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Exit polls predict landslide victory for Morales

Press TV – December 7, 2009 01:23:31 GMT
Exit polls predict that Evo Morales (C) has won 61 percent of the vote in the Bolivian presidential election.

Three exit polls predict that Bolivian President Evo Morales has won a landslide re-election victory with an overwhelming 61 percent of the vote.

His main rival, Manfred Reyes Villa, the candidate of the Progress Plan Party, trailed with around 23 percent of the vote in Sunday’s presidential election.

The exit polls conducted by private TV networks ATB, Uno, and PAT indicate that Morales has a 38 percentage point lead over his closest challenger.

The victory would give him a second term as president and authority to push on with leftist reforms that already include limiting the size of landholdings, nationalizing the energy and telecommunications sectors, and empowering downtrodden indigenous communities.

Morales’ Movement for Socialism will also take control of the Senate, which was the last bastion of the opposition, according to the exit polls.

As per Bolivian law, the winner should garner more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a second round and can also win if he takes 40 percent and holds a 10-point lead.

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News | 1 Comment

Yahoo Sells User’s Private Email Contents to U.S. Agencies

Mathaba
December 5, 2009

Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides to “law enforcement” and spy agencies has leaked onto the web.

After earlier reports this week that Yahoo had blocked an FOIA Freedom of Information release of its “law enforcement and intelligence price list”, someone helpfully provided a copy of the Yahoo company’s spying guide to the whistleblower web site Cryptome.org.

The 17-page guide, which Yahoo has tried to suppress via legal letters to the Cryptome.org site run by freedom of information champion John Young, describes Yahoo’s policies on keeping the data of Yahoo Email and Yahoo Groups users, as well as the surveillance and spying capabilities it can give to the U.S. government and its agencies.

The Yahoo document is a price list for these spying services and has already resulted in many people closing down their accounts in protest. However, closing a Yahoo account is not as easy as one might expect: users have reported great difficulty in finding the link to delete their account, and, Yahoo will still keep data for another 90 days.

If you ask Yahoo! to delete your Yahoo! account, in most cases your account will be deactivated and then deleted from our user registration database in approximately 90 days. This delay is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity.

Please note that any information that we have copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in our active user databases.

Many government leaders and officials around Africa, Asia and Latin America are known by Mathaba to widely be using Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail in spite of these Email services being hosted on U.S. computers and the ease that gives the hosts to access their data.. Mathaba has also long been aware of a great many business people, politicians and even Presidents who use the “free” web-based email services of Yahoo for their Email communications, thus making it easy for the U.S. and its owners to spy on them with negligible cost.

Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and Internet service providers.

But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo’s lawyers alone who have been stupid enough to try to issue a “DMCA takedown notice” to Cryptome demanding the document be removed. Yahoo claims that publication of the document is a copyright violation, and gave Cryptome owner John Young a Thursday deadline for removing the document.

We estimate Yahoo stands a near-zero chance of success given that Young has thousands of intelligence and other leaked documents on his site and in the past decade has yet to remove a single document upon legal threats, the same 10-year track record held by Mathaba on documents on British Intelligence in spite of having computers seized and properties raided.

Mathaba is now also hosting the Yahoo leaked document on its servers around the world, and the cat is long out of the bag with the original document having been downloaded and distributed by many already.

When John Young was asked if there was anything he wouldn’t reveal on his site — a fault in the President’s Secret Service detail, for instance — he said, “Well, I’m actually looking for that information right now”, much to the chagrin of those who believe that the U.S. government and its hopelessly corrupt agencies should have a right to suppress information from the public.

The Compliance Guide reveals, as has been known to Mathaba prior to the leak via our own sources, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they’ve been removed from a user’s trash folder.

The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, the photo sharing and storage site which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.

Chats conducted through the company’s Web Messenger service may be saved on Yahoo’s server if one of the parties in the correspondence set up their account to archive chats. This pertains to the web-based version of the chat service, however. Yahoo does not save the content of chats for consumers who use the downloadable Web Messenger client on their computer.

Instant message logs are retained 45 to 60 days and includes an account holder’s friends list, and the date and times the user communicated with them.

Young responded to Yahoo’s takedown request with a defiant note:

I cannot find at the Copyright Office a grant of copyright for the Yahoo spying document hosted on Cryptome. To assure readers Yahoo’s copyright claim is valid and not another hoary bluff without substantiation so common under DMCA bombast please send a copy of the copyright grant for publication on Cryptome.

Until Yahoo provides proof of copyright, the document will remain available to the public for it provides information that is in the public interest about Yahoo’s contradictory privacy policy and should remain a topic of public debate on ISP unacknowledged spying complicity with officials for lucrative fees.

Note: Yahoo’s exclamation point is surely trademarked so omitted here.

The company responded that a copyright notice is optional for works created after March 1, 1989 and repeated its demand for removal on Thursday. For now, the document remains on the Cryptome site.

Threat Level reported Tuesday that muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian had asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, to provide him with a copy of the pricing list supplied by telecoms and internet service providers for the surveillance services they offer government agencies. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that the information was proprietary and that the companies would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo wrote in its objection letter that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”

“Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,” the company added.

The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other U.S. “social networking” sites are at minimum providing information in similar fashion to U.S. agencies, and in some cases  have also received substantial funding by U.S. government related entities as a most efficient and cost-effective means of spying on their users around the world.

— Includes extensive reporting by Wired.com‘s Kim Zetter

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | 1 Comment

Climategate Investigator Is Member Of Vehemently Pro-Man Made Global Warming Organization

Paul Joseph Watson
Propaganda Matrix
December 4, 2009

A civil servant who is a member of one of the most vehemently pro man-made global warming advocacy organizations in Europe which also has direct ties to the IPCC has been handed the job of whitewashing the investigation into the University of East Anglia, while absurdly billing himself as impartial and unconnected to climate science.

Meanwhile, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has ludicrously announced that it will conduct its own investigation into the climategate scandal, despite the fact that the suspects involved have intimate ties to the IPCC, with one of the primary scientists accused of manipulating climate data being a lead author of the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports.

“The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading body for assessing climate change science,” reports the Daily Mail.

IPCC chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri told the BBC the claims were serious and he wanted them investigated.

“We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,’ he said.”

“We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.”

Having the IPCC investigate climategate would be like Ken Lay heading up the Enron enquiry.

One of the primary climategate suspects, Kevin Trenberth, is a lead IPCC author, having been influential in crafting the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports.

Professor Phil Jones, who infamously wrote of the need to “hide the decline” in global warming, is also a primary IPCC contributor, having been in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports.

In addition, another climategate suspect, Michael Mann, was the creator of the debunked “hockey stick” graph, which was “Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher than they are today.”

There is little pretense about the fact that the UN will merely absolve its own scientists of blame, the larger scam is the notion that civil servant Sir (Alastair) Muir Russell, who has been picked to head the investigation into East Anglia University, after an earlier trial balloon to have the inquiry headed by warmist advocate Lord Rees was shot down, is impartial, when he is a member of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, a vehemently pro-man made global warming organization.

“As a measure of how out of touch UEA is, they apparently have little idea that the title “former civil servant” does not inspire much confidence from skeptics, since it has been “civil servants” who have been blocking access to the data and procedures all along,” writes Anthony Watts.

Russell has pitched himself as someone with “no links to either the university or the climate science community,” yet he is firmly a member of the academic establishment, being the former Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow.

Russell is the quintessential establishment lackey, having been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2001.

There’s little doubt that Russell is an establishment insider who has been tasked with whitewashing the whole affair. He is a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an offshoot of the same organization that Lord Rees is a part of. The Royal Society of Edinburgh “provides annual grants totaling over half a million pounds for research” in Scottish universities, a sizeable portion of which goes to research attempting to validify claims about man-made global warming.

The RSE has thrown its weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and living standards.

This organization has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.

A February 2009 response to the Climate Change (Scotland) Bill outlines the organization’s staunch advocacy for the hypothesis of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.

Earlier this year, The Royal Society of Edinburgh elected Professor Peter Smith to become one of its members. Smith just happens to be the Convening Lead Author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. He has also been a lead author for numerous other IPCC reports over the past thirteen years.

How can a proud member of an organization that is aggressively pushing measures to cut CO2 in the name of halting alleged man-made global warming, while also having a direct relationship with the UN IPCC, bill himself as being totally impartial and unconnected to climate science?

The climategate scandal has grown wings and taken flight. This is a scandal within a scandal, the notion that the very crooks caught manipulating data can appoint their own allies to “investigate” their wrongdoing and think nothing of it, while claiming that such individuals are impartial and independent, is beyond belief.

The only real investigation of climategate has to occur at the congressional or parliamentary level, preferably both, and it has to be completely open and transparent – not sneakily wrapped up behind closed doors by organizations like the IPCC and members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, both of whom have a massive stake in protecting and upholding the entire climate change fraud.

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Deception | 8 Comments

SOFA agreement heralds US troop and missile deployment in Poland

December 4, 2009

WARSAW (AFP) – The United States and Poland have drawn up an accord regulating the stationing of US troops in Poland, the defence ministry said Friday, opening the way for the deployment of US Patriot missiles.

The accord was given the final backing of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk Friday and will be signed in Warsaw next Thursday, ministry spokesman Robert Rochowicz told AFP.

“Talks on the accord to allow a US military presence in our country have been concluded with success,” he said.

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) is a pre-requisite to setting up a US ground-to-air missile base in Poland. US officials say deployment should start in 2010.

During an October visit to Warsaw by US Vice President Joe Biden, Tusk said his country was ready to join a new US anti-missile system in central Europe.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said the United States wants to deploy SM-3 missiles in Poland and the neighbouring Czech Republic in 2015.

Gates’ announcement came after President Barack Obama scrapped a plan agreed in 2008 to install a controversial anti-missile shield system in the two countries.

The shield, promoted by president George W. Bush when he was in office, had angered Russia which considered it a threat to Russian security.

The Patriots and SM-3s are part of the new system proposed by the United States.

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | 1 Comment

Somali PM Calls for Plan Like US Afghan Strategy

Voice of America – December 5, 2009

Somalia’s prime minister is asking for U.S. President Barack Obama’s vision for Afghanistan to be applied to his country.

In a letter published Saturday in the British newspaper The Times, Omar Sharmarke said Obama’s plan for Afghanistan, announced in a speech Tuesday, “marks a sea change in international support to troubled countries.”

Prime Minister Sharmarke said Somalia needs similar aid, to restore an effective government and train security forces, to police Somalia’s waters to ensure only Somalis profit from the fish, oil, and gas, and to launch a vocational training program for young people.

Mr. Sharmarke said the chaos and conflict Somalia has endured since the last stable central government fell in 1991 may appear “beyond repair,” but he said it can be fixed.

Referring to warships sent by the international community to combat Somali pirates, he said his proposal would cost a quarter as much, and would “solve the problems rather than simply chasing them round the Indian Ocean.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama announced he would send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to fight insurgents and accelerate the transition of responsibility to Afghanistan’s own security forces. He also pledged to support Afghan ministries, governors and local leaders, while holding them accountable for corruption.

Some information for this report was provided by Reuters.

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Militarism | Comments Off on Somali PM Calls for Plan Like US Afghan Strategy

Who is responsible for the anarchy in Afghanistan?

Afghan Resistance Statement | December 5, 2009

Obama’s new strategy which is the result of the same mentality that wants to continue the occupation of Afghanistan by military means, will add to the anarchy prevailing in the country. In fact, Americans are responsible for the chaotic situation. They handed over power to notorious warlords, venal officials and mafia-linked governors;

But still, they claim that they want a clean government in Kabul while their convoys of logistics are escorted by some murderous militias involved in kidnapping and the extortion of arbitrary taxes. There are hundreds of private unregistered militias in Afghanistan under the guise of security guards who carry heroin in official vehicles. These militias have links with warlords who have a hold over high government positions. They carry out their criminal activities with impunity.

The warlords usurp government and people’s lands and buildings. No one can ask them why. A government land in Shirpur, located to the north-east of the Kabul city is a good example at hand. Once a property of the Ministry of Defense, now it is a posh area usurped by the warlords who have built luxurious houses there. Karzai himself has granted 6000-7000 acres of lands to his favorites. Many drug-smugglers who had been sentenced to prison by court have been released by decrees of the President.

General Khudaidad, Minister of the Narcotic Campaign of the the Kabul Administration has acknowledged in a press conference that US military officers had hands in the drug trafficking. Abdul Jabbar Sabit, former attorney general of the Kabul Administration, says he was not able to lay his hand on some notorious governors involved in drug trafficking and bribery because they were protected by high-ups in the government. Ultimately, Abdul Jabar Sabit was forced to resign. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, many times has referred to Afghanistan as a Mafia State but she did not disclose that the Mafia State was their own handiwork.

Independent analysts around the world believe that USA wants to keep a corrupt government installed in Kabul because this will provide a justification to maintain American military presence in the country. Similarly, on the one hand, the White House Security Advisor James Jones says there are fewer than 100 Al-qaeda members in Afghanistan and on the other hand, Obama sends 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. This high gap between words and deeds shows that America has other colonialist objectives in Afghanistan and in the region, ostensibly under the name of the so-called War on Terror. Furthermore, they claim that they want to resolve the Afghan issue through negotiation and reconciliation; but practically, they want the Mujahideen to lay down arms and accept the Constitution conceived and framed by America and want to keep their bases in Afghanistan for a longer period. Thus under the ploy of negotiation, the White House wants to find a pretext to continue their occupation of Afghanistan.

The Afghans, particularly the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, have no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantee if the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan. But the Mujahideen are not ready to allow foreign bases in Afghanistan or trade on the independence of the country. Ironically, after American invasion of Afghanistan, the country has been turned into a battle ground of rival intelligence agencies which are linked with the regime in Kabul and have hidden agendas against surrounding countries.

Bomb blasts in public places are the work of these agencies. The more the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan, the more such gruesome events will take place. At the present time, the Mujahideen are the only force which wants to release the Afghans and the country from being hostage in the cobweb of foreign agencies. With the victory of Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the whole region will take a breath of relief and the current bloodshed will come to an end. But it is the responsibility of all who have free conscience to morally help the Mujahideen to free the region from the vortex of the colonialist machinations.

December 6, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | 3 Comments