pentagon adds wikileaks to list of enemies

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/us/18wiki.html?ref=us

Pentagon Sees a Threat From Online Muckrakers

STEPHANIE STROM
March 17, 2010

To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.

The Pentagon assessed the danger WikiLeaks.org posed to the Army in a report marked “unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions.” It concluded that “WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army” — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.

WikiLeaks, true to its mission to publish materials that expose secrets of all kinds, published the 2008 Pentagon report about itself on Monday.

Lt. Col. Lee Packnett, an Army spokesman, confirmed that the report was real. Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, said the concerns the report raised were hypothetical.

“It did not point to anything that has actually happened as a result of the release,” Mr. Assange said. “It contains the analyst’s best guesses as to how the information could be used to harm the Army but no concrete examples of any real harm being done.”

WikiLeaks, a nonprofit organization, has rankled governments and companies around the world with its publication of materials intended to be kept secret. For instance, the Army’s report says that in 2008, access to the Web site in the United States was cut off by court order after Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss financial institution, sued it for publishing documents implicating Baer in money laundering, grand larceny and tax evasion. Access was restored after two weeks, when the bank dropped its case.

Governments, including those of North Korea and Thailand, also have tried to prevent access to the site and complained about its release of materials critical of their governments and policies.

The Army’s interest in WikiLeaks appears to have been spurred by, among other things, its publication and analysis of classified and unclassified Army documents containing information about military equipment, units, operations and “nearly the entire order of battle” for American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in April 2007.

WikiLeaks also published an outdated, unclassified copy of the “standard operating procedures” at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. WikiLeaks said the document revealed methods by which the military prevented prisoners from meeting with the International Red Cross and the use of “extreme psychological stress” as a means of torture.

The Army’s report on WikiLeaks does not say whether WikiLeaks’ analysis of that document was accurate. It does charge that some of WikiLeaks’s other interpretation of information is flawed but does not say specifically in what way.

The report also airs the Pentagon’s concern over some 2,000 pages of documents WikiLeaks released on equipment used by coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon concluded that such information could be used by foreign intelligence services, terrorist groups and others to identify vulnerabilities, plan attacks and build new devices.

WikiLeaks, which won Amnesty International’s new media award in 2009, almost closed this year because it was broke and still operates at less than its full capacity. It relies on donations from humans rights groups, journalists, technology buffs and individuals, and Mr. Assange said it had raised just two-thirds of the $600,000 needed for its budget this year and thus was not publishing everything it had.

Perhaps the most amusing aspect of the Army’s report, to Mr. Assange, was its speculation that WikiLeaks is supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. “I only wish they would step forward with a check if that’s the case,” he said.

indochina: cia's forgotten freedom fighters

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-secret-army-still-fighting-vietnam-war-1901755.html

The secret army still fighting Vietnam war

Hired and armed by the CIA in the 1960s, the Hmong remain trapped in enemy jungle, forgotten by America and the world By William Lloyd George in Laos

Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Va Ming Lee, 45, with other Hmong fighters and children at their hidden camp in the jungles of Laos. Mr. Lee holds a M-79 grenade launcher given to him by the CIA when he served for them in the secret war against the communists in Laos.

Up a winding dirt path through lush mountains comes the sound of whistling from the side of the road. Narrowly missing a passing motorbike, two young boys with machine guns leap out of the dense jungle.

We need to move fast, but as one boy hauls me to the top of a steep, muddy slope his hand flicks to his eyes. He is fighting to hold back tears.

In a tiny clearing they've cut out of the thick bamboo forest four boys, seemingly no older than 18 whisper to each other. Sweating from the quick climb and dense heat, they hang up their torn blue uniforms on bamboo branches and prop up their battered old AK-47s.

These are the remnants of the Royal Laos Army, hired by the Americans to disrupt Ho Chi Minh supply lines during the Vietnam War. Although Laos had been declared neutral, Vietnamese troops were operating there and the CIA saw it as another front against the spread of communism.

For the rest of the world, the capture of Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City – by North Vietnamese troops in 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War, but for the Hmong, it was just the beginning. When the communist regime, the Pathet Lao took power it announced it would wipe out all Hmong from Laos. Since then the Hmong have been hiding in the depths of the jungle completely cut off from the outside world.

The young soldiers lead the way to their people deep behind enemy lines in the Saysomboun, "special zone". They tread lightly and whisper, because, they warn, the "enemy is everywhere".

Days and nights of trekking, some of it straight up mountains to avoid enemy patrols brings us eventually to the entrance of their camp. The whole community falls on the ground crying hysterically and begging for help. Old women shake with emotion as they speak of the horrors they have witnessed, while young children weep at their first sighting of an outsider. CIA veteran Cho Her lies face down in the dirt, praying for the rescue of his people. "US and world leaders please come and rescue us and stop the Laos government persecuting us for being the CIA's foot-soldiers during the secret war," he says.

More than 30 years ago, when the Vietnam War finished and the CIA pulled their agents out, Cher Fer was a young man. When the Americans left, they took a handful of Hmong fighters with them, leaving more than 10,000 of their allies behind to fend for themselves. Bitter at their betrayal, the Laos government persecuted those who had fought alongside the Americans, forcing the Hmong to retreat deep inside the jungle.

"We had no choice but to take the weapons the Americans gave us and flee to the jungle," said another CIA veteran Chong Pha Thao, wiping tears from his cheeks. "Then the Vietnamese joined forces with the Laos communists and hunted us like animals in the jungle, leaving our people's corpses to rot when they killed them."

Members of the once proud and formidable fighting force now lie on the ground, abandoning all dignity to beg for help, even from a visiting journalist, their personification of the West. Identifying themselves as CIA soldiers, they plead over and over again for the Americans to return, and take them out of their "living hell".

"I am CIA. In 1970 Mr Jerry gave me this M79 and told me to shoot enemy," Cher Fer says in a perfect American accent, as he waves a battered grenade-launcher in the air.

"We have lost thousands of troops for America – when the Laos soldiers kill us they feel like they have killed an America soldier. The CIA must come and save us."

The fantasty that America will one day come and liberate them has motivated the veterans and their families to struggle on through for the last 30 years. But despite the Hmong rebels' alliance with the CIA, the American government has made little effort to extract them from the jungle.

Bill Lair, the legendary CIA agent who co-ordinated the operation to build an anti-Communist resistance army out of poorly educated jungle tribespeople, defended the Agency's actions. Speaking by phone from his home in Waco, Texas, he said that the US originally hired the Hmong and used Thai recruits to train them because the Hmong "were better than anyone else around, every step they took was up or down so they could move a lot faster than the enemy".

But when asked if America should now take steps to save them, he replied: "The CIA owes them nothing. We gave them the choice to leave but they decided to stay, thinking they could go back to how they used to live in the mountains".

In 2007, Vang Pao, the leader of the Hmong rebels appointed by the CIA, who later emigrated to the US and was a Hmong community leader there, was arrested in California and charged by the US with conspiring to overthrow the Laos government. The charges were later dropped, but the message was clear: America was now on the side of Laos, its former enemy, an enemy it trained Vang Pao to fight.

Cha Her, 46, a veteran who fought for the CIA during the vietnam war at a secret Hmong camp in the jungles of Laos. He says "I am a veteran. My military identification is 292973. I was a CIA soldier of America during the Vietnam War. America recruited us to fight the war in Laos. We fought the war for America for 15 years...In 1975 they started eliminating us, We are 100% soldiers of the CIA. They continue killing us to this day. All died to pay the price of America."

Barack Obama's election to the White House was seen as a beacon of hope for Hmong advocates. He has called for all parties to respect international law and "ensure that displaced Hmong are not placed in harm's way". However, despite an international furore, more than 4,500 Hmong refugees were forcibly repatriated back to Laos by Thailand where they had sought refuge. The US government issued statements saying it was concerned, but took no action.

The Laos government subsequently invited three US congressmen to visit. They later claimed that the returnees were being treated well which ignited anger among Hmong advocates said the trip was orchestrated by the Laos government.

Weeks later, visiting Congressman Joseph Cao said he would like to increase aid to Laos. But Hmong leaders believe US aid has already been funnelled into the Laos government's military efforts to eliminate, as the Hmong call themselves, the "CIA's forgotten allies"

Cut off from the outside world, this is the first time the jungle leaders have heard that the Hmong refugees were being sent back to Laos. On receiving the news their despair is evident.

"At least before, we thought we could escape to Thailand but now we have no place to run to," says Chao Fer as he looks over to a mountain just three miles away. "We can't keep running, soon we will all die here. Just over that mountain is where the enemy is and as we speak they are hunting us down with dogs – it's just a matter of time before they attack us again."

Weeks earlier the Laos army had stormed the Hmong's previous temporary camp in what they believe was part of campaign to prepare for the 25th Southeast Asian Games. In the raid a 14-year-old boy was killed, the leaders say he was unarmed and foraging for food to feed his family.

"My son was shot by the communists last month," the boy's mother says as she prepares food for her other children. He didn't have any gun, just finding food for us but I don't have the ability to do anything – I can only die inside".

Frequent attacks force the groups to change camp every two weeks and break up into small numbers to avoid large-scale offensives by the Laos army. This leaves the community no chance to farm food or forge a proper way of life. With no other choice, boiled tree shrub has become their daily diet and at times they are lucky if they can catch a jungle rat or monkey. The lack of nutrients has left the group visibly malnourished – both young and old have swollen abdomens.

Eating the tree shrub leaves them starving, so like animals, women and children take to the surrounding hills to dig on their hands and knees. Outside the camp, they claim that many women and children have been killed by the Laos army and the "lucky ones" have bullet wounds to show.

"I feel so unhappy to give this food to my kids, but we have no other choice," one mother explains. "It's too dangerous to hunt and we can't reach the villages because the communists will kill us. Sometimes we are too scared to go out so we just starve."

The Lao foreign ministry spokesman Khenthong Nuanthasing has denied that the group exists, stating, if anything, they are nothing more than "bandits". However, according to the Hmong, the Laos army has recently increased their campaign with the assistance of the Vietnamese. Hmong leaders report that the intensity of attacks against them has increased and their groups are being driven further and further into the jungle.

A planned trip by Vang Pal to visit Vientiane, the Laos capital, to try and strike a peace deal has been cancelled citing security risks. The Laos government has announced that if he returns he will "face the death sentence for his war crimes during the Vietnam War".

In the jungle camp, fear is written on all the faces, even those of the children. With Thailand apparently turning its back on them, and the US seemingly ignoring their plight, they know their chances of survival are slim.

As the entire group gathers to say farewell, one old lady grabs my hand and whispers in my ear.

"I know the communists are going to kill us all... when they do, make sure you tell the world we were here and what they did to us."

obama's secret prisons endanger us all

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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-obamas-secret-prisons-in-afghanistan-endanger-us-all-1896996.html

Obama's secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all

He was elected in part to drag us out of this trap. Instead, he's dragging us further in

Friday, 12 February 2010

(...)

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hangover from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap – but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama's orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects. The casualties are overwhelmingly civilians. We may not have noticed, but the Muslim world has: check out Al Jazeera any night.

Obama ran on an inspiring promise to shut down Bush's network of kidnappings and secret prisons. He said bluntly: "I do not want to hear this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that... but as a parent I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence." He said it made the US "less safe" because any gain in safety by Gitmo-ing one suspected jihadi – along with dozens of innocents – is wiped out by the huge number of young men tipped over into the vile madness of jihadism by seeing their brothers disappear into a vast military machine where they may never be heard from again. Indeed, following the failed attack in Detroit, Obama pointed out the wannabe-murderer named Guantanamo as the reason he signed up for the jihad.

Yet a string of recent exposes has shown that Obama is in fact maintaining a battery of secret prisons where people are held without charge indefinitely – and he is even expanding them. The Kabul-based journalist Anand Gopal has written a remarkable expose for The Nation magazine. His story begins in the Afghan village of Zaiwalat at 3.15am on the night of November 19th 2009. A platoon of US soldiers blasted their way into a house in search of Habib ur-Rahman, a young computer programmer and government employee who they had been told by someone, somewhere was a secret Talibanist. His two cousins came out to see what the noise was – and they were shot to death. As the children of the house screamed, Habib was bundled into a helicopter and whisked away. He has never been seen since. His family do not know if he is alive or dead.

This is not an unusual event in Afghanistan today. In this small village of 300 people, some 16 men have been "disappeared" by the US and 10 killed in night raids in the past two years. The locals believe people are simply settling old clan feuds by telling the Americans their rivals are jihadists. Habib's cousin Qarar, who works for the Afghan government, says: "I used to go on TV and argue that people should support the government and the foreigners. But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so?"

Where are all these men vanishing to? Obama ordered the closing of the CIA's secret prisons, but not those run by Joint Special Operations. They maintain a Bermuda Triangle of jails with the notorious Bagram Air Base at its centre. One of the few outsiders has been into this ex-Soviet air-hangar is the military prosecutor Stuart Couch. He says: "In my view, having visited Guantanamo several times, the Bagram facility made Guantanamo look like a nice hotel. The men did not appear to be able to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the floor. It smelled like the monkey house at the zoo."

We know that at least two innocent young men were tortured to death in Bagram. Der Spiegel has documented how some "inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". The accounts of released prisoners suggest the very worst abuses stopped in the last few years of the Bush administration, and Obama is supposed to have forbidden torture, but it's hard to tell. We do know Obama has permitted the use of solitary confinement lasting for years – a process that often drives people insane. The International Red Cross has been allowed to visit some of them, but in highly restricted circumstances, and their reports remain confidential. In this darkness, abuse becomes far more likely.

The Obama administration is appealing against US court rulings insisting the detainees have the right to make a legal case against their arbitrary imprisonment. And the White House is insisting they can forcibly snatch anyone they suspect from anywhere in the world – with no legal process – and take them there. Yes: Obama is fighting for the principles behind Guantanamo Bay. The frenzied debate about whether the actual camp in Cuba is closed is a distraction, since he is proposing to simply relocate it to less sunny climes.

Once you vanish into this system, you have no way to get yourself out. The New York lawyer Tina Foster represents three men who were kidnapped by US forces in Thailand, Pakistan and Dubai and bundled to Bagram, where they have been held without charge for seven years now. She tells me there have been "shockingly few improvements" under Obama. "The Bush administration rubbed our faces in it, while Obama's much smoother. But the reality is still indefinite detention without charge for people who are judged guilty simply by association. It's contrary to everything we stand for as a country... I know there are children [in there] from personal experience. I have interviewed dozens of children who were detained in Bagram, some as young as 10."

Today, Bagram is being given a $60m expansion, allowing it to hold five times as many prisoners as Guantanamo Bay currently does. Gopal reports that the abuse is leaking out to other, more secretive sites across Afghanistan. They are so underground they are known only by the names given to them by released inmates – the Salt Pit, the Prison of Darkness. Obama also asserts his right to hand over the prisoners to countries that commit torture, provided they give a written "assurance" they won't be "abused" – assurances that have proved worthless in the past. The British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith estimates there are 18,000 people trapped in these "legal black holes" by the US.

As Obama warned in the distant days of the election campaign, these policies place us all in greater danger. Matthew Alexander, the senior interrogator in Iraq who tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says: "I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight... We have lost hundreds if not thousands of American lives because of our policy." The increased risk bleeds out onto the London Underground and the nightclubs of Bali. I oppose these policies precisely because I want to be safe, and I loathe jihadism.

President Obama has been tossing aside the calm jihad-draining insights of candidate Obama for a year now. Whenever Obama acts like Bush, listen carefully – you will hear the distant, delighted chuckle of Osama bin Laden, and the needless stomp of fresh recruits heading his way.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Johann Hari

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/7214905/Prosecutors-consider-torture-charges-against-officers-from-MI5-and-MI6.html

Prosecutors consider torture charges against officers from MI5 and MI6

Senior prosecution lawyers are being consulted by police over the possibility of bringing criminal charges against two British intelligence officers suspected of complicity in torture.

Gordon Rayner and Duncan Gardham

11 Feb 2010

Binyam Mohamed claims an MI5 officer was complicit in his torture Photo: REUTERS

An MI5 officer who interviewed the former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed and an MI6 officer involved in an unrelated case are waiting to find out if they will be prosecuted following an 11-month Scotland Yard investigation.

The inquiry into the MI5 officer, known as Witness B, is believed to be at an advanced stage, with police seeking advice from the Crown Prosecution Service on whether charges could be brought either under the Criminal Justice Act or the Human Rights Act.

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Both cases were referred to police by the intelligence services, following internal reviews of the role of officers in interrogating terrorism suspects.

Details about Witness B’s alleged complicity in the torture of Mr Mohamed emerged on Wednesday when the Court of Appeal ordered the publication of previously censored information about MI5’s knowledge of his treatment.

The court said that Mr Mohamed had been deprived of sleep, shackled and threatened with the suggestion that he would “disappear” and that MI5 were fully aware of this.

Mr Mohamed has also claimed that Witness B fed questions to his CIA interrogators in the knowledge that he was being tortured.

The Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, said in a draft judgment that MI5 did not “respect human rights or abjure participation in coercive interrogation techniques” and that “this was particularly true of Witness B”.

His comments were deleted from the final version of the judgment after an intervention from a barrister representing the Foreign Secretary, but were referred to in a copy of a letter which was leaked to the media.

Witness B admitted in 2008, during High Court hearings into Mr Mohamed’s treatment that he questioned Mr Mohamed after his arrest in Pakistan, but he stopped giving evidence in case he incriminated himself.

It is alleged that he knew Mr Mohamed was about to be “rendered” to Morocco and told him when he offered him a cup of tea: “Where you are going you need a lot of sugar.”

Wednesday’s Appeal Court judgment revealed that Witness B “saw himself as having a role to play in conjunction with the US authorities in inducing [Mr Mohamed] to co-operate by making it clear that the United Kingdom would not help unless [Mr Mohamed] co-operated.”

Detectives have declined to release any details about the case involving the MI6 officer, though concerns have previously been reported about a Secret Intelligence Service officer who attended an interrogation by the US military in Afghanistan of a man who had previously had a nervous breakdown.

The Human Rights Act 2000 prohibits torture, inhumane or degrading treatment and the Criminal Justice Act prohibits violence against prisoners.

If either officer was charged, they would face an unprecedented criminal trial to determine whether work they carried out on behalf of the state was legitimate.

In March last year Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, asked police to investigate Mr Mohamed’s claims that he was tortured, and in July the Met announced that a team of detectives led by deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, of its specialist crime directorate, had begun a formal investigation.

Ethiopian-born Mr Mohamed, 31, who was granted refugee status when he came to Britain in 1994, spent seven years in custody after he was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 as he tried to leave the country using a false passport.

He told investigators he had travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in an attempt to kick a drug addiction, but was accused of links to Al-Qaeda and charged with plotting to blow up a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the US. The charges were later dropped when the US admitted its case was based on confessions obtained using torture.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/legal-gloves-come-off-in-row-over-torture-1898141.html

Legal gloves come off in row over 'torture'

Claims that MI5 misled MPs is 'a calumny and a slur', says chairman of intelligence committee

Robert Verkaik and Kim Sengupta

Saturday, 13 February 2010

An influential committee of MPs overseeing the role of MI5 was warned last year it had been misled over Britain's alleged collusion in torture.

A letter written by lawyers for Binyam Mohamed and sent to the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) detailed a number of "inaccuracies" in the MPs' report on the UK's alleged involvement in rendition.

It made clear that evidence given to the High Court about what the secret services knew of Mr Mohamed's treatment by the CIA was in stark contrast with the committee's findings, which exonerated MI5 of collusion in torture.

Writing in August last year Mr Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, drew the MPs' attention to evidence showing that MI5 officers must have known that Mr Mohamed was being unlawfully held and ill-treated when they gave evidence.

This week, three Court of Appeal judges ruled in favour of publishing a summary of this evidence, which they said showed Mr Mohamed, 31, had been denied sleep and threatened with "disappearance". The judges said MI5 would have known about this treatment but continued to co-operate with the CIA in Mr Mohamed's interrogation in Pakistan in 2002.

Next week they will decide whether to publish their full judgement, which is believed to make direct criticism of MI5 and its "culture of suppression".

In August last year, Mr Stafford Smith wrote to the MPs saying: "New documents belatedly supplied by the Secret Intelligence Services to the court expose a number of factual inaccuracies in the ISC's report. I stress that these errors are not the fault of the ISC, but are occasioned by the false testimony that the ISC received (which was apparently similar, I am sad to say, to the false and incomplete testimony given before the High Court)."

But yesterday the chairman of the ISC denied that his committee had been misled by MI5. In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Dr Kim Howells said any claim that the intelligence services were colluding in torture was "a calumny and a slur and should not be made".

He also appeared to attack the senior judge in the Binyam Mohamed ruling, Lord Justice Neuberger: "I don't know what the Master of the Rolls is doing or playing at. He sometimes chooses to put some information in his reports and he says he sometimes doesn't. The role of the judiciary is something that I can't account for. That's something they have to defend."

Dr Howells added: "[I am telling you] that our completely independent investigations don't seem to confirm that the agencies are involved in any way in torture or complicity in torture."

He said his view was underpinned by a conversation he had with the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, who assured him MI5 had not been involved. In a rare public intervention, Mr Evans said criticism of the security service could help Britain's enemies. They would use "propaganda and campaigns to undermine our will and ability to confront them", he wrote in the Daily Telegraph. "We would do well to maintain a fair and balanced view of events ... and avoid falling into conspiracy theory and caricature," he said.

The intelligence and security services say they have passed on any documents to the relevant authorities as they have come to light. These include papers which directly led to two separate Scotland Yard investigations, one into the Binyam Mohamed affair and a separate one into handing over prisoners to the Americans in Iraq.

The documents – which were found, it is claimed, in a collection of material held by MI6 – were passed on to the Attorney General, who ordered the police investigations.

A 2007 report by the ISC stated that an MI5 agent, "Witness B", had visited Mr Mohamed in Pakistan in 2002 but has had no further contact with the agency. But Mr Mohamed's lawyers say that documents subsequently presented to the High Court by MI6 show that US authorities continued to supply information to Britain from him until 2004.

Binyam Mohamed: The facts, the allegations and the political reaction

Q. Who is Binyam Mohamed and what happened to him?

A. Binyam Mohamed al-Habashi, an Ethiopian national, sought asylum in the UK in 1994. He was given indefinite leave to remain and in June 2001 he travelled to Afghanistan, where he is said to have fought alongside the Taliban. He has since described the Taliban as the "best government Afghanistan has had in 20 years". Pakistani authorities arrested Mr Mohamed and, he claims, he was deprived of sleep during interrogation in Karachi. He was subsequently sent to Morocco where, he says, he was subjected to torture, before being moved to Guantanamo Bay. He was released and returned to Britain last year.

Q. What lies behind the current controversy over the role of British intelligence in the alleged torture of Binyam Mohamed?

A. The Foreign Secretary David Miliband had taken legal action to keep secret seven paragraphs of "sensitive information" about Mr Mohamed being mistreated while in American custody. A draft judgment by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, was sent to the parties involved in the action. Jonathan Sumption QC, acting for the Government, maintained to the court that the draft judgment was portraying MI5 as not respecting human rights; having a "culture of suppression"; not renouncing "coercive interrogation"; and deliberately misleading MPs in the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). Mr Miliband lost the case.

Q. What will now happen to the judgment?

A. Lord Neuberger and his two fellow Appeal Court judges have stated that they have accepted Mr Sumption's argument, but they have been asked by Mr Mohamed's lawyers, and those of a number of media organisations, to reconsider this acceptance.

Q. What has been the reaction of MI5, Government and the ISC?

A. The head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, says that the claims in the draft judgment were "the precise opposite of the truth". The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, has described the media coverage of the affair as "baseless, groundless accusations" and "ludicrous lies". Mr Miliband also strongly defended the security and intelligence services. Kim Howells, chairman of the ISC, has denied that the committee was misled by MI5.

Q. What has been the reaction of the opposition parties?

A. The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, has claimed that ministers "at the very top of the Government" knew Britain was potentially complicit in torture but failed to act. David Davis, the former shadow Home Secretary and now a backbench Conservative MP, accused MI5 and MI6 of complicity in torture, adding that the alleged mistreatment of Mr Mohamed "seems like something the Gestapo got up to".

Q. How much did British intelligence and security services know about Mr Mohamed's mistreatment?

A. An MI5 officer, "Witness B", travelled to Karachi in Pakistan in 2002. He said he observed no abuse and Mr Mohamed did not complain to him about abuse. According to the evidence given to the ISC by MI5, they had no further contact with the prisoner. But the then-director general of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the ISC that "with hindsight" she regretted not seeking assurance from the Americans that Mr Mohamed would not be abused.

Mr Mohamed's lawyers, Reprieve, claim that intelligence documents presented to the High Court showed that the US continued to supply information from Mr Mohamed to the UK until March 2004.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/libertycentral/2010/feb/10/binyam-mohamed-legal-principle-representations

How 400 years of legal history were cast aside in the Binyam Mohamed case

Legal principle established in 1637 banned secret talks between lawyers and courts. It was broken by the government

Afua Hirsch, legal affairs correspondent

Wednesday 10 February 2010

Foreign Secretary David Miliband in the Commons defends the attempt to tone down an appeal ruling on Binyam Mohamed. Photograph: PA

When the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, decided to retract paragraph 168 from his draft judgment in the case of Binyam Mohamed, he relied on almost 400 years of jurisprudence to assume that the parties in the case had agreed to its removal.

The case of Ship Money, brought by Oliver Cromwell's cousin John Hampden in 1637, established the principle that there should be no secret communication between lawyers and the courts in legal proceedings.

Representations from one side – in this case, the foreign secretary's barrister, Jonathan Sumption QC – should be copied to all other parties in the case, so that they have the opportunity to respond.

On that basis, when Neuberger received a letter from Sumption requesting removal of the paragraph from the court of appeal draft judgment, lawyers say he must have thought he was acting with the agreement of all parties.

Neuberger removed the paragraph from the final judgment, watering down the court's condemnation of the security services, described by Sumption as containing "exceptionally damaging criticism".

"The master of the rolls' observations … will be read as statements by the court that the security service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques," says Sumption's letter, now published in full on the Guardian's website.

But other parties in the case were not consulted and are furious.

"In all the years – I was first a government lawyer and then a liberty lawyer – I have never known the draft judgment process abused in this way," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the human rights organisation which was a party to the case. "The purpose of using drafts is for typographical and factual corrections – minor matters such as names and dates.

"It is not to allow one party to re-run substantive arguments and tempt a court to tone down or change its judgments."

She added: "I can't believe that the Foreign Office thought they could get away with this. It shows the kind of contempt for the law that this case has always been about."

"This is anti-constitutional behaviour of the most disquieting kind," said Mark Stephens, who represented a group of American newspapers in the case and was not informed of Sumption's letter to the court until yesterday, when the judgment had already been changed. "In my experience of 31 years practising as a lawyer, it is unprecedented.

"This conduct has embarrassed Lord Neuberger who clearly assumed that he had received all submissions when he reached his decision to remove the judgment."

In a remarkable series of events, Neuberger has admitted he may have been "over-hasty" to remove the findings, after the Guardian, as well as Liberty and Justice, challenged the exclusion.

"I think it was over-hasty to amend that written request of one party, without giving other parties the opportunity to reply," said Neuberger.

Answering questions in the Commons today, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, defended the attempt to have the paragraph removed from the judgment.

"What our counsel did, once he had been provided with copy of the judgment in draft, was to express real concern that one paragraph set out conclusions that went beyond the evidence concluded and risked causing prejudice to a criminal investigation," said Miliband. "Our counsel took the view that this should be brought to the attention of judges in case."

Miliband came under fire from MPs for the conduct of the Foreign Office, for attempting to have the paragraph retracted, and for the court's findings that seven paragraphs kept secret from an earlier Binyam Mohamed judgment should also be kept secret.

The paragraphs, which have now been released, were redacted after Milliband said their publication would damage the government's intelligence-sharing relationship with the US administration.

"Publication of the redacted paragraphs would not reveal information which would be of interest to a terrorist or criminal or provide any potential material of value to a terrorist or a criminal," said Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge in today's judgment. "It increasingly appears that the issue is the control principle rather than the confidentiality of any information within the redacted paragraphs themselves."

"This whole case was one about openness, and attempts by the government to cover-up torture instead of exposing it," said Chakrabarti. "The fact that even at the court door, before the ink has even dried on the court of appeal's judgment, the government has had yet another go at a cover-up is truly remarkable."

further reading:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/goldsmith-calls-for-investigation-into-uks-role-in-torture-1899128.html

intel updates: dubai, india, russia-poland

.
http://www.kawther.info/wpr/2010/02/15/names-of-mossad-death-squad-published

Names of Mossad Death Squad Published

Lt. Gen. Dhafi Khalfan Tamim, Dubai’s police chief, stated during a press conference on Sunday that the team which carried out the killing of Mahmud al-Mabhouh in a room at the Al-Bostan, Rotana hotel in Dubai on January 20 consisted of six British passport holders, three Irish passport holders including the woman, and the holders of each a German and a French passport.

Pictures of the death squad members.

“This is a list of all the wanted suspects. The list will be given to the press, newspaper and the Interpol”, said Khalfan. Dubai will soon issue arrest warrants for 11 Europeans suspected in the killing of senior Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, but the police chief said on Monday that he was still not ruling out Israeli involvement.

Khalfan said that two Palestinians suspected of providing logistical support in Mabhouh’s murder were being held by police. Al Arabiya television said that the pair had been handed over by Jordan.

Khalfan said that the 11 suspects were believed to have rented a room across the corridor from al-Mabhouh around the time of the murder, and left Dubai shortly after. Al-Mabhouh entered the United Arab Emirates a day before his death using a passport that did not bear his family name.

Khalfan described the assassination of Al-Mabhouh, who was unarmed and alone, “by more than a dozen people” as a cowardly act and not an act of heroism. In an apparent reference to the possibility of state involvement in the assassination of Mabhouh, Khalfan said “if leaders of some countries export orders to their intelligence and security services to commit murders in another country, this is repugnant and unacceptable.”

The names of the suspected persons as published by Al-Quds:
Peter Ilevenger (sp?) – French passport
Kevin Davron – Irish passport
Gael Voallard (female) – Irish passport
Ivan Diningz (sp?) - Irish passport
Paul John Keely – British passport
Melvin Adam Mildainer – British passport
Steven Daniel Hodge – British passport
Michael Lawrence Barney – British passport
James Leonard Clark – British passport
Jonathan Lewis Graham – British passport
Michael Bodenhaimer – German passport

If you know anybody who uses these names, or if you recognize any of the individuals on the pictures, please contact the police station nearest to you.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/7166105/Dubai-to-issue-arrest-warrant-for-Netanyahu-if-Mossad-behind-Hamas-killing.html

Dubai to issue arrest warrant for Netanyahu if Mossad behind Hamas killing

Dubai is to issue an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, if investigators conclude that the Mossad intelligence service was behind the killing of a senior Hamas official in the emirate last month.

Adrian Blomfield in Jerusalem

05 Feb 2010

The threat to detain the Israeli leader came as police in Dubai linked the apparent murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior member of the Hamas military wing, to the Jewish state for the first time.

Dahi Khalfan Tamim, Dubai's police chief, claimed that the dead man was killed using methods known to be employed by Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency. He added that Mr Netanyahu would be held personally responsible if Mossad was identified as the culprit.

"Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to kill al-Mabhouh in Dubai," Gen Tamim told The National, an English language newspaper in Dubai.

"We will issue an arrest warrant against him."

Mr Mabhouh was found dead in his Dubai hotel room on January 20. According to initial forensic reports, he was given an electric shock before being suffocated. Police are still investigating other factors that could have contributed to his death, including poisoning.

Israel has yet to comment on whether or not it was involved in the killing, although it did issue a statement claiming that Mr Mabhouh played"z central role in smuggling weapons from Iran to Gaza militants".

In recent years Israel has been linked to the assassination of several Hamas leaders, both inside the Gaza strip, which is controlled by the Islamist movement, and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Any arrest warrant issued against Mr Netanyahu is likely to deal a setback to unofficial efforts to improve relations between Dubai and Israel.

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update feb 10 2010

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/7401691/Interpol-issues-alert-for-16-more-suspects-in-Dubai-hotel-room-assassination.html

Published: 4:55PM GMT 08 Mar 2010

Interpol issues alert for 16 more suspects in Dubai hotel room assassination

Interpol has issued an alert for 16 more suspects in connection with the assassination of a Hamas commander in a Dubai hotel room, bringing the total number of notices to 27.

Interpol has issued an alert for 16 more suspects Photo: INTERPOL

The French-based organization says it issued red notices, its highest-level alert, for a 16-strong team accused of shadowing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh before his killing. The total number of people sought by Interpol notices in the case is now 27.

Of the newly listed suspects, only one had never before been identified by Dubai police. Interpol revealed his face and alias for the first time, releasing a photo of a smiling, dark-haired young man and listing his alias as Joshua Aaron Krycer. It did not give his age or nationality.

The group of 16 is believed to have assisted another team, which Interpol described as a "smaller core group alleged to have carried out the killing" and whose members already were sought through Interpol notices.

According to the Dubai police probe, the "second team, the members of which are now also subject of red notices, is believed to have aided and abetted the first team by closely watching, following and reporting al-Mabhouh's movements from the moment he landed at Dubai airport until his murder on Jan. 19," Interpol said.

Interpol issued the alerts at the request of authorities in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Interpol had issued its first batch of 11 red notices in the case in February.

The methodical stalking and killing of al-Mabhouh in a luxury hotel room has been widely blamed on Israel's Mossad spy agency. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement.

The statement from Interpol said police in Dubai have agreed to enter evidence _ including DNA profiles _ into Interpol's international databases. It also said that Interpol was to join a Dubai-based international task force on the killing.

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http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20100215_2?

with permission from Wayne Madsen

February 15-16, 2010

Pune bombing was a planned false flag accidental explosion

WMR's knowledgeable Asian intelligence sources report that the February 13 improvised explosive device blast at the German Bakery in Pune, India, was likely the result of an accidental premature bomb blast carried out by a covert Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) network responsible for conducting false flag and other terrorist attacks in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Tibet.

Asian intelligence sources believe that the blast was part of a series of planned blasts in Pune, a city popular with western tourists, and that the back pack containing the bomb blew up in the bakery because of a failed pick-up by a pre-designated false flag agent.

It is known that David Coleman Headley, aka Daood Gilani, the Pakistani-American double agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), CIA, and the Pakistani/Kashmiri terrorist group Laskar e Taiba (LET), arrested in Chicago last October on charges that he conducted a reconnaissance operation of targets in Mumbai prior to the terrorist attack on that city on November 26, 2008, visited Pune in July 2008 and March 2009. Headley's father, Sayed Salim Gilani, was a Pakistani diplomat and director of Radio Pakistan and is related to the present Pakistani Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, who approved the staioning of Blackwater/Xe mercenaries in Pakistan. It is suspected that the young Headley was recruited by the CIA after he was arrested by U.S. authorities for the smuggling of heroin in 1988. In fact, Headley often represented himself as being with the CIA during his trips to India.

Indian law enforcement was investigating how Headley obtained an Indian visa from the Indian Consulate in Chicago in order to travel to India but Headley's original visa application papers are now missing from the Indian Consulate in the Windy City. In addition, the FBI is refusing to allow Indian authorities to have access to Headley.

It is also noteworthy that Headley's accomplice, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, also arrested by the FBI as part of an alleged LET cell in Chicago, has the name "Rana" that is not common in Pakistan but predominant among Hindus in Rajasthan state, India. In the criminal charges filed against Rana in Chicago, his contact in Dubai is referred to as "Pasha." Asian intelligence sources do not believe that "Pasha" is either Arab or Pakistani, since the honorific in Arab states and Pakistan is "sheikh" or "emir." "Pasha" is a Turkic, Turkic Khazar Jewish, and Baghdadi Jewish title used since the days of the Ottoman Empire.

Headley stayed in the Koregaon Park neighborhood of Pune and he visited the Hasidic Jewish Chabad House in the same neighborhood, as well as the German Bakery and the nearby Osho Ashram International Meditation center, founded by the late Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the founder of an international mystic cult that established its headquarters at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon in 1981. The communal headquarters collapsed in 1985 after Rajneesh stated that leaders of the commune committed a bio-terror attack on the people of The Dalles by contaminating their food. Rajneesh was arrested and deported from the United States and eventually settled in Pune. He died in 1990, with some people believing the CIA poisoned him to ensure his silence. The Rajneeshpuram colony in Oregon was swimming in weapons, saw a number of murders, and involved a number of CIA operatives. After the catastrophe at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978, it is believed Rajneeshpuram represented yet another CIA MK-ULTRA psyop and mind control operation.

Headley traveled to Pune from Goa, another center of heavy Mossad and Chabad activity. The German Bakery is very close to the Chabad House. Among those killed in the German Bakery blast was an Iranian national, with five other Iranians injured. Since Rajneeshpuram was connected to the CIA's training of El Salvadorean and Laotian mercenaries in the 1980s, there is some speculation that the Iranians in Pune were part of an operation to train them for operations in Iran, especially if they turn out to be Bahais who have also been connected to the Osho ashram.

As reported by WMR, the Chabad House in Mumbai was among the targets of the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai. The attack was carried out by operatives of the Pakistan-based part-time CIA facilitator Dawood Ibrahim, the head of the D-Company mafia that controls much of the drug trade in Mumbai, Bollywood, and Nepal. Ibrahim struck Mumbai in retaliation for what he believed was a CIA double-cross to have him captured in Pakistan and extradited to his native India for prosecution.

What links the Osho cult and Chabad, WMR has been told, is sex and Ecstasy, with both groups jointly involved in the prostitution and drug trade in Pune.

The Osho ashram cult has also expanded its operations in the last few years in Nepal where it is supporting a revived paramilitary infrastructure involving the Tibetan exile authority. Osho Nepal has provided Tibetan activists to support Free Tibet protests across Nepal and to help re-establish covert guerrilla operations on behalf of RAW and the CIA in Tibetan monasteries on Nepal's border with China.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was feted at President Obama's first state dinner at the White House on November 24 last year, said the following about Osho (Rajneesh):

""Osho is one of India’s greatest mystics.... I see him as one of the world’s great teachers, thinkers, philosophers and guides of our times. I have enormous respect for his world vision and the kind of International Communities he is building. I have always felt his influence in my life." And the Dalai Lama, who is due to meet Obama in Washington, said of Osho: "Osho is an enlightened master who is working with all possibilities to help humanity overcome a difficult phase in developing consciousness."

The Osho group is the main sponsor of Friends of Tibet, which Nepalese journalists have linked to paramilitary weapons training for Tibetans in Quebec and another branch in the United States. Ironically, the blast in Pune comes just before President Obama is scheduled to meet the Dalai Lama of Tibet in Washington, much to the consternation of the government of China. WMR's Beijing sources report that there is a belief by Chinese intelligence and sources in Nepal that the bomb that detonated at the German Bakery may have been an accidentally detonated device that might have been used in a terrorist training program by the Osho group in cooperation with the local branch of Students for Free Tibet, the more militant wing of the Tibetan independence movement, its more peaceful counterpart being the Tibetan Youth Congress.

Osho operations in Nepal, where George Soros is also active on behalf of the Tibetans, are also being used to spread the Rajneesh philosophy in Russia and other former Soviet republics, as well as Iran. The Osho cult has 55 religious center throughout Nepal and missionaries from the centers often travel to Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan to spread the Osho's message.

On November 29, 2008, WMR reported: "WMR previously reported that the violent and bloody attack on Mumbai represents a pay-back from exiled Indian Muslim Mumbai gangland warlord Dawood Ibrahim who fears that the CIA was conspiring with the Pakistani government to extradite him from Pakistan to India. Such an event would effectively cede control of Mumbai's lucrative organized crime territory to Hindu extremist criminal syndicates allied with the Hindu terrorist Shiv Sena group. The targeting of the Lubavitcher Chabad House in Mumbai, where a New York rabbi and his wife were killed by one team of gangsters that arrived by sea from Pakistan, was likely more score settling by Ibrahim who suspected that Israeli Mafiosi were conspiring with Hindu extremist gangs to supplant Ibrahim's criminal influence in Mumbai."

On December 1, 2008, WMR reported: "A report in Kashmir Times, since removed from its website, claimed that the terrorists that entered the Taj Mahal Palace hotel had identified two senior U.S. intelligence officers in the crowd. The fact that the two CIA agents were singled out lends more proof to WMR's original report that Ibrahim was retaliating against his old CIA friends because he suspected them of working with India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency to extradite him from his sanctuary in Quetta, Pakistan to India. Ibrahim is a veteran of CIA "off-the-books" operations during the mujaheddin war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and currently in CIA drug and weapons smuggling and money laundering activities in South Asia, particularly in facilitating the shipment of bumper crop opium from U.S.-occupied Afghanistan to enrich the coffers of CIA slush funds . . . WMR has learned from Asian intelligence sources that the Russian-Israeli gangsters operating out of Chabad House tried to take over Mumbai's drug trade with the help of local Jewish mobsters so Ibrahim, while settling scores with India, the CIA, and Britain, decided to have his sub-contractor LET terrorists pay a visit to Chabad House and 'collect on a debt with high interest.' Ibrahim has always been careful to kill more criminals than he employs and after his attacks on Hindu and Israeli mobsters in Mumbai, the ratio has reportedly gotten better. Ibrahim eliminated practically every one of his criminal rivals in Mumbai during the 1980s and he is not about to see Hindu and Israeli crime syndicates replace him in his fiercely fought-for turf in Mumbai and other parts of India. Ibrahim's drug and other smuggling operations in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Africa, and Sri Lanka have also faced new and increased competition from Russian-Israeli gangsters operating in the same regions."

WMR has learned that the Pune bombing does not involve Ibrahim but a network of RAW-supported right-wing false flag terrorist operatives intent on driving a wedge between India and Pakistan before new diplomatic negotiations between the two sub-continental nuclear powers were to begin thus scuttling the talks.

Pune is a hub of joint RAW, CIA, British MI-6, Mossad, and possibly, Blackwater/ Xe, intelligence operations in the sub-continent. The headquarters of the Indian Army's Southern Command, Pune is also the location of more than a dozen Indian military bases and military research laboratories. Pune is also the location of the National Defense College, where Headley also paid a visit during his stay in the city. Pune is a key meeting ground between the RAW and its operative in the Osho group and Israeli intelligence counterparts using Chabad House as cover. The Military Intelligence Training School and Depot (MITSD) in Pune has also been used to train Sri Lankan military intelligence officers in methods to battle the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Israel's Mossad also provides military and intelligence support to Sri Lanka's military intelligence service.

In 2004, a joint Mossad/Shin Bet unit quietly slipped into Pune to teach surveillance courses to Indian military intelligence units at the MITSD in Pune. The Mossad operatives are reportedly still stationed at the school and are reportedly involved in teaching the RAW the finer points of conducting false flag terrorist attacks. The chief RAW entity for conducting false flag attacks is the Counter Intelligence Team X (CIT-X), which conducted false flag attacks in Pakistan;'s Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Pakistan proper as part of the joint RAW-CIA-Mossad OPERATION PARKARAM between December 2001 and October 2002. RAW agents, masquerading as "Al Qaeda" operatives lured recruits, particularly from the Taliban, with cash, weapons, and ammunition.

Indian police investigators are reporting that the IED used at the German Bakery consisted of 1 to 1.5 kilograms of RDX. WMR has learned that the source of the RDX was the MTSD's weapons depot, another indication that the explosion was the result of a botched training exercise and/or a false flag operation.

On January 4, 2010, Israel's national security adviser Uzi Arad, the former Mossad chief in Washington who handled Israel's Pentagon spy Larry Franklin, was in Delhi after Israel publicly warned of a possible terrorist attack in Goa in October of last year.

It is believed that Headley was originally part of Ibrahim's heroin-smuggling D-Company but that after his arrest he became a key link between the CIA and Ibrahim, as well as to the LET for purposes of running false flag attack operations in the region.

WMR has learned that the most plausible scenario for the detonation at the German Bakery was that it was the result of sloppiness by someone in the Rashneesh/Osho group, likely an intermediate whose job it is to transfer weapons and bombs from the RAW to militant Hindus of the anti-Pakistan dialogue Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiv Sena movement, Tibetans, Tamils, and others for use in false flag provocation attacks.

WMR's sources report that the following is the likely scenario behind the bomb explosion in the German Bakery: The device (in a backpack) was being dropped off under a table at the bakery, but the pick-up was late and was possibly waiting for the table to clear of guests.
It went off only when the waiter tried to open it, setting a self-destruct trigger. With 70 people in the bakery, the back pack was practically invisible in a crowd and a good place
for a transfer without police surveillance. The police are spinning the "usual suspects" - including the little -known Indian Mujaheddin, a shadowy group responsible in the past for planting bombs on treetops in parks.

Our sources also point out that the Indian authorities did not cite the Deccan Mujaheddin, as they have in the past, since there are few Muslims in the part of the Deccan where Pune is located. The problem of a targeted bombing hypothesis is the "target" - the German Bakery. The bakery as a target makes no political statement, its munch too small time after the Taj hotel in Mumbai was attacked in November 2008.

To recap in more detail, if the blast at the bakery was an accident that occured during a transfer by a cut-out en route to another target in Pune, the following are the outstanding questions:

The militant Hindus would not target the bakery right in the middle of their assets, the Osho ashram and a friendly Chabad House, so the militant Hindus obviously were planning to hit a public site to "scare" the Indian politicians away from the planned talks with Pakistan. Also, the Hindu militants would have had some sort of Laskar-e-Taiba insignias or markings (a fake ID, a letter, a flag, or name card) "found" at the attack site.

The actual target or targets would probably be in a public square or plaza near a major transport hub, either a bus terminal or train station, with security cameras, as lots of
people have to be visibly running for their lives for maximum effect to sway the opinions of the television audiences. It is likely that the German Bakery device was probably one among many IEDs en route to targets in Pune.

By blowing prematurely in the middle of their own prized assets, the Hindu right now risks exposing their entire false flag operations, along with the involvement of RAW assets, Osho ashram, the CIA, and Mossad (Chabad House). Now that the Indian police have investigators scouring all over the Koregaon Park section, there is little likelihood of a
rightist operation being pulled off before the scheduled Indo-Pakistani talks. INdian police are now reporting that closed circuit TV footage shows two men at a 5-star hotrel across the street from the German Bakery. One has a bag in his possession, while the other is talking on a cell phone. It is a vital clue in the scenario that the back pack exploded at the bakery because of a late pick-up.

The incident also reveals the source of explosives for the Hindu "false-flag" (Lashkar colors) attacks as the same huge cache of weapons distributed to Tibetan,
Tamil, Assamese, and other "terrorist" movements that are covertly fed by RAW to enable Indian military interventions or security agreements with neighboring countries, including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Bangladesh.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, Counterpunch, Online Journal, CorpWatch, Multinational Monitor, News Insider, In These Times, and The American Conservative. His columns have appeared in The Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Sacramento Bee, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others.

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http://intelligencenews.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/01-387/#more-4451

Did missing Polish intel officer defect to Russia?

February 13, 2010

Stefan Zielonka

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |

We have been keeping an eye on the mysterious case of Stefan Zielonka, a senior SIGINT officer with Poland’s Military Intelligence Services (SWW), who disappeared without trace in early May of 2009. The seriousness of Zielonka’s disappearance stems from his extensive knowledge of Polish undercover intelligence networks operating overseas, including names and contacts of illegals –i.e. agents operating without diplomatic cover. Consequently, Polish intelligence officials have expressed fears that, if Zielonka defected, or was kidnapped by foreign intelligence agents, “much of the country’s intelligence network could be compromised”. The possibility that Zielonka actually defected increased after it became known that his wife and young child also disappeared. In December, a report in Poland’s Dziennik Gazeta Prawna claimed that the signals intelligence officer’s mysterious disappearance is connected with a “trail leading to the Far East”, with “all clues lead[ing] to China”. Earlier this week, however, Russian weekly Argumenti Niedieli suggested that Zielonka was in fact recruited by Russian military intelligence. This was the original theory behind the SIGINT officer’s disappearance, to which intelNews alluded when we first reported the story. It is worth pointing out, however, that Polish intelligence sources dismiss this theory, in favor of the purported Chinese link. Instead, they explain Argumenti Niedieli’s claim as an attempts by Russian intelligence services to strike back at Poland after the arrest of a Russian illegal in Warsaw. The unidentified man was detained in 2009 by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW), but his arrest was announced earlier this month.

thailand: pedophilia, us diplomats, religious org ( 8 texts )

.

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

by Wayne Madsen

September 1, 2009

Another confirmation about pedophile US diplomats in SE Asia

The Department of Justice and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are congratulating themselves on the arrest in Cambodia of three Americans in "Operation Twisted Traveler," a law enforcement operation that targets Americans traveling to Cambodia for the purpose of engaging in sex with children. Three American men -- Ronald Boyajian, Erik Peeters, and Jack Sporich -- were arrested in Cambodia and deported to the United States to face criminal charges under the PROTECT Act. The men are the first to be apprehended under the Twisted Traveler operation.

However, neither Justice nor ICE is focusing on the network that permits child prostitution and pedophilia to flourish under the cover of diplomatic immunity -- the large number of pedophiles who are U.S. diplomats posted in Southeast Asia. In addition, there are now reports that Blackwater maintained a "man camp" in Baghdad where Iraqi children were used as prostitutes by contract security personnel. Blackwater was acting under contract to the Pentagon and CIA.

WMR has also been informed that a few former and "on call" Blackwater and other private security company personnel ply the bars and alleyways of Thailand and are on the lookout for minors.

WMR broke story about the involvement of John Mark Karr, who erroneously identified himself as the killer of Jon Benet Ramsey, in a child procurement operation run by the U.S. embassy in Bangkok. A reporter for a major Japanese newspaper who covered the Karr case in Bangkok confirmed to WMR that Karr was procuring children for higher-ups at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok. WMR reported that the embassy would arrange for sexual trysts between child prostitutes and visiting American VIPs, including members of Congress. WMR reported that the program was conducted under the aegis of both the U.S. embassy and CIA station in Bangkok.

The following is from WMR's July 16, 2007 report:

"Karr had been charged with previous child pornography crimes in the United States. After he jumped bail in the United States before his California trial on kiddie porn charges, Karr surfaced in various countries known as havens for pedophiles – Costa Rica, the Netherlands, Honduras, South Korea, and finally, Thailand. In Thailand, Karr ended up teaching affluent Thai and foreign children at three elite international schools in Bangkok. A senior level State Department official, who dealt with the trafficking of children for sexual exploitation, told this editor that Karr definitely fits the profile of a child predator.

Karr, it will be remembered, publicly claimed after his arrest in Thailand last year on unrelated child prostitution charges, to have been present at the murder of 6-year old Jon Benet Ramsey in 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Karr, given rock star status by the corporate media, was interviewed by Larry King on CNN's tabloidish Larry King Live and, more recently, by Fox News' Greta Van Sustren.

A longtime U.S. resident of Thailand and an author of several books on Thailand's expatriate community told this editor that Karr’s unusual special treatment by the U.S. embassy in Bangkok last year is very unusual. In fact, it is practically unprecedented. The question is why?

After Karr was arrested by Thai police on what was reported to be 'unspecified sex charges' unrelated to the Ramsey matter, the U.S. embassy, and particularly the large CIA station in Bangkok and the 16-person Department of Homeland Security contingent located in rented office space adjacent to the huge embassy compound, arranged for Karr’s hasty departure from Thailand to face charges in the Ramsey murder case. Karr was flown, un-handcuffed and sipping champagne, in business class from Bangkok to Los Angeles on Thai International Airways, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Again, why?

Karr, according to several informed sources in Asia, including former Japan Timesweekly magazine editor Yoichi Shimatsu, who lives part time in Thailand, and Robert Finnegan, former editor of Indonesia’s English-language Jakarta Post, was more than a mere publicity-seeking alleged pedophile preying on young children – he fit the classic profile of a procurer of children for others – a business that leads directly to the very embassy that accorded him VIP treatment on his departure from Thailand. Both journalists have extensively investigated the scourge of pedophiles in Southeast Asia. And both have been singled out for attack by pedophile interests, operating through various front operations in the region, including anti-pedophile non-government organizations."

WMR's report continued: "The perception management campaign by the foreign media in Thailand to paint Karr as a filthy degenerate living in squalid conditions was not bought by the Thai media. It was not pimps and drug dealers with whom Karr rubbed shoulders but diplomats and members of the U.S. military.

Former Jakarta Posteditor Finnegan is well aware of U.S. ambassador to Thailand Ralph 'Skip' Boyce’s modus operandi. He believes that John Mark Karr was a typical intelligence cut out for the embassy in Bangkok, one whose major job for the embassy was to procure underage children for sex with visiting VIPs and senior diplomats. In fact, Bangkok is a major stopping point for U.S. members of Congress on 'junkets.' This editor has identified a number of House members who have visited Bangkok on numerous occasions. All of them are Republicans.

Because Karr was smart enough to spread out incriminating evidence he possessed of embassy involvement, they had no other choice but to extricate him from Thailand when he ran afoul of the local authorities. It was under the protection of the U.S. embassy that Karr was spirited out of Thailand on a business class Thai International Airways flight to the United States, where all charges, including those involving Jon Benet Ramsey and the Sonoma County kiddie porn charges, were dropped. It is clear that the Ramsey story was a ruse cooked up by the U.S. embassy to create such a firestorm of media attention that the Thai authorities, who had come under the rule of a military junta in a coup a few weeks earlier, had no other choice but to release Karr to the Americans."

The involvement of the State Department in the child trafficking and prostitution business goes deeper. THe following is from WMR's July 16, 2007 report: "One of the Bangkok embassy individuals who was cited in news reports as being involved in Karr’s extrication, Ann Hurst who heads the Department of Homeland Security office adjacent to the sprawling embassy compound, refused to return my phone calls requesting comment. According to published news reports, Hurst was assisted in Karr’s extrication by the CIA station at the embassy,

Finnegan had seen it before. Finnegan said that while he was with the Jakarta Post, he became aware that Boyce, while ambassador in Jakarta, used the services of two known local procurers of child prostitutes and sex slaves. They were both Indonesian nationals, one was a CIA asset operating as a businessman and the other was a journalist. Finnegan says that State Department pedophiles operate under the 'deniability cover' of being diplomats with immunity from prosecution. Finnegan claims these individuals are often promoted and transferred to other embassies in the Southeast Asia region. The CIA uses them to gather incriminating trash on other embassy personnel that is used later to blackmail them, sort of an insurance policy for the pedophile rings.

Finnegan said that when he began to write about Boyce’s malfeasance in Jakarta, the U.S. embassy’s security officer threatened him on the grounds of the U.S. embassy. Eventually, Boyce had Finnegan’s journalist visa pulled and he was forced to return to the United States, along with his Indonesian wife.

State Department sources with whom this editor spoke confirm what Finnegan says about diplomat-pedophiles being transferred around Southeast Asia. They cite one example of a U.S. diplomat in Phnom Penh, Cambodia who was openly living with two underage boys – one Cambodian and the other Lao. After being transferred to the U.S. embassy in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, his 'secret' was discovered by the strict Muslim government. He was summarily declared persona non grata. He now serves at the American embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a hornets’ nest for pedophiles operating bordellos filled with child prostitutes.

Recently, a State Department security officer from Phnom Penh was arrested upon his return to New Jersey for attempting to spirit into the United States two Cambodian nationals with false immigration documents. The State Department, along with a complicit corporate media, covered up the incident."

Twisted Traveler is said to use agents from the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service to track down American pedo-tourists in Cambodia. The use of any State Department assets in the program is a virtual Trojan horse that will ensure certain offenders are "tipped off" before any busts by the local Cambodian police and FBI. Twisted Traveler also focuses on Cambodia when there are huge pedo-rings involving Americans in northern Thailand, Philippines, Bangladesh, Laos, and Indonesia.

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Update to Southeast Asia diplo-pedo story

August 19-20, 2009

WMR has an update to an August 11, 2007 story on the involvement of U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia in the child trafficking trade:

Our August 11, 2007 report stated:

"The U.S. embassy in Bangkok is the second largest in the Far East (after Tokyo). Its CIA station is also rumored by many intelligence observers in Bangkok to be the second largest in Asia, after Tokyo. However, the U.S. embassy in Bangkok has another distinction – it is at the center of the State Department’s pedophile activities in Asia.

According to journalistic sources posted to the region, the pedophilia activity has centered around Ambassador Ralph (“Skip”) Boyce, the current U.S. ambassador to Thailand and the former ambassador to Indonesia. Boyce, who speaks fluent Thai, has spent much of his Foreign Service career in Southeast Asia. Before his stint in Indonesia, Boyce was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific. He was Political Counselor Bangkok from 1988 to 1992, had a brief stint as Charge d’Affairs in Singapore from 1992 to 1994 and he returned to Bangkok as Deputy Chief of Mission from 1994 to 1998 In 1995, while Boyce served as the number two man at the Bangkok embassy, a scandal engulfed the U.S. mission. The Consular Services section of the embassy conspired with Thai police and pedophiles in Belgium, Thailand, and the United States to allow a Thai boy to be sent from Thailand to Belgium, a noted haven for pedophiles.

Thai government officials issued an order on behalf of the child’s American godfather to keep the youngster in Thailand. The boy’s Lao mother, a barmaid, was part of a ring of pedophiles in Pattaya Beach and Antwerp, Belgium. Amid protests, the woman transported the boy to Belgium Boyce ignored repeated warnings about the misconduct of his embassy’s Consular Affairs office. Boyce and his key staffers, including Consul General Thomas P. Furey and American Citizens Services chief Christopher Richard, later blocked a Thai police investigation of the matter

From an informed source in Pattaya, Thailand, WMR has received the following update:

The child's American godfather, with the help of the child's Thai grandmother, persuaded the Thai government to prevent the child from departing Thailand for Belgium with his mother, a barmaid, and her escort, a Belgian pedophile The Belgian pedophile's associates got Christopher Richard, head of the American Citizens Services section of the American Consulate in Bangkok, to pressure the Thai government to let them take the child to Belgium. Amazingly, Richard gladly did so.

In official correspondence to the Thai officials who had issued the protective order, Richard tried to discredit the child's American godfather and encourage the Thai government to withdraw the protective order. He accused the child’s godfather of fraud The Thai government made an immediate about face and let the child go to Belgium where he was quickly trafficked. The mother returned to Thailand without him not long afterward Richard's malicious false accusation, which could be easily refuted, resulted in (1) the trafficking of the child and (2) exposing an innocent American to possible arrest in a foreign country on false charges. Incidentally, if Richard’s accusation had been true, he could have implicated (or embarrassed) an American senator.

Boyce refused to alert the Thai police to the child's predicament and Thomas P. Furey, the American consul, expressed his support of the pedophile ring in his official correspondence.

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April 6, 2009

Asian pedo-gate

With Hillary Clinton in charge, no change in State Department involvement with and tolerance for U.S. pedophiles in Asian nations.

Although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once advised the Children's Defense Fund after graduating from Yale Law School, that experience has not equated to any commitment to protect children in Southeast Asia from predatory American diplomats and expatriates.

WMR has learned from a non-governmental organization (NGO) that is devoted to protect northern Thailand's tribal Akha people from exploitation that the Thai language press in northern Thailand recently reported that Thai police hauled in for questioning a noted U.S. expatriate missionary for questioning on child abuse charges.

On March 13, the pages of northern Thailand newspapers featured a photograph of Robert Moss, aka Bobby Morse, of the evangelical Independent Christian Churches and the North Burma Christian Mission in Chiang Mai being questioned, along with a Thai employee, at the headquarters of Police Bureau Region 5’s Juvenile and Women’s Protection Division. Moss/Morse and his employee were released on bail after their arrest.

Moss/Morse is a Lisu-fluent third generation U.S. missionary whose forebearers retreated from Tibet an China's Yunnan province after the communist takeover and then from Burma in the 1960s after the military junta there consolidated power. U.S. missionaries settled in northern Thailand and began to proselytize among the northern hill tribes, including the Hmong, Karen, Lisu, and Akha. U.S. missionary numbers increased between 1974 and 1979, a time period that coincided with the winding down of the Indochina war and the introduction of CIA covert teams into northern Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia to challenge the victory of the communists in Vietnam and Laos and the anti-Vietnamese Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Moss/Morse is reportedly well known in Yangon and northern Thailand for his work with the Independent Christian Churches, youth training centers, and orphanages. Moss'/Morse's North Burma Christian Mission in based in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. NGO sources in Thailand have told WMR that a number of missionary-pedophile activities in the region are linked to a CIA-run opium smuggling network operating out of Luang Namtha, Laos and under the control of the CIA stations at the U.S. embassies in Bangkok and Vientiane, Laos.

The following is an excerpt from the Sun Herald of Sydney, Australia from January 10, 1988, "Former CIA agent Bill Young,who works in the booming Golden Triangle trekking business, has formed his own intelligence network to ensure the safety of his clients. Mr Young was among the CIA's most successful operatives during the Vietnam War, according to the American academic Dr Alfred McCoy in his book The Politics of Heroin in South-East Asia. After he quit spying, Mr Young settled in north Thailand and went into business in the tourist centre of Chiang Rai. Recently, he became a partner in a company called Golden Triangle Tours which offers Australian and other westerners the chance to '"follow the opium trail' through remote hillside villages on foot or by elephant. He has reactivated his former hillside contacts who provide him with up-to-date intelligence on the security situation in the rugged mountains. He considers this essential to ensure that tourists do not trek into the middle of an opium war or encroach on an area in which robbers roam."

Thai-language paper carrying story of arrest of Moss/Morse and his employee.

The following is an English translation of the March 13 Thai-language newspaper report on police investigation of American missionary [translation provided by Akha rights NGO]:

Robert Moss (seated right) and Chailong Siriwong are questioned at the headquarters of Police Bureau Region 5’s Juvenile and Women’s Protection Division. Two men charged with sexual abuse of young girls in their care Saksit Meesubkwang Two men, one American and one Thai, were recently arrested and charged with sexual abuse against a number of young hill tribe girls between the ages of 13 and 15. It seems that the two men’s abuse of the young girls in their charge may have been continuing unreported for a number of years. The men were questioned and charged at Police Bureau Region 5’s Juvenile and Women’s Protection Division; a search of the foundation’s premises resulted in the seizure of CDs and DVDs which will be used as evidence. Robert Moss, 55, the proprietor of Hor Fuang Fah, a foundation which supplied accommodation and access to education for hill tribe girls, with premises in Muang and Mae Taeng districts, together with his employee Chailong Siriwong, 49, are, at present, denying the charges. During questioning, Chailong insisted that he had not sexually abused the girls, and that he had loved them as would a father. He refused to comment about Moss’s involvement, stating that it was “none of his business”. Prior to the two men’s arrest, Somboon Jai-ngarm, the principal of Mae Tang’s Sop Perng Wittaya School, had become concerned about the behaviour of a number of young girls from the foundation’s Mae Taeng premises who were being educated at the school. The students seemed ill, nervous and depressed, and were often found crying. Suspecting child sexual abuse, Somboon contacted local police, and was finally able to persuade 7 of the girls to talk with police. After the subsequent arrest of their alleged abusers, the victims felt able to tell their full stories. The Hor Fuang Fah foundation was supposedly acting to sponsor selected students from impoverished hill tribe families living in Chiang Rai’s Mae Suay district, providing them with education and a place to stay in Chiang Mai. The accused Thai, Chailong, originally from Mae Suay, was employed by Moss to drive the girls to and from school and to perform housekeeping duties. At least 100 young girls were resident at the facility. However, during questioning by police, the possibility that the foundation was being run for the financial benefit of its proprietor was revealed. Each student’s family was charged 3,000 baht annually for accommodation, food and transportation to school, and another 10,000 baht for education services. It is being suggested that the bulk of the charges, plus national and international donations received by the foundation, were retained by Moss. One of the abuse victims told the school’s principal that girls staying at the dormitories often went hungry, as food was in short supply. Another said that she was afraid she would have to die before she could get away from Moss and Chailong, and that if she could escape, she would never go back. Others said that on many occasions, Moss and Chailong would force girls to go with them to their private quarters in order to ‘give a massage’. Outsiders were not permitted to enter the foundation’s premises, even when girls were sick and needed medical attention, or when the school’s principal needed to check on their health. The children were also forced to work in Moss’s orchard. Since the arrests, almost half the girls have left the foundation’s premises; a number have been sent to other children’s homes in Chiang Mai, others have been taken back to their villages by their parents. Some, who have been terrified by the constant threat of abuse, have refused to return to the facility. Pol Lt Col Thawatchai Yoomark, deputy superintendent of the Juvenile and Women’s Protection Division, said that police suspect that a further number of organisations may be acting in this manner, and that their founders’ and executives’ history and profiles were being investigated by the authorities. Most foreign missionaries in northern Thailand are evangelical Protestants. There are also Roman Catholics. Most of the missionaries are Americans with a sizable contingent of western Europeans and Australians. Chiang Mai is a center for the foreign missionary activities in northern Thailand.

Photo of Moss/Morse with native boys

Attempts by NGOs to publicize

the arrest of Moss/Morse have met with the typical push back from the expatriate pedophile community in Thailand. Postings about the case of English-language blogs in Thailand are removed by moderators and there are threats of libel lawsuits from the "usual suspects."
In early 2007, WMR conducted an in-depth investigation of the involvement of U.S. diplomats and members of the American expatriate communities in Thailand and Cambodia in pedophilia and child prostitution:
"[John Mark] Karr, it will be remembered, publicly claimed after his arrest in Thailand last year on unrelated child prostitution charges, to have been present at the murder of 6-year old Jon Benet Ramsey in 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Karr, given rock star status by the corporate media, was interviewed by Larry King on CNN's tabloidish Larry King Live and, more recently, by Fox News' Greta Van Sustren.

A longtime U.S. resident of Thailand and an author of several books on Thailand's expatriate community told this editor that Karr’s unusual special treatment by the U.S. embassy in Bangkok last year is very unusual. In fact, it is practically unprecedented. The question is why?

After Karr was arrested by Thai police on what was reported to be "unspecified sex charges" unrelated to the Ramsey matter, the U.S. embassy, and particularly the large CIA station in Bangkok and the 16-person Department of Homeland Security contingent located in rented office space adjacent to the huge embassy compound, arranged for Karr’s hasty departure from Thailand to face charges in the Ramsey murder case. Karr was flown, un-handcuffed and sipping champagne, in business class from Bangkok to Los Angeles on Thai International Airways, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Again, why?

Karr, according to several informed sources in Asia, including former Japan Times weekly magazine editor Yoichi Shimatsu, who lives part time in Thailand, and Robert Finnegan, former editor of Indonesia’s English-language Jakarta Post, was more than a mere publicity-seeking alleged pedophile preying on young children – he fit the classic profile of a procurer of children for others – a business that leads directly to the very embassy that accorded him VIP treatment on his departure from Thailand. Both journalists have extensively investigated the scourge of pedophiles in Southeast Asia. And both have been singled out for attack by pedophile interests, operating through various front operations in the region, including anti-pedophile non-government organizations. [In an update to this article, a private investigator who is working on the cases of Jon Benet Ramsey and Iowa paperboy Johnny Gosch, abducted in 1982 at age 12, reports that the U.S. law enforcement contact in Japan reports that Karr may have been procuring for one other embassy in Bangkok, in addition to the U.S. embassy].

For a California schoolteacher, arrested in April 2001 for possession of child pornography, losing his teaching license, and vanishing into thin air after serving six months in a California jail, Karr led a charmed life in an upscale neighborhood of Bangkok. After Boulder, Colorado, authorities determined that Karr lied about killing Ramsey, Sonoma County, California prosecutors discovered that the computer containing the child pornography images for which Karr was originally arrested in April 2001 was missing. As a result, all criminal charges from that case were dropped against Karr. A seasoned law enforcement specialist commented that evidence does not simply "walk out" of evidence rooms without some powerful 'outside intervention.' . . .

Former Jakarta Post editor Finnegan is well aware of U.S. ambassador to Thailand Ralph "Skip" Boyce’s modus operandi. He believes that John Mark Karr was a typical intelligence cut out for the embassy in Bangkok, one whose major job for the embassy was to procure underage children for sex with visiting VIPs and senior diplomats. In fact, Bangkok is a major stopping point for U.S. members of Congress on "junkets." This editor has identified a number of House members who have visited Bangkok on numerous occasions. All of them are Republicans.

Because Karr was smart enough to spread out incriminating evidence he possessed of embassy involvement, they had no other choice but to extricate him from Thailand when he ran afoul of the local authorities. It was under the protection of the U.S. embassy that Karr was spirited out of Thailand on a business class Thai International Airways flight to the United States, where all charges, including those involving Jon Benet Ramsey and the Sonoma County kiddie porn charges, were dropped. It is clear that the Ramsey story was a ruse cooked up by the U.S. embassy to create such a firestorm of media attention that the Thai authorities, who had come under the rule of a military junta in a coup a few weeks earlier, had no other choice but to release Karr to the Americans."

A former senior U.S. State Department ambassador told WMR on background that for any U.S. diplomats to be involved in 'authorized' child prostitution would require embassy collusion at the "very top" within the embassy structure. During the Bush administration, WMR reported that Deputy Secretary of State and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte helped provide cover for such activities because of a major conflict-of-interest in law enforcement investigation of child trafficking and abuse cases involving U.S. citizens in Cambodia, particularly at an orphanage on the outskirts of Phnom Penh near the international airport that was frequented by VIPs arriving in private jets who engaged in inappropriate activities with children.

Condoleezza Rice's excuse for not cracking down on U.S. embassy involvement with child prostitution was mainly Negroponte's presence within the intelligence and foreign policy structure of the Bush-Cheney administration. It remains unknown what reason Mrs. Clinton has for allowing such illegal activity to continue.

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February 15-17, 2008

SPECIAL REPORT. The US security umbrella for child trafficking in Southeast Asia

It has been a year since this editor traveled to Southeast Asia to investigate U.S. diplomats and intelligence agents in the region who have participated, aided, and abetted in the sexual abuse and trafficking of children. Since that time, the situation has largely deteriorated. The only bright spot was the December 2007 early retirement and departure of U.S. ambassador to Thailand Ralph Boyce, who was repeatedly accused over the years of failing to take action against U.S. diplomats and their local interlocutors in countries where he was assigned as ambassador, including Thailand and Indonesia.

WMR has now learned that one orphanage in the region that was targeted by wealthy American patrons with close links to the CIA and Bush White House continues to suffer financially after the American patrons withdrew their support after their sexual abuse activities resulted in complaints from local staff.

Boys of the average age of 10 were used by one of the American patrons for sexual gratification and a few girls of the same age were used to "entertain" visiting dignitaries. WMR has reported in the past that members of Congress used congressional junkets to Southeast Asia as a screen for engaging in sex with children and underage teens.

WMR has also learned that children at the same orphanage were forced to appear in child porn movies that were then transmitted abroad via the Internet using extremely powerful encryption software. Upon abandoning the orphanage, the American patrons ensured the encryption software was pulled off the computers.

WMR has also learned that the CIA is pressuring local media outlets that report on the widespread abuse of children involving Americans in general and diplomats and American VIPs in particular. Some of the money used to silence the local media is being laundered by the agency through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

This editor has personally requested assistance from Congress to investigate and curtail the sexual abuse of children by U.S. diplomats and intelligence agents. However, given the fact that the abuse also involves members of Congress and their staff, the requests have been met with stony silence.

Anti-pedophile activists in Southeast Asia are considering a civil law suit against the American perpetrators, but lacking in funds, they are attempting to seek out pro bono legal assistance in the United States. So far, such assistance has not been forthcoming.

One major problem for the activists is that many "established" and "recognized" non-government organizations (NGOs) dedicated to the anti-pedophile cause are ciphers for larger organizations that want to divert attention and obfuscate about the actual perpetrators of pedophile activities. These include local NGOs supported by the Roman Catholic Church and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID has long been a financial pass-through for the CIA.
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January 28, 2008

Boyce never took action against abuse of children in northern Thailand

WMR has been informed by two knowledgeable sources that recently-departed US ambassador to Thailand Ralph "Skip" Boyce took no stand against the abuse of children in northern Thailand, including Akha tribal children in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai provinces and Burmese refugee children on the Thai side of the border with Burma (Myanmar).

Boyce quietly accepted an early retirement last month and slipped away from the US embassy in Bangkok without much fanfare. Boyce was a well-known apologist for the Burmese military junta and did little to criticize the Burmese for the wretched status quo of Burmese refugees on the Thai side of the border. It is from Burmese refugee camps in Thailand that a number of children have been pressed into service as slave laborers and prostitutes.

WMR has learned that Thai children who are preyed upon for sex are killed and their bodies are disposed of after they are abused. The bodies are dumped in clusters of five to ten at a time. While Boyce was U.S. ambassador to Jakarta, there were reports of similar murders of children used as prostitutes with their skeletal remains later being discovered in caves in Bali and Java.

There have also been repeated reports of Christian missionaries being involved in the sexual abuse of Akha children in northern Thailand.

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January 25-27, 2008

UPDATED 1 X

Ambassador at center of diplo-pedo scandals takes early retirement

Ralph "Skip" Boyce, who has served as US ambassador to Indonesia and, more recently, Thailand, quietly announced his early retirement last month and has left the US Embassy in Bangkok.

Boyce was at the center of a WMR investigation of the cover-up of a major US State Department scandal involving US diplomats, primarily in Southeast Asia, with child prostitution and pedophilia. For example, it was Boyce who helped arrange John Mark Karr's hasty trip from a Bangkok prison on a business class flight to the United States. Karr falsely claimed he had killed Jon Benet Ramsey in Colorado after being arrested on non-related sex charges by Thai police.

Boyce's covering the tracks for known pedophiles in the State Department and CIA extended from his time in Jakarta, Indonesia to two postings in Bangkok, one as ambassador and a previous stint as deputy chief of mission.

Boyce was also a proponent of US tobacco sales in Thailand and a supporter of US engagement with the Burmese military junta.

WMR has received word confidentially that the State Department did not want to undergo another scandal, prompting a hint from Foggy Bottom that Boyce should retire. We have also been told that WMR's series of reports on pedophilia among U.S. diplomats in Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia prompted a congressional inquiry, resulting in the State Department's action.
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October 22, 2007

Canadian and other diplomats across Asia worried about Neil capture in Thailand

Former Canadian seminarian Christopher Neil sits in a Bangkok prison under suspicion by Thai authorities that he sexually molested a 9-year old boy in Thailand four years ago. Neil is also believed by INTERPOL to be the adult male subject appearing in decrypted Internet photos molesting Asian male children. The photos were decrypted by German experts in "Operation Vico," an international investigation of some 200 sexually-explicit photos involving boys taken in Vietnam and Cambodia four to five years ago.

Neil's job description and modus operandi are very similar to those of John Mark Karr, the enigmatic American former school teacher who has managed to avoid prison sentences in Thailand and California. Karr was arrested last year in Bangkok for a child sex-related crime but was soon whisked out of Thailand on a business class ticket from Bangkok to Los Angeles, courtesy of the CIA and U.S. Department of Homeland Security at the American embassy in Bangkok. WMR learned that it was the CIA station in Bangkok that instructed Karr to admit to killing Jon Benet Ramsey to cause an international outcry and media frenzy that would give Thai authorities no other choice but to release Karr to U.S. custody. The gambit worked and today, Karr walks a free man.

Like the accused Canadian pedophile Neil, Karr taught school in South Korea but acquired an affinity for Thailand. Karr had also lived in other havens for pedophiles: Costa Rica and Honduras.

On October 13, 2006, WMR reported the following:

After WMR was the first to report on the strange story of John Mark Karr, who was arrested on pedophilia charges by Thai authorities, falsely claimed to have killed Jon Benet Ramsey, and was whisked out of Thailand after the intervention of the CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Embassy in Thailand, State Department sources revealed to us that the U.S. embassies in Southeast Asia not only tolerate U.S. diplomats having sex with underage nationals of the host nations but act as "pimp services" for visiting and newly-transferred U.S. officials. One of the embassies involved is the U.S. Embassy in Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar. WMR received information that Karr was pulled out of Thailand because he had information on the involvement of top U.S. government officials in the child prostitution trade in Thailand and any testimony by Karr in a Thai court could have proved 'embarrassing' for the Bush administration.

The situation at the US Embassy in Bangkok was so bad, a newly-arrived Deputy Chief of Mission wondered why barely legal-aged male staffers at one of the official State Department residences would line up at the foot of stairs before he went to bed. He later realized that they were waiting to see which one he would take to bed. One U.S. diplomat regularly traveled with two young boys he procured in Vientiane, Laos and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. When he took the boys on an assignment to Bandar Seri Begawan, he was declared persona non grata by the Brunei government because homosexuality is illegal in the Muslim monarchy. The U.S. embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia is another posting that tolerates its diplomats having sex with underage male prostitutes.

In February this year, this editor undertook an investigation in Thailand and Cambodia that discovered that Western embassies, non-governmental organizations, and religious organizations throughout Southeast Asia are involved in covering up of the participation of their personnel in the child sex trade. In some cases, diplomats and NGO officials are, themselves, involved in pedophilia.

With Neil's arrest, the VIP patrons of Southeast Asia's sex trade will be nervous about further revelations. Above, one of many sex tourist magnets for pedophiles in Thailand, this one in seedy Pattaya Beach.

On July 16, 2007, WMR provided further details on the Southeast Asia pedophilia network:

"I visited Karr’s neighborhood and his hotels in the Sathorn district of Bangkok and found his surroundings to be an oasis of European diplomatic and cultural missions, including the Danish and Austrian embassies, the German-Thai Cultural Center and Goethe Institute, and most intriguingly, the Joint U.S.-Thai Military Assistance Group (JUSTMAG), a highly-secured compound where U.S. Special Operations personnel operate, along with their Thai counterparts, against various Southeast Asian insurgent groups, including the Al Qaeda affiliate, Jemaah Islamiya.

The perception management campaign by the foreign media in Thailand to paint Karr as a filthy degenerate living in squalid conditions was not bought by the Thai media. It was not pimps and drug dealers with whom Karr rubbed shoulders but diplomats and members of the U.S. military.

Former Jakarta Post editor Robert Finnegan is well aware of U.S. ambassador to Thailand Ralph "Skip" Boyce’s modus operandi. He believes that John Mark Karr was a typical intelligence cut out for the embassy in Bangkok, one whose major job for the embassy was to procure underage children for sex with visiting VIPs and senior diplomats. In fact, Bangkok is a major stopping point for U.S. members of Congress on 'junkets.' This editor has identified a number of House members who have visited Bangkok on numerous occasions. All of them are Republicans."

WMR has learned that Nakhon Ratchasima, the northeast Thai province where Neil was arrested, is an important nexus in a route for the trafficking of children for sexual exploitation in Southeast Asia, especially from Laos and Cambodia to the Thai-Burmese border zone. The Thai-Burmese "in-between" border refugee zones not only provide sanctuary for Burmese minority groups and other refugees from the Burmese military junta but now provide a ready-made pool of virtual slave laborers and child prostitutes. Not only are the children used in the sex trade from Burma and rural northern Thailand but increasingly they are being trafficked into these political "neutral zones" from locations like Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

We have also learned that the recent sanctions imposed by the Bush administration on Burma as a result of that country's junta crackdown on the latest neocon-prompted "thematic revolution" -- Burma's "Saffron Revolution" -- is having the effect of closing down garment and other factories in Burma, thus driving more young women, including children, to the sex trade zones of the Burmese-Thai border.

Kingpins in the Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli Mafia (RUIM) are also increasingly moving in on the Southeast Asia child sex trade, as WMR discovered in its investigation in February this year. The potential for blackmailing visiting U.S. and other Western politicians and businessman is an obvious side benefit to the RUIM as its involvement in the trafficking of children for sex increases in scope.

WMR has also learned from a knowledgeable source that the Canadian embassies in Jakarta and Bangkok and its High Commission in Kuala Lumpur are concerned about the Neil arrest. Canadian diplomats and NGO officials, like their Australian, American, British, German, Belgian, and New Zealand counterparts, will be on pins and needles about any revelations coming out of a trial for Neil in Thailand. The Thai military government is known not to look kindly on the acquiescence by Western embassies of the child sexual exploitation activities of their diplomats and other official representatives and visitors. There are already calls for Neil to be extradited to Canada. That is an obvious high priority strategy for the Canadian government and its Western allies.

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August 11, 2007

Pedophiles preyed on young survivors from Indian Ocean tsunami

There is an extremely sordid footnote to the story about the plague of pedophilia in Southeast Asia, on which WMR has reported extensively in the past. According to relief workers who went to southern Thailand’s Phuket region after the catastrophic December 26, 2004 tsunami that struck the coastal areas of the Indian Ocean, the Swedish media was warned by relief workers, including those from the Red Cross, about the possibility of child abductions.

Almost 100 children younger than 13 were among 565 missing in the aftermath of the disaster. The Swedish National Police compounded the problem by keeping a list of the dead and missing secret citing “privacy concerns.” In February 2005, a Swedish court ordered the list of the victims and the missing made public.

The coastal areas of Thailand traditionally make their income by smuggling and human trafficking, in addition to tourism and fishing. The alarm about abductions became clear when a Swedish boy named Kristian Walker was escorted out of a hospital by a German man who was not his father. Although the German man returned the child, a disturbing anomaly was noted by relief workers who were identifying bodies through dental records and DNA.

Although a number of Swedish adults and young girls were identified, the bodies of a number of Swedish boys were never recovered, heightening speculation that they had been snagged by abductors and sold into the white slave trade. Young blond boys are highly prized in places like India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Saudi and Emirati governments remain immune from international criminal probes into their roles in perpetuating child trafficking and prostitution.

Indonesian police reported that a number of orphaned and separated Indonesian children were moved from Aceh province to other parts of Indonesia and Malaysia for trafficking purposes. Likewise, after the 2002 terrorist car bombings in Bali, orphaned children fell prey to foreign pedophiles.

The Australian child advocacy group ChildWise, in a 2004 report, stated that foreign pedophiles operate openly on the streets of Bali, some adopting poor children left without parental support. And what kind of diplomats does Australia post to Indonesia? Individuals like William Stuart Brown, arrested for pedophilia on the Bali, was assigned to Indonesia as an official of Australia Aid (AusAID). Recalled to Australia after a 1984 incident with a boy in Indonesia, he remained with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade with a diplomatic passport until 1995 when he resigned. He quickly returned to Indonesia where he lived openly with underage boys on the island of Lombok.

Brown was later sentenced to 13 years in prison in Indonesia. Brown hanged himself in his Bali jail cell on the second day of his prison sentence.

In 2003, the Australian embassy in Phnom Penh issued Clint Betterridge, a New South Wales schoolteacher, a replacement passport that allowed him to escape into Thailand a few days before his trial in Cambodia for having sex with nine Cambodian underage girls. He was convicted in absentia. Australian ambassador Louise Hand cited an “administrative error” in permitting Betterridge’s escape. Betterridge’s embassy special treatment was similar to that afforded to John Mark Karr in Bangkok. Both schoolteachers, both freed from jail and escaping extradition, and both fitting the profile of procurers.

Echoing the complaints heard from American diplomats about pedophiles at U.S. embassies, Alastair Gaisford, who served at the Australian embassy in Cambodia in the 1990s, claimed that the Australian foreign affairs department systematically covered up pedophile cases involving Aussie diplomats. He told the Sydney Morning Herald, “there is an institutionalized culture of never dealing with these people.”

The U.S. embassy in Bangkok is the second largest in the Far East (after Tokyo). Its CIA station is also rumored by many intelligence observers in Bangkok to be the second largest in Asia, after Tokyo. However, the U.S. embassy in Bangkok has another distinction – it is at the center of the State Department’s pedophile activities in Asia.

According to journalistic sources posted to the region, the pedophilia activity has centered around Ambassador Ralph (“Skip”) Boyce, the current U.S. ambassador to Thailand and the former ambassador to Indonesia. Boyce, who speaks fluent Thai, has spent much of his Foreign Service career in Southeast Asia. Before his stint in Indonesia, Boyce was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific. He was Political Counselor Bangkok from 1988 to 1992, had a brief stint as Charge d’Affairs in Singapore from 1992 to 1994 and he returned to Bangkok as Deputy Chief of Mission from 1994 to 1998.

In 1995, while Boyce served as the number two man at the Bangkok embassy, a scandal engulfed the U.S. mission. The Consular Services section of the embassy conspired with Thai police and pedophiles in Belgium, Thailand, and the United States to allow a Thai boy from being sent from Thailand to Belgium, a noted haven for pedophiles. Thai government officials issued an order on behalf of the child’s American godfather to keep the youngster in Thailand. The boy’s Lao mother, a barmaid, was part of a ring of pedophiles in Pattaya Beach and Antwerp, Belgium. Amid protests, the woman transported the boy to Belgium.

Boyce ignored repeated warnings about the misconduct of his embassy’s Consular Affairs office. Boyce and his key staffers, including Consul General Thomas P. Furey and American Citizens Services chief Christopher Richard, later blocked a Thai police investigation of the matter.

Three successive American ambassadors to Thailand – William Itoh, Richard Hecklinger, and Darryl Johnson, refused to get involved in the case. Only Itoh officially responded to a letter asking for his intervention, however, he did not take any action.

Boyce has, time and time again, shown himself to be conducting his own foreign policy. Although the State Department has a full-time ambassador-at-large who deals with child trafficking matters, the last ambassador was replaced by a fundamentalist Christian, Mark Lagon, a stong advocate of faith-based initiatives, regardless of the fact that it has been elements of the church -- Catholic and Protestant -- that has provided, and continues to provide, cover for pedophiles around the world. At his swearing-in ceremony, Lagon boasted that he is a "practicing, confirmed Christian" and ended his remarks by asking God to bless his efforts.

Lagon is a veteran of the staff of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, the Project for the New American Century, and the American Enterprise Institute. He was brought into the State Department in 2004 as part of the purge of pro-Colin Powell and anti-necon elements in the department.

Mark Lagon, the man Bush appointed in February 2007 to head up anti-child trafficking activities of the State Department, which itself condones and supports such activities.

Boyce has been content to allow the problem to flourish at the embassies to which he has been assigned, not only in Bangkok but also in Jakarta. Although the Bush administration condemned the September 2006 Thai military coup, dubbed the “Silken Coup,” Boyce wears a yellow tie to affirm his support for the Royal Family, which authorized the coup. He has also refused to condemn the Burmese military junta, although that policy runs counter to official U.S. policy. Boyce has also pushed the interests of American tobacco and alcohol companies even though the Thai government is discouraging the use of both, especially among the young.