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Salvadorian hit-man extradited to Cuba to answer hotel bombing charges

By Patrick J. O’Donoghue | VHeadline News | July 08, 2010

Venezuela has extradited Salvadorian hit-man, Francisco Chavez Abarca to Cuba where he is wanted for allegedly placing bombs in hotels to destabilize the tourism industry in 1997.

According to Venezuelan government reports and confirmed by Telesur, Chavez Abarca has been singing like a canary, confessing he had been hired to set up destabilizing activities in the run-up to the legislative elections in September.

The Salvadorian is said to be one of Cuban terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles’ henchmen or link-man with Venezuela.

The Venezuelan police have not revealed details about possible associates in the country only to confirm that the investigation into Chavez Abarca’s contacts continues. The Salvadorian tried to enter Venezuela last Thursday using false documents and a Guatemalan passport.

The suspect’s wife has accused the Venezuelan government of having kidnapped her husband in Guatemala and forcibly taken him to Venezuela.

Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said terrorist bands operating inside Venezuela are being monitored and that Chavez Abarca is part of the group trained and financed by the CIA in Central America.

July 10, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News | 1 Comment

10 Ways We Are Being Tracked, Traced, and Databased

Are technological advances infringing on our right to privacy?
Activist Post | July 10, 2010
The war on terror is a worldwide endeavor that has spurred massive investment into the global surveillance industry – which now seems to be becoming a war on “liberty and privacy.”  Given all of the new monitoring technology being implemented, the uproar over warrantless wiretaps now seems moot.  High-tech, first-world countries  are being tracked, traced, and databased, literally around every corner.  Governments, aided by private companies, are gathering a mountain of information on average citizens who so far seem willing to trade liberty for supposed security.  Here are just some of the ways the matrix of data is being collected:
  • Internet — Internet browsers are recording your every move forming detailed cookies on your activities.  The NSA has been exposed as having cookies on their site that don’t expire until 2035.  Major search engines know where you surfed last summer, and online purchases are databased, supposedly for advertising and customer service uses.  IP addresses are collected and even made public.  Controversial websites can be flagged internally by government sites, as well as re-routing all traffic to block sites the government wants to censor. It has now been fully admitted that social networks provide NO privacy to users while technologies advance for real-time social network monitoring is already being used.  The Cybersecurity Act attempts to legalize the collection and exploitation of your personal information.  Apple’s iPhone also has browsing data recorded and stored.  All of this despite the overwhelming opposition to cybersurveillance by citizens.
  • RFID — Forget your credit cards which are meticulously tracked, or the membership cards for things so insignificant as movie rentals which require your SSN.  Everyone has Costco, CVS, grocery-chain cards, and a wallet or purse full of many more.  RFID  “proximity cards” take tracking to a new level in uses ranging from loyalty cards, student ID, physical access, and computer network access.  Latest developments include an RFID powder developed by Hitachi, for which the multitude of uses are endless — perhaps including tracking hard currency so we can’t even keep cash undetected. (Also see microchips below).
  • Traffic cameras — License plate recognition has been used to remotely automate duties of the traffic police in the United States, but have been proven to have dual use in England such as to mark activists under the Terrorism Act.  Perhaps the most common use will be to raise money and shore up budget deficits via traffic violations, but uses may descend to such “Big Brother” tactics as monitors telling pedestrians not to litter as talking cameras already do in the UK.
  • Computer cameras and microphones — The fact that laptops — contributed by taxpayers — spied on public school children (at home) is outrageous.  Years ago Google began officially to use computer “audio fingerprinting” for advertising uses.  They have admitted to working with the NSA, the premier surveillance network in the world.  Private communications companies already have been exposed routing communications to the NSA.  Now, keyword tools — typed and spoken — link to the global security matrix.
  • Public sound surveillance — This technology has come a long way from only being able to detect gunshots in public areas, to now listening in to whispers for dangerous “keywords.” This technology has been launched in Europe to “monitor conversations” to detect “verbal aggression” in public places.  Sound Intelligence is the manufacturer of technology to analyze speech, and their website touts how it can easily be integrated into other systems.
  • Biometrics — The most popular biometric authentication scheme employed for the last few years has been Iris Recognition. The main applications are entry control, ATMs and Government programs. Recently, network companies and governments have utilized biometric authentication including fingerprint analysis, iris recognition, voice recognition, or combinations of these for use in National identification cards.
  • Microchips — Microsoft’s HealthVault and VeriMed partnership is to create RFID implantable microchips.  Microchips for tracking our precious pets is becoming commonplace and serves to condition us to accept putting them in our children in the future.  The FDA has already approved this technology for humans and is marketing it as a medical miracle, again for our safety.
  • Facial recognition — Anonymity in public is over.  Admittedly used at Obama’s campaign events, sporting events, and most recently at the G8/G20 protests in Canada. This technology is also harvesting data from Facebook images and surely will be tied into the street “traffic” cameras.
All of this is leading to Predictive Behavior Technology — It is not enough to have logged and charted where we have been; the surveillance state wants to know where we are going through psychological profiling.  It’s been marketed for such uses as blocking hackers.  Things seem to have advanced to a point where a truly scientific Orwellian world is at hand.  It is estimated that computers know to a 93% accuracy where you will be, before you make your first move.   Nanotech is slated to play a big role in going even further as scientists are using nanoparticles to directly influence behavior and decision making.
Many of us are asking:  What would someone do with all of this information to keep us tracked, traced, and databased?  It seems the designers have no regard for the right to privacy and desire to become the Controllers of us all.

July 10, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | 2 Comments

Turkey warns Israel of ‘sanctions’

Press TV – July 10, 2010

“There is an action, a crime here. Turkey’s demand is rather lucid. Since there is a death, the killing side is acknowledged and an international commission should be formed and make its decision with respect to this fact in the frame of objective provisions of law. If Israel does not want an international commission, then it has to acknowledge this crime, apologize, and pay compensation,” Davutoglu said in an interview published in the Newsweek magazine on July 9.

The top Turkish diplomat made the comments after the recent Israeli attack on the aid fleet seeking to break the siege of Gaza Strip. The deadly attack in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea claimed the lives of nine Turkish citizens.

“If the international community and the international law do not ask about the causes of these deaths, we, as the government of the Republic of Turkey, have the right to ask. Turkey-Israel relations will never be on a normal footing until we have an answer. And Turkey has the right to one-sidedly apply its own sanctions,” the Turkish top diplomat added.

“If the right steps are not taken (by Israel), the relations would go in the direction of a break-off process. However, I cannot share with you what I have told them behind closed doors. They know what kind of sanctions we would impose,” Davutoglu said.

Asked about Ankara’s “zero-tension policy” with Turkey’s neighbor countries and the recent escalation of tensions with Israel, Davutoglu said: “Zero problems with neighbors is a value. But another equally important value is to establish peace. If any actor blocks peace processes, keeps civilians under blockade, massacres civil people on international waters, the peace value could not be disregarded for the sake of zero problems with neighbors. These policies of Israel are a menace to regional peace. Excusing these policies that go against peace just to develop zero-problem relations is out of the question.”

July 10, 2010 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | 3 Comments

Noam Chomsky opposes Palestinian-led movement to boycott Israel

By Alison Weir – July 10, 2010

In an interview on the Council for the National Interest internet radio program “Jerusalem Calling,” MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, author of The Fateful Triangle and other books on Israel-Palestine, said that he opposes boycotting Israel.

In a July 8th interview with new CNI President Alison Weir, Dr. Chomsky at first denied that he opposed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, calling this an “internet rumor.”

However, when Weir said she had heard him say that he opposed boycott during a lecture at the University of California Berkeley several years ago, Chomsky admitted that he had opposed boycotting Israel then and said that he still did so now. He said that he felt that activists should instead only divest from American companies.

Chomsky claimed that the boycott movement “hurts Palestinians,” because he felt it was “hypocritical to boycott Israel and not the US, which funds Israeli actions.”  Weir pointed out that many authors – among them Donald Neff, George Ball, Stephen Green, Kathleen Christison, Edward Tivnan, Walt and Mearsheimer, and, most recently, Grant Smith – have provided massive evidence that the primary reason the U.S. supports Israel is the Israel Lobby (the most powerful lobby for a foreign country in the US).

Chomsky, who has consistently denied the power of the Israel Lobby, said that AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) would use the charge that the Palestinian support movement is allegedly “hypocritcal” to undermine its effectiveness, and that therefore this boycott would be harmful to Palestinians. While this statement appeared to indicate that Chomsky now acknowledges the power and significance of the Israel lobby, later in the interview he continued to deny the importance of this lobby.

In response to Chomsky’s assertion that the boycott movement allegedly hurts Palestinians, Weir pointed out that Palestinian civil society overwhelmingly calls for such a boycott. She said that over a hundred different Palestinian groups – including farmers’ groups, women’s groups, and others – have asked for an international boycott of Israel.

A caller to the show, long-time Middle East analyst Jeffrey Blankfort, commented that he felt it was highly inappropriate and condescending for Chomsky, a Jewish-American who had lived on a Kibbutz and says that he supports Israel, to tell Palestinians what’s good for them.

During the interview, Chomsky said that he has long favored a binational state. He said that he felt that the call for a “single, secular, democratic state” did not make much sense, suggesting  that calls for one state were “rhetorical” and did not “rise to the state of advocacy” because proponents had not sketched out a path of how to get there. He did not comment on the books on this subject by Ali Abunimah and Virginia Tilley, which advance detailed discussion on this approach.

Because technical problems caused occasional problems during the program, Weir, who is also executive director of If Americans Knew, has invited Chomsky to come on the show again so that he may explain his position further. Chomsky accepted the invitation and will appear again in a few months when his schedule permits.

The interview, in which Chomsky also discusses other aspects of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, can be heard in full on the CNI: Jerusalem Calling section of the WS Radio website. Outgoing CNI President Eugene Bird says that CNI will post a transcript on the CNI website within a few days.

July 10, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Solidarity and Activism | 8 Comments