Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Report: Chinese Develop Special "Kill Weapon" to Destroy U.S. Aircraft Carriers

Advanced missile poses substantial new threat for U.S. Navy


from U. S. Naval Institute

With tensions already rising due to the Chinese navy becoming more aggressive in asserting its territorial claims in the South China Sea, the U.S. Navy seems to have yet another reason to be deeply concerned.

After years of conjecture, details have begun to emerge of a "kill weapon" developed by the Chinese to target and destroy U.S. aircraft carriers.

First posted on a Chinese blog viewed as credible by military analysts and then translated by the naval affairs blog Information Dissemination, a recent report provides a description of an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) that can strike carriers and other U.S. vessels at a range of 2000km.

The range of the modified Dong Feng 21 missile is significant in that it covers the areas that are likely hot zones for future confrontations between U.S. and Chinese surface forces.

The size of the missile enables it to carry a warhead big enough to inflict significant damage on a large vessel, providing the Chinese the capability of destroying a U.S. supercarrier in one strike.

Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes.

Supporting the missile is a network of satellites, radar and unmanned aerial vehicles that can locate U.S. ships and then guide the weapon, enabling it to hit moving targets.

ASBM is said to be a modified DF-21

The ASBM is said to be a modified DF-21

While the ASBM has been a topic of discussion within national defense circles for quite some time, the fact that information is now coming from Chinese sources indicates that the weapon system is operational. The Chinese rarely mention weapons projects unless they are well beyond the test stages.

If operational as is believed, the system marks the first time a ballistic missile has been successfully developed to attack vessels at sea. Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.

Along with the Chinese naval build-up, U.S. Navy officials appear to view the development of the anti-ship ballistic missile as a tangible threat.

After spending the last decade placing an emphasis on building a fleet that could operate in shallow waters near coastlines, the U.S. Navy seems to have quickly changed its strategy over the past several months to focus on improving the capabilities of its deep sea fleet and developing anti-ballistic defenses.

As analyst Raymond Pritchett notes in a post on the U.S. Naval Institute blog:

"The Navy's reaction is telling, because it essentially equals a radical change in direction based on information that has created a panic inside the bubble. For a major military service to panic due to a new weapon system, clearly a mission kill weapon system, either suggests the threat is legitimate or the leadership of the Navy is legitimately unqualified. There really aren't many gray spaces in evaluating the reaction by the Navy…the data tends to support the legitimacy of the threat."

In recent years, China has been expanding its navy to presumably better exert itself in disputed maritime regions. A recent show of strength in early March led to a confrontation with an unarmed U.S. ship in international waters.

Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran—Or I Will

by Jeffrey Goldberg

In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.

“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.

History teaches Jews that threats against their collective existence should be taken seriously, and, if possible, preempted, he suggested. In recent years, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has regularly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” and the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, this month called Israel a “cancerous tumor.”

But Netanyahu also said that Iran threatens many other countries apart from Israel, and so his mission over the next several months is to convince the world of the broad danger posed by Iran. One of his chief security advisers, Moshe Ya’alon, told me that a nuclear Iran could mean the end of American influence in the Middle East. “This is an existential threat for Israel, but it will be a blow for American interests, especially on the energy front. Who will dominate the oil in the region—Washington or Tehran?”

Netanyahu said he would support President Obama’s decision to engage Iran, so long as negotiations brought about a quick end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “How you achieve this goal is less important than achieving it,” he said, but he added that he was skeptical that Iran would respond positively to Obama’s appeals. In an hour-long conversation, held in the Knesset, Netanyahu tempered his aggressive rhetoric with an acknowledgement that nonmilitary pressure could yet work. “I think the Iranian economy is very weak, which makes Iran susceptible to sanctions that can be ratcheted up by a variety of means.” When I suggested that this statement contradicted his assertion that Iran, by its fanatic nature, is immune to pressure, Netanyahu smiled thinly and said, “Iran is a composite leadership, but in that composite leadership there are elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist right now in any other would-be nuclear power in the world. That’s what makes them so dangerous.”

He went on, “Since the dawn of the nuclear age, we have not had a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest. People say that they’ll behave like any other nuclear power. Can you take the risk? Can you assume that?”

Netanyahu offered Iran’s behavior during its eight-year war with Iraq as proof of Tehran’s penchant for irrational behavior. Iran “wasted over a million lives without batting an eyelash … It didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness. It wasn’t Britain after World War I, lapsing into pacifism because of the great tragedy of a loss of a generation. You see nothing of the kind.”

He continued: “You see a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” I asked Netanyahu if he believed Iran would risk its own nuclear annihilation at the hands of Israel or America. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said.

Neither Netanyahu nor his principal military advisers would suggest a deadline for American progress on the Iran nuclear program, though one aide said pointedly that Israeli time lines are now drawn in months, “not years.” These same military advisers told me that they believe Iran’s defenses remain penetrable, and that Israel would not necessarily need American approval to launch an attack. “The problem is not military capability, the problem is whether you have the stomach, the political will, to take action,” one of his advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me.

Both Israeli and American intelligence officials agree that Iran is moving forward in developing a nuclear-weapons capability. The chief of Israeli military intelligence, Major General Amos Yadlin, said earlier this month that Iran has already “crossed the technological threshold,” and that nuclear military capability could soon be a fact: “Iran is continuing to amass hundreds of kilograms of low-enriched uranium, and it hopes to exploit the dialogue with the West and Washington to advance toward the production of an atomic bomb.”

American officials argue that Iran has not crossed the “technological threshold”; the director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, said recently that Israel and the U.S. are working with the same set of facts, but are interpreting it differently. “The Israelis are far more concerned about it, and they take more of a worst-case approach to these things from their point of view,” he said. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Michael Mullen, recently warned that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would undermine stability in the Middle East and endanger the lives of Americans in the Persian Gulf.

The Obama administration agrees with Israel that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to Middle East stability, but it also wants Israel to focus on the Palestinian question. Netanyahu, for his part, promises to move forward on negotiations with the Palestinians, but he made it clear in our conversation that he believes a comprehensive peace will be difficult to achieve if Iran continues to threaten Israel, and he cited Iran’s sponsorship of such Islamist groups as Hezbollah and Hamas as a stumbling block.

Taliban Chief Vows 'Amazing' Attack on Washington 'Soon'

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan — The commander of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility Tuesday for a deadly assault on a Pakistani police academy and said the group was planning a terrorist attack on the White House that would "amaze" the world.

Baitullah Mehsud, who has a $5 million bounty on his head from the U.S., said Monday's attack on the outskirts of the eastern city of Lahore was retaliation for U.S. missile strikes against militants along the Afghan border. ....

Beyond AIG: A bill to let Big Government set your salary

By Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent washingtonexaminer.com

It was nearly two weeks ago that the House of Representatives, acting in a near-frenzy after the disclosure of bonuses paid to executives of AIG, passed a bill that would impose a 90 percent retroactive tax on those bonuses. Despite the overwhelming 328-93 vote, support for the measure began to collapse almost immediately. Within days, the Obama White House backed away from it, as did the Senate Democratic leadership. The bill stalled, and the populist storm that spawned it seemed to pass.

But now, in a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the "Pay for Performance Act of 2009," would impose government controls on the pay of all employees -- not just top executives -- of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

The purpose of the legislation is to "prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards," according to the bill's language. That includes regular pay, bonuses -- everything -- paid to employees of companies in whom the government has a capital stake, including those that have received funds through the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The measure is not limited just to those firms that received the largest sums of money, or just to the top 25 or 50 executives of those companies. It applies to all employees of all companies involved, for as long as the government is invested. And it would not only apply going forward, but also retroactively to existing contracts and pay arrangements of institutions that have already received funds.

In addition, the bill gives Geithner the authority to decide what pay is "unreasonable" or "excessive." And it directs the Treasury Department to come up with a method to evaluate "the performance of the individual executive or employee to whom the payment relates."

The bill passed the Financial Services Committee last week, 38 to 22, on a nearly party-line vote. (All Democrats voted for it, and all Republicans, with the exception of Reps. Ed Royce of California and Walter Jones of North Carolina, voted against it.)

The legislation is expected to come before the full House for a vote this week, and, just like the AIG bill, its scope and retroactivity trouble a number of Republicans. "It's just a bad reaction to what has been going on with AIG," Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, a committee member, told me. Garrett is particularly concerned with the new powers that would be given to the Treasury Secretary, who just last week proposed giving the government extensive new regulatory authority. "This is a growing concern, that the powers of the Treasury in this area, along with what Geithner was looking for last week, are mind boggling," Garrett said.

Rep. Alan Grayson, the Florida Democrat who wrote the bill, told me its basic message is "you should not get rich off public money, and you should not get rich off of abject failure." Grayson expects the bill to pass the House, and as we talked, he framed the issue in a way to suggest that virtuous lawmakers will vote for it, while corrupt lawmakers will vote against it.

"This bill will show which Republicans are so much on the take from the financial services industry that they're willing to actually bless compensation that has no bearing on performance and is excessive and unreasonable," Grayson said. "We'll find out who are the people who understand that the public's money needs to be protected, and who are the people who simply want to suck up to their patrons on Wall Street."

After the AIG bonus tax bill was passed, some members of the House privately expressed regret for having supported it and were quietly relieved when the White House and Senate leadership sent it to an unceremonious death. But populist rage did not die with it, and now the House is preparing to do it all again.

A bill to shift cybersecurity to White House

A bill to shift cybersecurity to White HouseForthcoming legislation would wrest cybersecurity responsibilities from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and transfer them to the White House, a proposed move that likely will draw objections from industry groups and some conservatives.

CNET News has obtained a summary of a proposal from Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) that would create an Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor, part of the Executive Office of the President. That office would receive the power to disconnect, if it believes they’re at risk of a cyberattack, “critical” computer networks from the Internet.

Newt Gingrich: A Single Nuke Could Destroy America

(Compiler's note: This must read is frightening…. One to three missiles tipped with nuclear weapons and armed to detonate at a high altitude — to achieve the strongest EMP over the greatest area of the United States — would create an EMP “overlay” that triggers a continent-wide collapse of our entire electrical, transportation, and communications infrastructure.

The impact has been likened to a nationwide Hurricane Katrina. Within weeks after such an attack, tens of millions of Americans would perish.Some studies estimate that 90 percent of all Americans might very well die in the year after such an attack as our transportation, food distribution, communications, public safety, law enforcement, and medical infrastructures collapse.)


By:
Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen

A sword of Damocles hangs over our heads. It is a real threat that has been all but ignored.

On Feb. 3, Iran launched a “communications satellite” into orbit. At this very moment, North Korea is threatening to do the same. The ability to launch an alleged communications satellite belies a far more frightening truth. A rocket that can carry a satellite into orbit also can drop a nuclear warhead over any location on the planet in less than 45 minutes.

Far too many timid or uninformed sources maintain that a single launch of a missile poses no true threat to the United States, given our retaliatory power.

A reality check is in order and must be discussed in response to such an absurd claim: In fact, one small nuclear weapon, delivered by an ICBM can destroy the United States by maximizing the effect of the resultant electromagnetic pulse upon detonation.

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a byproduct of detonating an atomic bomb above the Earth’s atmosphere. When a nuclear weapon is detonated in space, the gamma rays emitted trigger a massive electrical disturbance in the upper atmosphere. Moving at the speed of light, this overload will short out all electrical equipment, power grids and delicate electronics on the Earth’s surface. In fact, it would take only one to three weapons exploding above the continental United States to wipe out our entire grid and transportation network. It might take years to recover from, if ever.

This is not science fiction. If you doubt this, spend a short amount of time skimming the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack from April 2008. You will come away sobered.

Even as the new administration plans to spend trillions on economic bailouts, it has announced plans to reduce funding and downgrade efforts for missile defense. Furthermore, the United States’ reluctance to invest in a modern and credible traditional nuclear deterrent is a serious concern. What good will a bailout be if there is no longer a nation to bail out?

Fifty years ago, it was not Sputnik itself that sent a dire chill of warning around the world; it was the capability of the rocket that launched Sputnik. The rocket that lofted Sputnik into orbit also could have served as an ICBM.

Yet for all its rhetoric, the Soviet Union was essentially a rational power that recognized the threat of mutual destruction and thus never stepped to the edge.

The world is different today. Intercontinental range missiles tipped with nuclear weapons in the hands of leaders driven by fanaticism, leaders that support global terrorism, leaders that have made repeated threats that they will seek our annihilation . . . can now at last achieve that dream in a matter of minutes.

Those who claim that there is little to fear from Iran or North Korea because “at best” they will have only one or two nuclear weapons ignore the catastrophic level of threat we now face from just “a couple” of nuclear weapons.

Again: One to three missiles tipped with nuclear weapons and armed to detonate at a high altitude — to achieve the strongest EMP over the greatest area of the United States — would create an EMP “overlay” that triggers a continent-wide collapse of our entire electrical, transportation, and communications infrastructure.

Within weeks after such an attack, tens of millions of Americans would perish. The impact has been likened to a nationwide Hurricane Katrina. Some studies estimate that 90 percent of all Americans might very well die in the year after such an attack as our transportation, food distribution, communications, public safety, law enforcement, and medical infrastructures collapse.

We most likely would never recover from the blow.

Two things need to be done now and without delay:

1. Make clear in the strongest of terms that, if either Iran or North Korea launches a rocket on a trajectory headed toward the territory of the United States, we will shoot it down. The risk of not doing so is beyond acceptable. And if they construe this as an act of war, so be it, for they fired the first shot. The risk of sitting back for 30 minutes and praying it is not an EMP strike is beyond acceptable, beyond rational on our part.

2. Funding for EMP defense must be a top national priority. To downgrade or halt our missile defense program, which at last is becoming viable after 25 years of research, would be an action of criminal negligence.

Surely, with such a threat confronting us, a fair and open debate, with full public access and the setting aside of partisan politics, is in order. In the meantime, a policy must be stated today that we will indeed shoot down any missile aimed towards the United States that is fired by Iran or North Korea. America’s survival, your survival, and your family’s survival might very well depend on it.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. William Forstchen is the author of "One Second After," an account of a town struggling to survive after an EMP weapon is used against the United States.

Latest Gitmo releasee: Al-Qaeda operative accused of taking part in anthrax plot

from Jihad Watch

He also was accused of aiding terrorist-charities and repeatedly meeting with Osama bin Laden. All rubbish, insists his lawyer; as for his meetings with bin Laden, well, they were all merely "chance encounters."

"U.S. Decides to Release Detainee at Guantánamo," by William Glaberson for the New York Times, March 31:

The Justice Department announced Monday that the administration had decided to release a detainee at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, a Yemeni doctor who the Bush administration once claimed had taken part in an anthrax program of Al Qaeda.

The government had backed away from the anthrax accusations but had continued to hold the detainee, Dr. Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, asserting that he had worked for a charity that had terrorist ties and that he had met with Osama bin Laden.

The decision to release Dr. Batarfi came in the third case the Obama administration has reviewed under new procedures the president put in place to analyze the cases of military detainees in preparation for closing the Guantánamo prison in Cuba.[...]

Captured in Afghanistan in 2002, Dr. Batarfi has been detained for nearly seven years. The Justice Department did not say whether Dr. Batarfi, 38, who once practiced medicine in Afghanistan, would be freed, monitored or prosecuted if another country agreed to accept him.

His lawyer, William J. Murphy of Baltimore, said that under an agreement the court case could be reopened if his client objected to the conditions of his release. Mr. Murphy said that the meetings with Mr. bin Laden had been chance encounters and that the Justice Department decision had vindicated his client...

Russia backs return to Gold Standard to solve financial crisis

(Compiler's note: See if you can read between the lines on this one. Click on the title to go and see the video)

Russia has become the first major country to call for a partial restoration of the Gold Standard to uphold discipline in the world financial system.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Arkady Dvorkevich, the Kremlin's chief economic adviser, said Russia would favour the inclusion of gold bullion in the basket-weighting of a new world currency based on Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.

Chinese and Russian leaders both plan to open debate on an SDR-based reserve currency as an alternative to the US dollar at the G20 summit in London this week, although the world may not yet be ready for such a radical proposal.

Mr Dvorkevich said it was "logical" that the new currency should include the rouble and the yuan, adding that "we could also think about more effective use of gold in this system".

The Gold Standard was the anchor of world finance in the 19th Century but began breaking down during the First World War as governments engaged in unprecedented spending. It collapsed in the 1930s when the British Empire, the US, and France all abandoned their parities.

It was revived as part of fixed dollar system until US inflation caused by the Vietnam War and "Great Society" social spending forced President Richard Nixon to close the gold window in 1971.

The world's fiat paper currencies have lacked any external anchor ever since. It is widely argued that the financial excesses and extreme debt leverage of the last quarter century would have been impossible - or less likely - under the discipline of gold.

Russia is a major gold producer with large untapped reserves of ore so it has a clear interest in promoting the idea. The Kremlin has already instructed the central bank of gradually raise the gold share of foreign reserves to 10pc.

China's government has floated a variant of this idea, suggesting a currency based on 30 commodities along the lines of the "Bancor" proposed by John Maynard Keynes in 1944.

Obama courts West-haters

Plans to attend conference seeking Islamic interests

By Aaron Klein


President Obama

JERUSALEM – Concern has been mounting over President Obama's scheduled participation in the U.N.'s Alliance of Civilizations summit in Turkey next month, with some critics painting the organization as anti-Western and advocating Iranian interests.

"The Alliance might more appropriately be called a U.N.-approved Slush Fund for Advancing Iranian and Other Islamic Interests," wrote Claudia Rosett, a Forbes contributor and journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

A separate report by the Heritage Foundation labeled the Alliance forum "well-intentioned" but with little prospect for success due to "bias and objectionable proposals to freedom of expression." The report was titled "Why President Obama should not attend the Alliance of Civilizations forum."

Obama is reportedly due at the Alliance April 7. The organization was formed in 2005 as an offshoot of the Dialogue of Civilizations, an earlier U.N. project founded by former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, who is still a member of the Alliance.

Other Alliance member states or participating organizations include China; the Organization of the Islamic Conference; the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the Arab League; Turkey; and the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific

Organization. Not on the list is Israel.

In 2006, the Alliance released a 63-page official report largely laying blame on the West for negative perceptions of Muslims and Islam. The report only mentioned Islamic terrorism once – in its recommendations section where it suggested the Western media should not use the term terrorism.

The Western media should refrain from using certain terms in reporting on Muslims and Islam, the report recommended, "including the use of terms such as 'Islamic terrorism' and 'Islamic fascism' – [which] have contributed to an alarming increase in Islamophobia which further exacerbates Muslim fears of the West."

Jorge Sampaio, U.N. High Representative for the Alliance, declared at a press conference in Iran last year that freedom of speech should be balanced with respect for religion.

"There is a balance to be found between freedom of expression and respect for religion and for religious feelings and principles," he said.

According to Iranian state-run television, Sampaio also told Supreme Islamic Revolution Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei that Iran "has an important role to play within the Alliance of Civilizations because of its unique cultural and religious makeup."

Iran's Khatami, meanwhile, has reportedly been actively involved with shaping the Alliance agenda. Also, as Rosett pointed out, Khatami entered the U.S. in 2006 for an Alliance meeting and used his U.N.-sponsored trip to stay in the country for another two weeks, During that time he embarked on a speaking tour that saw him denounce America and keynote a Washington fundraising dinner for the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.

Wrote Rosett: "From U.S. soil, thanks to an Alliance entry ticket, Khatami served broadly as a prominent spokesman for Iran's interests – just as Iran was thumbing its nose at U.S. efforts, via the U.N. Security Council, to put a stop to Tehran's pursuit of nuclear bomb fuel."

Alliance hails 'anti-Israel' Arab plan

The Alliance's 2006 report, reviewed by WND, seemed to focus disproportionately on Israel. It painted a picture that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is largely to blame for much of the violence in the Middle East.

The report recognizes the importance of a so-called "Arab Peace Initiative," which defenders of Israel warn would leave the Jewish state with truncated, difficult-to-defend borders and could threaten Israel's Jewish character by compelling it to accept millions of foreign Arabs.

Following scores of denials he would trumpet the plan, Obama in January hailed the Arab initiative, which offers normalization of ties with the Jewish state in exchange for extreme Israeli concessions. In an interview with an Arab television network

– his first formal interview as president – Obama stated:

"Well, here's what I think is important. Look at the proposal that was put forth by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. ... I might not agree with every aspect of the proposal, but it took great courage to put forward something that is as significant as that. I think that there are ideas across the region of how we might pursue peace. I do think that it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what's happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan."

The Arab Initiative, originally proposed by King Abdullah in 2002 and later adopted by the Arab League, states that Israel would receive "normal relations" with the Arab world in exchange for a full withdrawal from the entire Gaza Strip, West Bank, Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem, which includes the Temple Mount.

The West Bank contains important Jewish biblical sites and borders central Israeli population centers, while the Golan Heights looks down on Israeli civilian zones and was twice used by Syria to mount ground invasions into the Jewish state.

The Arab plan also demands the imposition of a non-binding U.N. resolution that calls for so-called Palestinian refugees who wish to move inside Israel to be permitted to do so at the "earliest practicable date."

Palestinians have long demanded the "right of return" for millions of "refugees," a formula Israeli officials across the political spectrum warn is code for Israel's destruction by flooding the Jewish state with millions of Arabs, thereby changing its demographics.

When Arab countries attacked the Jewish state after its creation in 1948, some 725,000 Arabs living within Israel's borders fled or were expelled from the area that became Israel. Also at that time, about 820,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries or fled following rampant persecution.

While most Jewish refugees were absorbed by Israel and other countries, the majority of Palestinian Arabs have been maintained in 59 U.N.-run camps that do not seek to settle the Arabs elsewhere. There are currently about 4 million Arabs who claim Palestinian refugee status with the U.N., including children and grandchildren of the original fleeing Arabs, Arabs living full-time in Jordan, and Arabs who long ago emigrated throughout the Middle East and to the West.

U.S. Threatens Bankruptcy for GM, Chrysler

(Compiler's note: And what exactly is the Constitutional authority for this action being considered by those with absolutely not business experience? We had best wake up people -- before it is too late.)

Plan Would Separate 'Bad' and 'Good' Assets of Two Companies; Historic Intervention Carries Big Political Risk for Obama

Monday, March 30, 2009

Obama’s Middle East Strategy – A Cause for Concern?

The Editors from Family Security

President Obama may be trying to distance himself from his predecessor as he sends Secretary of State Hillary Clinton around the world apologizing for what “big, bad America” has done over the past eight years, but his Afghanistan strategy might well have been warmed-over remains of a George W. Bush repast.
Writing for TIME.com, Bobby Ghoush reports:
Like Bush, Obama plans to send more U.S. troops to fight the insurgency in Afghanistan. In fact, when you add them up — the additional brigade Bush announced in January, the 17,000 combat troops Obama announced a couple of weeks ago and the 4,000 trainers added Friday — you get almost exactly the same number of extra troops sent into Iraq for the "surge."
The parallels don't end there. Bush's "surge" strategy was twinned with an effort to capitalize on disputes between al-Qaeda and its Iraqi allies; eventually, the majority of Sunni insurgents were induced, with promises of money or political power, to stop attacking U.S. forces and turn their guns on the jihadists. Obama, likewise, hopes to drive a wedge between what he describes as "uncompromising" Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders on the one hand, and less implacable insurgents who may be more inclined, for the right price, to make a deal with Western forces or the Afghan government.
There are those who believe Afghanistan is a lost cause and we should cut our losses. FSM contributing editor Alan Caruba is among them:
The decision by the new Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, to move more troops into this situation ignores the reality of waging war in Afghanistan. If he had no stomach for the war in Iraq, it is doubtful he will be willing to sustain the increased casualties that will result from simply putting more of our troops in harm’s way.
Islamic militancy throughout the Middle East and extending its deadly intensions worldwide is going to be a long fight. The U.S. would do well to pick somewhere other than Afghanistan to wage that war. If the Russians with some 100,000 troops were eventually defeated by the local tribes (with weapons assistance from the U.S.) it seems clear that the current mission has little hope for success. The Russians had 14,000 casualties by the time they left.
Don’t look for Obama to withdraw anytime soon, however: he was among the anti-war crowd whose reasoning was that we should have “finished the job” in Afghanistan and should never have entered Iraq. Is Afghanistan a lost cause? We aren’t sure, but Obama’s naïveté in other areas certainly are cause for concern.
Take, for instance, his insistence upon talking and negotiating with Iran. His videotaped message for the Iranian New Year celebration was met with scorn from the real man in power in that nation – Ayatollah Ali Khameni. And the situation there is becoming more alarming by the moment. In testimony given to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 24th of this year, General Bantz J. Craddock, commander of the United States European Command, said the following (emphasis ours):
“Some threats have developed to the point where a more direct response is required. At the upper end of the technological spectrum is the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and ballistic missiles that can be used to deliver them. Iran already possesses ballistic missiles that can reach parts of Europe and is developing missiles that can reach most of Europe. Iran also continues to threaten one of our key regional allies with its advancing missile technology. In response, the U.S. deployed an X-Band Radar to provide advanced early warning indications. Entirely defensive in nature, the radar provides additional warning time to execute defensive counter-measures. By 2015 Iran may also deploy an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capable of reaching all of Europe and parts of the U.S.”
It’s hard to believe that sitting down to have a cozy little chat with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
will change that nation’s nuclear ambitions. But it seems that others in Congress are jumping on the “Chat with Mahmoud” bandwagon. According to a report in CQ Today from Friday, March 27, 2009, Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) urged the Obama administration to engage with Iran. “In 2001 and 2002, we should not forget that Iran provided us critical assistance in stabilizing Afghanistan. The administration is absolutely correct to explore how our interests might again coincide.”
Part of the reason Kerry lost to George W. Bush in 2004 was that voters didn’t trust him enough when it came to national security concerns. His support of Obama’s desire to negotiate with Tehran should be judged accordingly.
Then, of course, there is the fact that the Taliban has gained a solid foothold in Pakistan –a nation that already has nuclear weapons. Should we really be giving them more aid, as CQ Today reports that Sen. Kerry and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) plan to propose as early as next week?
To quote the late, great Theodore Roosevelt, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” How big of a stick is President Obama carrying? And will he do anything with it when the situation demands?

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Obama seeks Muslims for White House posts

WASHINGTON

Barack Obama is conducting his own affirmative action program to get more Muslims in the White House.

The move began with Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn, who took his oath of office with a hand on the Quran, to solicit the resume of what he considered to be the nation's most qualified adherents of Islam. ....

Foreign Ways and War Scars Test Hospital

(Compiler's note: We have illegal aliens who leech "free service" paid for on our dime and they kill our hospitals -- see how it works in this article.)

by DENISE GRADY

MINNEAPOLIS — The man from Somalia sat nervously in an examining room at Hennepin County Medical Center, gingerly brushing his fingertips against the left side of his head.

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About the Series

The United States has experienced the greatest surge in immigration since the early 20th century, with one in five residents a recent immigrant or a close relative of one. This series examines how American institutions are being pressed to adjust. More Articles in the Series »

“You’re having surgery to remove shrapnel from your skull,” Dr. Steven Hillson told him, pausing to let a Somali interpreter dressed in a black head scarf and a floor-length skirt translate.

The patient, Abdulqadir Jiirow, 31, nodded and explained that the shrapnel had been there since 1991, when he was 14 and civil war broke out in Somalia and an artillery shell smashed into his home. It had not bothered him much until recently, when he began to work at a meat-packing plant and the helmet and goggles needed for the job pressed on it painfully.

Mr. Jiirow said he worked in a small town several hours away and shared an apartment with other Somalis, while his wife and child lived in Minneapolis. He saw them on weekends.

“It’s still astonishing,” the doctor, shaking his head, said after Mr. Jiirow left. “ ‘Someone sent artillery into my home.’ But it’s common.”

Hennepin County Medical Center, a sprawling complex in downtown Minneapolis near the Metrodome, offers an extraordinary vantage point on the ways immigrants are testing the American medical establishment. The new arrivals — many fleeing repression, war, genocide or grinding poverty — bring distinctive patterns of illness and injury and cultural beliefs about life, death, sickness and health.

In a city where Swedes and Norwegians once had separate hospitals, Hennepin spends $3 million a year on interpreters fluent in 50 languages to communicate effectively with its foreign-born patients.

Many arrive with health problems seldom seen in this country — vitamin deficiencies, intestinal parasites and infectious diseases like tuberculosis, for instance — and unusually high levels of emotional trauma and stress. Over time, as they pick up Western habits, some develop Western ailments, too, like obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and yet they often question the unfamiliar lifelong treatments these chronic diseases need.

Some also resist conventional medical wisdom or practices, forcing change on the hospital. The objections of Somali women to having babies delivered by male doctors has led Hennepin, gradually, to develop an obstetrical staff made up almost entirely of women.

Doctors here say that for many of these newcomers, the most common health problems, and the hardest to treat, lie at the blurry line between body and mind, where emotional scars from troubled pasts may surface as physical illness, pain and depression.

“Being an immigrant, it will be a chronic illness for the rest of your life,” said Dr. Veronica Svetaz, a physician from Argentina who works at one of Hennepin’s neighborhood clinics. “You don’t belong anywhere anymore.”

From Far-Flung Countries

Like many American cities, Minneapolis has seen a tremendous influx of Hispanics, many of them here illegally from Ecuador and Mexico. Hispanics, both legal and illegal, make up the biggest immigrant group in the state, as well as in the nation.

But since the late 1970s, this once lily-white city on the prairie, frozen solid half the year, has also been taking in waves of legal refugees from more far-flung parts of the world: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Liberia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Myanmar and other countries.

So many people came here from war zones that a nonprofit group opened the nation’s first Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis in 1987. Statewide, the number of foreign-born people more than doubled in the 1990s and is nearly a quarter million now. They make up 5 percent of the population.

The influx from Somalia has been especially large. A million people fled the country when civil war broke out. Many spent years in squalid, disease-ridden refugee camps or shantytowns in Ethiopia or Kenya.

The lucky ones, granted refugee status, started arriving in the United States in the mid-1990s. Many were relocated to Minneapolis by the State Department because of the city’s strong social services and its many civic groups that help newcomers. There are an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 Somalis in Minnesota, most in Minneapolis, more than in any other American city. But the exact number is not known because refugees are not tracked when they move from state to state. Some officials and Somalis themselves think the figure is much higher than the state estimates, perhaps even double.

“Nobody can count us,” said Dr. Osman Harare, a physician and public health official in Somalia who became a patient advocate and interpreter at Hennepin. “We are nomads.”

The community is thriving, though it is not without troubles. The F.B.I. has been investigating whether young Somali men in Minneapolis have been recruited to commit acts of terrorism in Somalia, and health officials have been looking into reports of unusually high rates of autism in the children of Somali immigrants.

A 446-bed public hospital, Hennepin has a tradition of turning no one away, and it has become the first stop for many immigrants who need a doctor.

No questions are asked about immigration status. About 20 percent of the center’s patients were born in other countries, and they account for $100 million of its $500 million yearly expenses for patient care. Hennepin’s interpreters are called on to help patients more than 130,000 times a year. The greatest demand by far is for Spanish, followed by Somali.

One of the challenges in treating immigrants is money. Hennepin has $45 million a year in costs that are not reimbursed, and though immigrants by no means account for all of it, they are “a major contributor,” said Mike Harristhal, the hospital’s vice president for public policy and strategy.

Most Somalis are in this country legally and qualify for various government health insurance programs. For people here illegally, it is a whole other story. They used to be eligible for Medicaid, but are not anymore, except for emergencies or if they are pregnant or under 18. Hennepin has sliding-scale fees for the indigent, but some cannot afford even those prices.

Minnesota has its share of people who oppose immigration and resent footing the bills for foreigners, and Mr. Harristhal acknowledged that the melting-pot atmosphere at Hennepin drives some potential customers away. But the hospital is a renowned trauma center; even those who turn up their noses at the clientele accept that for someone in a car accident, there is no better place to be.

Complex Needs at the Clinic

Much of Hennepin’s work with immigrants takes place in a stretch of examining rooms and offices on the seventh floor, which has become an international health clinic with certain days set aside for various ethnic groups.

On a Tuesday afternoon last fall, a 62-year-old woman from Somalia made her first visit to the clinic. Initially, she was exuberant, speaking so rapidly that an interpreter could barely keep up.

“I love this big government hospital, the same government that welcomed me here after the war and the sadness of Somalia,” she said, beaming at Deborah Boehm, a nurse practitioner. “Your face welcomes me.”

The patient’s broad smile showed gaps in her teeth. She wore a traditional Muslim head scarf, a floor-length skirt in bright blue and purple, flip-flops and a gauzy, pale aqua shawl over a sweatshirt. Her fingernails were tinted orange with henna.

She had a dozen bottles of pills from other clinics in the Twin Cities, and a long list of ailments: arthritis, digestive trouble, allergies, insomnia and, worst of all, pain. Twice in recent months she had gone to the emergency room for terrible aches in her legs and burning pain in her side.

Ms. Boehm said she would order a blood test to measure vitamin D, because deficiencies are common in Somalis and are a frequent cause of aches and pains. (Aching all over is not uncommon among Somalis, and older people sometimes tell doctors they feel as if camels or horses have been walking on them all night.)

The body uses sunlight to make vitamin D, and dark-skinned people make less than whites. Somali women are especially prone to deficiencies because their traditional clothing covers so much of their skin.

The patient said she sometimes could not recall how many of her children were still alive. The forgetfulness had begun when she left Africa and all the problems there.

Ms. Boehm, 56, with short, curly hair and glasses, looked at the patient intently as she took notes and said, “Haa,” the Somali word for yes. “Tell me about the problems.”

The woman’s face crumpled. She rocked in her seat, choked out a few words, then bit her hand and wiped her eyes with her shawl.

The translation, “Don’t remind me,” was unneeded.

Ms. Boehm calmly changed the subject to matters of digestion and a local supermarket that sold camel’s milk.

Later, Ms. Boehm predicted that much of her new patient’s physical trouble would turn out to have emotional roots in Somalia. Anguish morphing into physical pain and depression is something Ms. Boehm has seen time and again in treating Somali refugees.

Ms. Boehm began working with Somali women at the clinic in 1997, and her job quickly became complicated.

“I began to hear about the pain,” Ms. Boehm said. “I couldn’t find any reason for it. They would say it felt like fire or electricity, descriptions I wasn’t familiar with. I did X-rays, lab tests, ordered physical therapy. Somehow, I just couldn’t get it to go away. After 6 to 12 months I said, ‘We have to look at the mental health piece.’ ”

At her urging, the clinic brought in a psychologist, and Ms. Boehm said, “I aggressively worked on getting these women into therapy.”

Dr. Mary Bradmiller, the psychologist, said the rates of depression and post traumatic stress disorder were high. Most of her Somali patients are mothers with “tremendous psychosocial stress, domestic violence, child protection issues, war trauma, nightmares, flashbacks and separation from their families,” Dr. Bradmiller said.

A study of 1,134 Somali and Eritrean refugees in the United States in 2004 found that 25 percent of the men and 47 percent of the women had been tortured, rates that the researchers considered shockingly high. The torture of women frequently involves rape.

Survivors often resist psychological help and deny their problems. Somali culture, like many others, stigmatizes mental illness. In Somalia, mental troubles are often attributed to spirit possession, and psychotherapy barely exists. “They might have talked to a sheik or an imam or a female healer,” Dr. Bradmiller said.

She has deliberately kept an office in the medical clinic, a familiar place to patients, so they do not feel as if they are going to a mental hospital. The director of care for the Somalis, Dr. Douglas Pryce, and Ms. Boehm urge certain patients to see Dr. Bradmiller and sometimes even walk them down the hall to make sure they go.

“They never come for therapy unless there’s a strong recommendation from a medical person they trust,” Dr. Bradmiller said.

Still, it has not been easy. Early on, she noticed insulted looks on patients’ faces when her role was being explained and found out that some interpreters were calling her the “crazy doctor.” Other interpreters laughed at what patients said.

Indeed, Dr. Bradmiller said, some therapists have left the clinic because of their struggles with interpreters. Now, she introduces herself as a “talk therapist” and chooses interpreters carefully.

“Some patients have completely checked out,” Dr. Bradmiller said. “The older children are bringing up the younger ones, and the mother doesn’t leave the house.”

If patients reach the point of talking about what happened to them in Somalia or at the refugee camps, it has to be handled carefully to prevent their being traumatized all over again, Dr. Bradmiller said.

The patients’ stories may also bring back the interpreters’ horrific memories, so Dr. Bradmiller has tried to find the interpreters who are the least vulnerable.

“I try not to digest what is being said so it doesn’t affect me,” said one, Abdi Rahmansali. “I try my best, but I’m a human being. I do get affected. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you feel your hair standing up.”

Dr. Bradmiller estimated that about only 10 percent of her patients saw the connection between their physical and emotional pain.

But for those who do, she said, the changes can be striking.

“They go to school, they cook, they put on makeup and colorful clothes, they start talking to you in English,” she said. “When life becomes more interesting than therapy, it’s time for therapy to be done.”

Home Health in Question

On an afternoon in late September, Dr. Pryce and Dr. Harare, the interpreter and patient advocate, emerged from an examining room looking tired but wryly triumphant.

They had just finished negotiating, politely but persistently, with a patient who — just as politely but persistently — had refused to allow any blood tests because it was the holy month of Ramadan and he feared that having blood drawn might be a sin.

Finally, they telephoned an imam, who declared there was no sin. The blood was drawn.

Dr. Pryce says one of the great joys of working in a hospital like Hennepin is finding ways to bridge such cultural divides — and knowing that his patients are better off because of it. But the cultural challenges can cut both ways, he said, and lately one issue has begun to grate on him and Ms. Boehm.

Somali patients have been asking them to fill out forms stating that they need personal-care assistants. Some do not need the help, Dr. Pryce said, but are being egged on by Somali-run health care agencies that want to collect insurance payments for the services.

Somalis in Minneapolis, often entrepreneurial and business minded, have opened the agencies to take advantage of relatively generous rules in Minnesota that were originally meant to help keep the elderly and chronically ill out of nursing homes.

Tricia Alvarado, director of home care for the Minnesota Visiting Nurse Agency, which evaluates requests for home help, agreed that there had been an explosion of Somali agencies, with 100 or so opening in just the last three years. Many are run by people without any medical training. And Ms. Alvarado confirmed that the agencies were putting a hard sell on potential clients.

“ ‘Diabetes?’ ” Dr. Pryce said, relaying what he said was a typical conversation between a sick Somali and a Somali-run agency. “ ‘You need a personal-care assistant. Here’s a form. Give it to your doctor.’ ”

Dr. Pryce turns down requests that he thinks are unwarranted, but patients argue and sometimes even act sicker than they really are.

The whole thing leaves him “hopping mad,” Dr. Pryce said. “I want to be a good steward of our resources, the tax money we’re all paying.”

The same thing happened with Russian immigrants in the 1990s, he said, even though state regulations were stricter then.

The current situation with the Somalis is part of a larger problem in Minnesota: the number of clients, and the costs of personal care, more than doubled from 2002 to 2008, and the number of agencies more than tripled. A report in January by the state legislative auditor said, “Personal care services remain unacceptably vulnerable to fraud and abuse”; the state is drawing up plans to tighten its control of the services.

“I love the Somali people and their culture,” Dr. Pryce said. “I like taking care of them. It’s rewarding and interesting. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke much, they’re living the American dream, they need our help. Then you have this other side that’s really painful, this contentious issue of who gets what.”

Prospect of Barack Obama show causes UK to clear its decks

With an entourage of 500 staff, an armour-plated limousine and a fleet of decoy helicopters, America's new president will arrive for his first visit to Britain amid huge razzmatazz on Tuesday for the G20 summit. But it will be his closed-door meetings with world leaders that are likely to prove the most significant of the trip ....

Saturday, March 28, 2009

An internet sensation, the Tory who told Brown to his face that he's a disaster

By Kirsty Walker


Daniel Hannan

Withering: Daniel Hannan pulled no punches in his attack on Mr Brown

A Tory who criticised Gordon Brown to his face in a brutal personal attack has won an army of fans worldwide.

A video of MEP Daniel Hannan delivering a withering assessment of the Prime Minister's handling of the economic crisis has become a surprise hit on the internet.

More than 730,000 users have viewed it on YouTube, making it the most popular clip on the site two days in a row.

Mr Hannan's assault came after the Premier had given a keynote speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday.

As Mr Brown looked on through gritted teeth, shaking his head, the Tory lambasted him as a 'Brezhnev era apparatchik' who was ' pathologically incapable' of taking responsibility for his role in the financial crisis.

The 37-year-old, who was the youngest British member elected to the European Parliament in 1999, yesterday received plaudits for his tongue-lashing.

Broadcasters - including the BBC - failed to report Mr Hannan's onslaught despite giving full coverage to Mr Brown's most pro-European speech to date.

But it was quickly posted on YouTube and news outlets from Australia to America seized on his comments.

The clip features Mr Brown looking on with a frozen smile, while Mr Hannan warned how Britain was entering the recession in a 'dilapidated condition' with an 'almost unbelievable' deficit.

Scroll down to watch the video of Daniel Hannan's address

Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown addresses the European Parliament

Tirade: Gordon Brown addressing the European Parliament on Tuesday. He then had to sit through an attack on his record by MEP Daniel Hannan

After accusing Mr Brown of losing his moral authority, he finished with the pay-off line: 'You are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.'

The speech, which was met with cheers and laughter from fellow MEPs, unleashed a torrent of comments on the internet with most praising Mr Hannan's assessment.

Mr Hannan, who represents South East England, said he had been stunned by the response. He said: 'I suspect what has happened is that a lot of people have wanted to say something similar to him and have never had the chance.

'There is something very surreal about a speech in the European Parliament - one of the most boring places on earth - causing so much excitement.'

Mr Hannan, who went to Oriel College, Oxford, has good form in the debating chamber.

A former journalist, he has previously worked as a speechwriter for Michael Howard and William Hague. He has also been a key opponent of the Lisbon Treaty.

Downing Street last night failed to comment on Mr Hannan's internet fame. But one of the 5,000 who left comments on YouTube said: 'Thanks for telling Gordon to his face what many people would like to.'

Another added: 'Brilliant! As a British victim who has suffered under the Labour yoke for 12 long, depressing years, I am delighted to see that, here at last, is someone telling the story as it really is.'

A BBC spokesman last night insisted its reporting of Mr Brown's speech was 'entirely balanced'.

He said the Daily Politics show on BBC2 had run a clip of Mr Hannan's speech yesterday and a discussion with bloggers about the story.

He added: 'Daniel Hannan was one of the Daily Politics guests on the programme when it broadcast an entire edition from Brussels last week.'


Watch Daniel Hannan's tirade against Gordon Brown


Here is the Tory MEP's speech in full:

'Prime Minister, I see you've already mastered the essential craft of the European politician: namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate. You've spoken here of free trade, and amen to that.

Who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase 'British jobs for British workers,' and that you have subsidised - where you have not nationalised outright - swaths of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.

Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this House if your actions matched your words, and perhaps more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not sailing into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is now born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

Now, once again today, you have tried to spread the blame around. You spoke about an international recession, an international crisis.

Well, it's true that we are sailing together into the squalls but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging - in other words, to pay off debt. But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further.

As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the waterline under the accumulated weight of your debt.

We are now running a deficit that touches 10 per cent of GDP, an almost unbelievable figure - more than Pakistan, more than Hungary; countries where the IMF has already been called in.

It's not just that you are not apologising - like everyone else I've long accepted that you are pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things - it's that you are carrying on wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left.

In the last year 100,000 private sector jobs have been lost and yet you have created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister, you cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.

You cannot spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev era apparatchik giving the party line.

You know and we know and you know that we know that it's nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times.

The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets say so, which is why the pound has lost a third of its value.

In a few months, the voters will have their chance to say so, too.

They can see what the markets have seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government.'

Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries

By JOHN MARKOFF

TORONTO — A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

Enlarge This Image
Tim Leyes for The New York Times

The Toronto academic researchers who are reporting on the spying operation dubbed GhostNet include, from left, Ronald J. Deibert, Greg Walton, Nart Villeneuve and Rafal A. Rohozinski.

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information.

The newly reported spying operation is by far the largest to come to light in terms of countries affected.

This is also believed to be the first time researchers have been able to expose the workings of a computer system used in an intrusion of this magnitude.

Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.

The researchers were able to monitor the commands given to infected computers and to see the names of documents retrieved by the spies, but in most cases the contents of the stolen files have not been determined. Working with the Tibetans, however, the researchers found that specific correspondence had been stolen and that the intruders had gained control of the electronic mail server computers of the Dalai Lama’s organization.

The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.

The Toronto researchers said they had notified international law enforcement agencies of the spying operation, which in their view exposed basic shortcomings in the legal structure of cyberspace. The F.B.I. declined to comment on the operation.

Although the Canadian researchers said that most of the computers behind the spying were in China, they cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved. The spying could be a nonstate, for-profit operation, for example, or one run by private citizens in China known as “patriotic hackers.”

“We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a member of the research group and an associate professor of political science at Munk. “This could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea that China was involved. “These are old stories and they are nonsense,” the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, said. “The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime.”

The Toronto researchers, who allowed a reporter for The New York Times to review the spies’ digital tracks, are publishing their findings in Information Warfare Monitor, an online publication associated with the Munk Center.

At the same time, two computer researchers at Cambridge University in Britain who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans, are releasing an independent report. They do fault China, and they warned that other hackers could adopt the tactics used in the malware operation.

“What Chinese spooks did in 2008, Russian crooks will do in 2010 and even low-budget criminals from less developed countries will follow in due course,” the Cambridge researchers, Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson, wrote in their report, “The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement.”

In any case, it was suspicions of Chinese interference that led to the discovery of the spy operation. Last summer, the office of the Dalai Lama invited two specialists to India to audit computers used by the Dalai Lama’s organization. The specialists, Greg Walton, the editor of Information Warfare Monitor, and Mr. Nagaraja, a network security expert, found that the computers had indeed been infected and that intruders had stolen files from personal computers serving several Tibetan exile groups.

Back in Toronto, Mr. Walton shared data with colleagues at the Munk Center’s computer lab.

One of them was Nart Villeneuve, 34, a graduate student and self-taught “white hat” hacker with dazzling technical skills. Last year, Mr. Villeneuve linked the Chinese version of the Skype communications service to a Chinese government operation that was systematically eavesdropping on users’ instant-messaging sessions.

Early this month, Mr. Villeneuve noticed an odd string of 22 characters embedded in files created by the malicious software and searched for it with Google. It led him to a group of computers on Hainan Island, off China, and to a Web site that would prove to be critically important.

In a puzzling security lapse, the Web page that Mr. Villeneuve found was not protected by a password, while much of the rest of the system uses encryption.

Mr. Villeneuve and his colleagues figured out how the operation worked by commanding it to infect a system in their computer lab in Toronto. On March 12, the spies took their own bait. Mr. Villeneuve watched a brief series of commands flicker on his computer screen as someone — presumably in China — rummaged through the files. Finding nothing of interest, the intruder soon disappeared.

Through trial and error, the researchers learned to use the system’s Chinese-language “dashboard” — a control panel reachable with a standard Web browser — by which one could manipulate the more than 1,200 computers worldwide that had by then been infected.

Infection happens two ways. In one method, a user’s clicking on a document attached to an e-mail message lets the system covertly install software deep in the target operating system. Alternatively, a user clicks on a Web link in an e-mail message and is taken directly to a “poisoned” Web site.

The researchers said they avoided breaking any laws during three weeks of monitoring and extensively experimenting with the system’s unprotected software control panel. They provided, among other information, a log of compromised computers dating to May 22, 2007.

They found that three of the four control servers were in different provinces in China — Hainan, Guangdong and Sichuan — while the fourth was discovered to be at a Web-hosting company based in Southern California.

Beyond that, said Rafal A. Rohozinski, one of the investigators, “attribution is difficult because there is no agreed upon international legal framework for being able to pursue investigations down to their logical conclusion, which is highly local.”