermining Colombian Government!

New information reveals that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was indirectly sending messages to the FARC. The Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is designated as a terrorist group by the US government. Speaker Pelosi was doing this while at the same time she refused to bring a free trade agreement with Colombia up for a vote in the US House. In fact, Pelosi took extraordinary steps to block this trade agreement with America's closest ally in South America.

Cordoba-Pelosi-McGovern
Colombian Sen. Piedad Cordoba (left) is currently under investigation by the Colombian attorney general for ties to the FARC. Cordoba claims that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was sending messages to the FARC terrorists. Cordoba also claimed during FARC negotiations that Pelosi had assigned Rep. Jim McGovern, as the point man. Captured FARC documents confirmed in March that Mr. McGovern had been working with an American go-between, who had been offering the rebels help in undermining Colombia's elected and popular government.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the confiscated FARC documents that implicated Rep. McGovern back in March: ...

Crossroads in History: The Struggle against Jihad and Supremacist Ideologies

By Jeffrey Imm

In fighting Islamic supremacism, instead of an approach only based on tactical measures and efforts at clever twists of terminology, what if America had a true strategy that was instead based on the defense of our values on human equality and liberty?

The true challenge of Islamic supremacism to America and the free world is not about Islam, Islamism, or terrorism, but about us. It is a historic challenge to determine whether we truly have the courage of our convictions on equality and liberty and we are willing to fight for these ideals, or if we will instead accept the continuing growth of anti-freedom ideologies here and around the world.

Islamic supremacists are counting on their belief that America is no longer willing to fight for such freedoms, that it has gotten too soft to do so, and that regardless of the success or failure of individual Jihadist tactics, eventually we will tolerate a continued growth of Islamic supremacism. The crossroads in history that we stand at remains whether or not we will prove Islamic supremacists correct, or if the idea defined in our very Declaration of Independence and chiseled in a marble memorial in America's capital - that "all men are created equal" - is an idea that America will once again sacrifice to defend.

America and the West are at a critical crossroads in history in their faltering struggle with Islamic supremacist ideologies and Jihadist terror tactics. Increasingly, groups seek to halt any meaningful debate and halt any challenge to the ideology behind Jihad, and they seek to redirect such debate and action to focus only on the terrorist symptoms of such a supremacist ideology. Such diversionary efforts are being made by non-violent Islamic supremacist groups and activists, government officials, academics, and media commentators. The solution to this can be found in recognizing how Islamic supremacism (as any supremacist ideology) is opposed to our values, and in understanding America's historical experience in defeating other supremacist ideologies.

1. The Islamic Supremacist Declaration of War on Equality and Freedom ...
2. "All Men Are Created Equal" Versus Sharia ...
3. Approach to Confronting a 4 Million Member Terrorist Group...
4. America's "War of Ideas" Against Supremacist Ideologies...
5. A Declaration of Independence from Islamic Supremacism ...

The full-length version of this article can be found here.

Electric shock for air passengers?

You check in at the airline ticket counter. But instead of a boarding pass, you get shackled with an electronic bracelet which tracks your every move, contains all your personal information, and can shock you senseless. This vision of the future of air security is being floated around the Department of Homeland Security’s research and development office.

According to a video promoting the so-called EMD Safety Bracelet, all airline passengers would be required to wear it “until they disembark the flight at their destination.”

The device, in addition to storing all of your sensitive personal information and tracking you with GPS, would allow someone to activate it remotely and immobilize the wearer for several minutes. This is EMD, or electro-muscular disruption.

And the Department of Homeland Security is interested in buying them. ...

Israel Lobby Says Pentagon ‘INFILTRATED’

By Michael Collins Piper

A leading voice of the pro-Israel lobby is pushing for an old-style “witchhunt”—under the guise of “homeland security”—to identify (and expel) individuals in the U.S. government and our military who are suspected of being hostile to Israel.

The call for a witch-hunt is based on the outlandish thesis that “Islamo-fascists” and Muslim “jihadist” operatives and, perhaps more particularly, their “sympathizers”—however loosely defined—have infested America’s defense, national security and federal law enforcement community. ...

Passport Record System Open To Abuse, Review Finds

Investigators surveyed the records of 150 high-profile Americans, whose names were selected from Forbes and Sports Illustrated magazine lists and Internet search engine Google's most-searched names.

The report said that the records of 127 of those people, or 85 percent, had been accessed a total of 4,148 times, strongly suggesting attempts at unauthorized access. Their names were not identified.

"The system is unable to protect itself," said one State Department official, who requested anonymity. "Anybody can go in." ...

Problems remain with US Coast Guard's Homeland Security performance

The Coast Guard's Deepwater Program, under the Department of Homeland Security, has experienced serious performance and management problems.

Deepwater is intended to replace or modernize Coast Guard vessels, aircraft, and the communications and electronic systems that link them together. ...

GAO: First Responders' Detection of Hazardous Releases Inadequate

WASHINGTON, DC, July 3, 2008 (ENS) - More than six years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, local first responders do not have tools to accurately and quickly identify the release of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear materials in an urban environment, according to a new report issued by the Government Accountability Office, GAO, the investigative branch of Congress. ...

Border security report: State Department must update planning

Under the Visa Waiver Program, citizens from 27 countries can travel to the United States visa free. Terrorism concerns involving VWP country citizens have led some to suggest eliminating or suspending the program, while the executive branch is considering adding countries to it. ...

The sad saga of a soldier from Long Island

The March 2003 image became one of the most iconic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: that of a bespectacled American soldier carrying an Iraqi child to safety. The photograph of Army Pfc. Joseph Dwyer, who was raised in Mount Sinai, was used by news outlets around the world. ...

Biometric Scans Find U.S. Crooks in Iraq, Afghanistan

Since 9/11, the U.S. government has fingerprinted, iris-scanned, and face-captured hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa. Some have been insurgents or detainees; some prospective policemen, or just ordinary folks looking to get back into their homes. "Hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials tell the Washington Post. "They have criminal arrest records in the United States."

Iraq says may agree timetable for U.S. withdrawal

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki raised the prospect on Monday of setting a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops as part of negotiations over a new security agreement with Washington.

It was the first time the U.S.-backed Shi'ite-led government has floated the idea of a timetable for the removal of American forces from Iraq. The Bush administration has always opposed such a move, saying it would give militant groups an advantage. ...

US removes uranium from Iraq

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program - a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium - reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" - the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment - was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

What's now left is the final and complicated push to clean up the remaining radioactive debris at the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad - using teams that include Iraqi experts recently trained in the Chernobyl fallout zone in Ukraine. ...

Is cosying up to Muslim extremists the best way to defeat terrorism?

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, was nice about sharia this week. It is not "only about mandating sanctions such as stoning, flogging, the cutting off of hands and death to those who do not comply with the law", he said. And the provisions of sharia "do not include the repression of women". ...

... Next week, a big exhibition at Olympia called Islam Expo, with stalls from delightful governments like Sudan and Iran, will give a platform to this grand coalition of Islamists under the banner of "Understanding Political Islam". And a minister, Shahid Malik, will appear on television for the anniversary of July 7, 2005 (when Muslim extremists murdered British people of all religions), to say that Muslims are "under siege like the Jews" under the Nazis.

So the solution to extremism is that extremists become the official representatives of Islam in this country. Islamist mosques, organisations and spokesmen will be treated as the true voice of Muslims (and woe betide those Muslims who disagree). Then we shall get a lot more sharia than Lord Phillips has bargained for.

Father Strangles Daughter in Georgia Honor Killing

They seemed to be decent, lovely people.

Chaudhry Rashad strangled his 25 year-old daughter Sandela Kanwal because he felt her plans for divorce would have disgraced the family. (MyFOX Atlanta)

WSBTV Atlanta has video HERE. ...