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Posts Tagged ‘Target’

source: argonium79

By Philip Giraldi – Israeli government claims that it does not spy on the United States are intended for the media and popular consumption. The reality is that Israel’s intelligence agencies target the United States intensively, particularly in pursuit of military and dual-use civilian technology. Among nations considered to be friendly to Washington, Israel leads all others in its active espionage directed against American companies and the Defense Department. It also dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations.

As tensions with Iran increase, sources in the counterintelligence community report that Israeli agents have become more aggressive in targeting Muslims living in the United States as well as in operating against critics. There have been a number of cases reported to the FBI about Mossad officers who have approached leaders in Arab-American communities and have falsely represented themselves as “U.S. intelligence.” Because few Muslims would assist an Israeli, this is done to increase the likelihood that the target will cooperate. It’s referred to as a “false flag” operation.

Mossad officers sought to recruit Arab-Americans as sources willing to inform on their associates and neighbors. The approaches, which took place in New York and New Jersey, were reportedly handled clumsily, making the targets of the operation suspicious. These Arab-Americans turned down the requests for cooperation, and some of the contacts were eventually reported to the FBI, which has determined that at least two of the Mossad officers are, ironically, Israeli Arabs operating out of Israel’s mission to the United Nations in New York under cover as consular assistants.

In another bizarre case, U.S.S. Liberty survivor Phil Tourney was recently accosted in Southern California by a foreigner who eventually identified himself as an Israeli government representative. Tourney was taunted, and the Israeli threatened both him and journalist Mark Glenn, who has been reporting on the Liberty story. Tourney was approached in a hotel lounge, and it is not completely clear how the Israeli was able to identify him. But he knew exactly who Tourney was, as the official referred to the Liberty, saying that the people who had been killed on board had gotten what they deserved. There were a number of witnesses to the incident, including Tourney’s wife. The threat has been reported to the FBI, which is investigating, but Tourney and Glenn believe that the incident is not being taken seriously by the bureau.

FBI sources indicate that the increase in Mossad activity is a major problem, particularly when Israelis are posing as U.S. government officials, but they also note that there is little they can do to stop it as the Justice Department refuses to initiate any punitive action or prosecutions of the Mossad officers who have been identified as involved in the illegal activity.

In another ongoing Israeli spy case, Stewart Nozette appears to be headed towards eventual freedom as his case drags on through the District of Columbia courts. Nozette, an aerospace scientist with a top secret clearance and access to highly sensitive information, offered to sell classified material to a man he believed to be a Mossad officer, but who instead turned out to be with the FBI. Nozette has been in jail since October, but he has now been granted an additional 90-day delay so his lawyers can review the documents in the government’s case, many of which are classified. If Nozette demands that sensitive information be used in his defense, his case will likely follow the pattern set in the nine-times-postponed trial of AIPAC spies Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were ultimately acquitted in April 2009 when prosecutors determined that they could not make their case without doing significant damage to national security. A month after Rosen and Weissman were freed, Ben-Ami Kadish, who admitted to providing defense secrets to Israel while working as an engineer at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, walked out of a Manhattan court after paying a fine. He did no jail time and continues to receive his substantial Defense Department pension.

The mainstream media reported the Rosen and Weissman trial intermittently, but there was virtually no coverage of Ben-Ami Kadish, and there has been even less of Nozette. Compare that with the recent reporting on the Russian spies who, by all accounts, did almost nothing and never obtained any classified information. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that spying for Israel is consequence free.

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/mossad-i…

http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/08/26/p…

source: Russia Today

While some US troops are told to avoided casualties, others are told to take no prisoners. Groups known as capture-kill teams operate on a separate, less transparent set of rules when targeting high value individuals.

Pratap Chatterjee, a senior editor at Corp Watch said these teams are made up on joint Special Forces teams from members of the US military branches, CIA and other government bodies. They work to find those the US suspects are involved in Al-Qaeda, Taliban and other high value groups.

“They look for people on a target list, it’s called the joint prioritize effects list, there are 200 names on that. Their job is to track these people down and bring them back for interrogation and imprisonment or if the case may warrant, actually kill them. So, they work 24/7 looking for people the US suspects,” said Chatterjee.

Chatterjee explained that this goes beyond the military. The US Drug Enforcement Agency also employs such tactics and utilizes capture-kill teams.

The teams are often given impunity globally. They originated in Afghanistan and combat zones, but are today crossing borders and entering various other operations in many countries, explained Chatterjee.

The capture-kill teams operate under US law, whether or not US law is the same as the nation where they may be operating.

Due to national security and legal concerns, Chatterjee argued that the US government is reluctant to discuss the capture-kill teams and their activities.

source: Palestine Telegraph
Sunday, 18 July 2010 08:49
Written by Omar Ghraieb

altUK, July 18, (Pal Telegraph – By Peter Eyre) There isn’t a day goes by where every Palestinian is not under the watchful eye of the Israeli Military. The IDF can eliminate (assassinate) anyone at anytime without putting any of their own forces in danger. It’s all done by the technology of using satellites, airborne drones or elevated cameras at strategic locations along the border. Maybe you would find it hard to believe that they can almost read your book, newspaper or magazine from space as you walk along the road or sit in your garden reading.

The technology is now so advanced that a military operative many miles away can control a drone on the other side of the world, select a target and fire a missile, bunker buster or gun. You may also be surprised to learn that this technology is going a stage further by being able to focus a beam of energy onto you as your walk along the street and then having the ability to interact with your mind and disable you etc. This technology really does add new meaning to the term Microwave or Laser. We must also not forget high frequency sounds or other form of energy and mind control techniques currently under test and it literally becomes, dare I say, a “Mind Blowing Experience.”

Imagine an operator sitting in an easy chair, with a large computer screen and maps, zooming in on you with a joy stick control and then at the press of a button deciding your fate. Add to this the many international double agents who join a charity or activist group and who appear to show support for the Palestinian cause.

These agents infiltrate into the West Bank and Gaza, befriend key Palestinian activist and then at an appropriate time give Mossad a detailed profile of the activist i.e. location and movements etc. It is then left to Mossad to carry out an assassination or arrest the activist. Sometimes some of these internationals became the sacrificial lamb and would get shot which added even more drama to the charities cause.
One could clearly see that this was the case with the Turkish ferry incident this year and there had to be insiders operating onboard the ferry

Israel is at the forefront of this technology and accordingly allows the government to maintain its apartheid control of each and every Palestinian in the most inhumane way. So let’s take a look at this vast web of technology and its evil covert operations.

Satellites have many applications and can be used as a collecting point for receiving spy data, relaying that data to another point on the planet or military unit or just simply sending images back to earth and navigational information etc

Drones on the other hand have a different application when they fly over such places as Gaza (on a continuous basis) and are truly an invasion into to their privacy! The operator can sit in his command centre and when you leave your house or get into your car you can be followed for the entire day if necessary (day or night).

The drone operator once they have located a potential victim then highlights that person or vehicle or building with a spot laser. Once the beam is locked onto the target the drone can fire its own Hellfire missile or bunker buster which will then very accurately hit the assigned target. Alternatively the operator can keep the laser beam on target and call in Israeli jet fighters or helicopter that again will use the same beam to guide their weapons to target.

All of this technology is carried out automatically without the necessity for any Israeli being in the conflict zone. One can clearly see that with this type of operation many Palestinians can be killed or injured without the loss of one single Israeli.

You may be shocked to learn that the Israelis are now working on fully robotic armed vehicles/vessels for both land and sea. This will allow them to send an armoured vehicle into the West Bank or Gaza and open fire as required without any risk to the IDF.

You can clearly see in this series of photographs Israel’s future remote control vehicles that will be used against Palestinians or any other nation who may become involved in any conflict with Israel. Unfortunately as we have seen in Pakistan one can expect a much higher death rate from such robots that do not have the ability to decide if the target is friend or foe. This obviously just adds to the deteriorating relationship between Israel and Palestine. Even the bulldozer can now be remotely controlled by some off location operator. It is also evident that the US and Israel are currently working on the next generation of weapons which will add to the misery of all the people of Palestine.

Finally we have the ground surveillance system that operates from cameras located in towers or poles along the Palestinian border which feed information back to a military control room. The operator is normally a female owing to the shortage of combat troops. This level of surveillance is appalling as it gives no opportunity for the operator to distinguish between good or bad and will lead to many innocent deaths. It was interesting to note that the headline for this aspect of ground surveillance was “Killing by remote control.”

The article stated the following: Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people – Palestinians in Gaza – who can be killed with the press of a button on the joystick. The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds Gaza.
According to Giora Katz, Rafael’s vice president, remote-controlled military hardware such as Spot and Shoot is the face of the future. He expects that within a decade at least a third of the machines used by the Israeli army to control land, air and sea will be unmanned.

The demand for such devices, the Israeli army admits, has been partly fuelled by a combination of declining recruitment levels and a population less ready to risk death in combat.
The women are supposed to identify anyone suspicious approaching the fence around Gaza and, if authorised by an officer, execute them using their joysticks.

The Israeli army, which plans to introduce the technology along Israel’s other confrontation lines, refuses to say how many Palestinians have been killed by the remotely controlled machine-guns in Gaza.

According to the Israeli media, however, it is believed to be several dozen.
The article went on to say that the system was phased-in two years ago for surveillance, but operators were only able to open fire with it more recently. The army admitted using Sentry Tech in December to kill at least two Palestinians several hundred metres inside the fence.

The towers are designed to create a 1500-meter deep “automated kill zone” along the Gaza border. Each unit mounts a 7.62 or 0.5″ machine gun, shielded from enemy fire and the elements by an environmentally protective bulletproof canopy. In addition to the use of direct fire machine guns, observers can also employ precision guided missiles, such as Spike LR optically guided missiles and Lahat laser guided weapons.”

It is clearly obvious that the IDF are now becoming robots being fed information from Satellites, Drones and remote control vehicles with no physical contact with its potential enemy or victim. This is just another obstacle for the struggling Palestinians to overcome in dealing with this evil and satanic regime. It is obvious that Israel has now crossed the line in its attempt to reach a two state solution with only one intention…..”To remove all Palestinians from their homeland.”

Peter Eyre – Middle East Consultant – 17/7/2010

source:Political Theatrics

“They’re bombing Lebanon”

I remember my mothers words as they stung me like hot coals; On July 12th, 2006 my family was huddled around the television, listening to the news. The voices would shatter my eardrums as the death toll would climb higher and higher. Soon it was just noise.

CNN,MSNBC,FOX,ABC – Media personnel would recite numbers and memorized, commercialized statistics. I shouldn’t have expected them to profess any natural sentiment for the Lebanese being slaughtered en masse but I grew bitter nonetheless.

Lebanon’s graceful sky’s were raining blood.

I recall, with intensity, how many phone-cards we would buy so that we may have a chance to speak with our family living in Southern Lebanon – every ring forced a knot inside our stomachs as we waited for any connection, any one of them to pick up their mobile. For days we heard nothing and for weeks we were restricted to listening to the mainstream media; it was an endless back and forth with us, between tissue boxes and sleepless nights – amidst tears and rage.

We watched the slaughter of our people through the grainy television screen – helpless, keeping to our bedrooms while the Resistance took on the Israeli giant.

We saw the tears in Ali’s eyes
We heard his voice as he prayed
under the rain of bloody skies 1

The Israeli bombs did not discriminate against gender, sex or age; everyone was a target – whether you were carrying a white flag or the body of your child. The Merkava Tanks and US-funded missiles were equal opportunity destroyers.

The drones circled like vultures as the gates of hell opened wide; Our ‘Paris of the Middle East’ was being rapidly set aflame.

The bombing become our lullaby, the drums of war our anthem.

Over a month; 37 days. Nearly 1,500 Lebanese were slaughtered and 4,409 were injured according to the Lebanon Higher Relief Council, 15% of whom were permanently disabled.

The Israeli’s left us with elusive snares, even after 2006; The death toll estimates do not include the Lebanese killed since the end of fighting by land mines or unexploded Israeli cluster bombs. At least 40 Lebanese citizens have been killed and 250 injured by these subtle surprises left for us to find.

Abandoned numbers, again.

That’s all we have ever been.

That’s what our children were, the ones who had their arms and legs blown off by Israeli cluster bombs. That is what the widows were, who cried out for their husbands with nothing but endless explosions replying to their screams. The 1,500 slaughtered in cold blood – just exhausted enumerations.

Israel attempted to turn Lebanon into a cemetery wherein they would bury the Lebanese Resistance perpetually but they did not succeed in this iniquitous mission. By attacking Lebanon they united the Lebanese Resistance and empowered the Lebanese.

Although we were in unharmed Beirut, the bombs sounded like they were landing a few blocks away. One significant memory I have of that time was when Sayyed Nasrallah was announcing the hit on the warship. Power was out, so we had to listen to it on the radio. The entire neighborhood was pitch black, and you could barely see figures on every balcony. Everyone was listening. There was a feeling of fear mixed with despair. When Nasrallah said what he said, the entire city rose and celebrated. The mood changed in an instant.

We kept count of casualties, military and civilian. We took a special interest in the number of destroyed tanks. While the pictures of what was happening were quite horrendous, our parents didn’t care much for keeping them out of our site; it seemed as though they wanted the images to stick with us, and they did.2

Israeli aggression fell away to defeat; 158 Israelis, 119 of them soldiers, died during the war and a Globes Smith poll showed that 52% of electors believed that the Israeli army had failed in its Lebanon offensive.

“In 1982, Israel succeeded in invading Lebanon and its hopes of re-vivifying the Greater Israel project became high. But the Resistance was able to achieve Liberation in 2000, the year in which the Israeli troops withdrew from the Lebanese territories in a flagrant announcement of the failure of the theory of the Greater Israel project. Then came the Al-Aqsa Intifada that made Israel feel weak and talk about a battle for its existence but Resistant Gaza made it again and kicked out the occupation. Israel then continued its aggressive war against Lebanon and planned in 2006 to beat the Resistance but the Resistance remained. It was even strengthened.” – Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezb’Allah.

Four years have passed since Israels devastating war against Lebanon, having met with the most unprecedented defeat. The most highly trained Israeli political and military leaders were left vanquished; The ‘strongest military in the Middle East’ was thwarted by a seemingly paltry Resistance Bloc – that of Hezb’Allah.

Hezb’Allah has shown the entire world that Lebanon’s dignity and honor will not be bought or sold; The Lebanese Resistance is ready to sacrifice everything in order to defend both.

The 2006 war was a astounding turning point in the conflict with Israel.

For every bomb dropped on our dignified cedars a chord was struck, creating a symphony of echo’s in reply to the Israeli military assaults – one which will never be forgotten: Hayhath Minna Thilla – Woe Unto The Wretched.

-

1 Nizar Qabbani The Face Of Qana

2 Excerpt from a personal account of the 2006 war by Jawad Taher who was 15 at the time of the war.

source:Associated Press

Oil impacts Redfish Bay in Louisiana’s birdsfoot delta, where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, May 27, 2010.
REUTERS/Jeffrey Dubinsky/Gulf Restoration Network

NEW ORLEANS – The best hope for stopping the flow of oil from the blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico has been compared to hitting a target the size of a dinner plate with a drill more than two miles into the earth, and is anything but a sure bet on the first attempt.

Bid after bid has failed to stanch what has already become the nation’s worst-ever spill, and BP PLC is readying another patchwork attempt as early as Wednesday, this one a cut-and-cap process to put a lid on the leaking wellhead so oil can be siphoned to the surface.

But the best-case scenario of sealing the leak is two relief wells being drilled diagonally into the gushing well — tricky business that won’t be ready until August.

“The probability of them hitting it on the very first shot is virtually nil,” said David Rensink, incoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, who spent most of his 39 years in the oil industry in offshore exploration. “If they get it on the first three or four shots they’d be very lucky.”

The relief well drilling and temporary fixes were being watched closely by President Barack Obama, who planned to meet for the first time Tuesday with the co-chairmen of an independent commission investigating the spill. A senior administration official said the meeting will take place at the White House. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting had not been formally announced.

For the relief well to succeed, the bore hole must precisely intersect the damaged well. If it misses, BP will have to back up its drill, plug the hole it just created, and try again.

The trial-and-error process could take weeks, but it will eventually work, scientists and BP said. Then engineers will then pump mud and cement through pipes to ultimately seal the well.

As the drilling reaches deeper into the earth, the process is slowed by building pressure and the increasing distance that well casings must travel before they can be set in place.

Still, the three months it could take to finish the relief wells — the first of which started May 2 — is quicker than a typical deep well, which can take four months or longer, said Tad Patzek, chair of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas-Austin. BP already has a good picture of the different layers of sand and rock its drill bits will meet because of the work it did on the blown-out well.

On the slim chance the relief well doesn’t work, scientists weren’t sure exactly how much — or how long — the oil would flow. The gusher would continue until the well bore hole collapsed or pressure in the reservoir dropped to a point where oil was no longer pushed to the surface, Patzek said.

“I don’t admit the possibility of it not working,” he said.

A third well could be drilled if the first two fail.

“We don’t know how much oil is down there, and hopefully we’ll never know when the relief wells work,” BP spokesman John Curry said.

The company was starting to collect and analyze data on how much oil might be in the reservoir when the rig exploded April 20, he said.

BP’s uncertainty statement is reasonable, given they only had drilled one well, according to Doug Rader, an ocean scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund.

Two relief wells stopped the world’s worst peacetime spill, from a Mexican rig called Ixtoc 1 that dumped 140 million gallons off the Yucatan Peninsula. That plug took nearly 10 months beginning in the summer of 1979. Drilling technology has vastly improved since then, however.

So far, the Gulf oil spill has leaked between 19.7 million and 43 million gallons, according to government estimates.

In the meantime, BP is turning to another risky procedure federal officials acknowledge will likely, at least temporarily, cause 20 percent more oil — at least 100,000 gallons a day — to add to the gusher.

Using robot submarines, BP plans to cut away the riser pipe this week and place a cap-like containment valve over the blowout preventer. On Monday, live video feeds showed robot submarines moving equipment around and using a circular saw-like device to cut small pipes at the bottom of the Gulf.

The crews will eventually cut the leaking riser and place the cap on top of it, the company hopes it will capture the majority of the oil, sending it to the surface.

“If you’ve got to cut that riser, that’s risky. You could take a bad situation and make it worse,” said Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor of environmental sciences.

BP failed to plug the leak Saturday with its top kill, which shot mud and pieces of rubber into the well but couldn’t beat back the pressure of the oil.

Meanwhile, the location of the spill couldn’t be worse.

To the south lies an essential spawning ground for imperiled Atlantic bluefin tuna and sperm whales. To the east and west, coral reefs and the coastal fisheries of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. And to the north, Louisiana’s coastal marshes.

More than 125 miles of Louisiana coastline already have been hit with oil. “It’s just killing us by degrees,” said Tulane University ecologist Tom Sherry.

It’s an area that historically has been something of a superhighway for hurricanes, too.

If a major storm rolls in, the relief well operations would have to be suspended and then re-started, adding more time to the process. Plugging the Ixtoc was also hampered by hurricane season, which begins Tuesday and is predicted to be very active.

Three of the worst storms ever to hit the Gulf coast — Betsy in 1965, Camille in 1969 and Katrina in 2005 — all passed over the leak site.

On the Gulf coast beaches, tropical weather was far from some tourists’ minds.

On Biloxi beach, Paul Dawa and his friend Ezekial Momgeri sipped Coronas after a night gambling at the Hard Rock Casino. Both men, originally from Kenya, drove from Memphis, Tenn., and were chased off the beach by a storm, not oil.

“We talked about it and we decided to come down and see for ourselves” whether there was oil, Momgeri said. “There’s no oil here.”

Though some tar balls have been found on Mississippi and Alabama barrier islands, oil from the spill has not significantly fouled the shores.

Still, the perception that it has soiled white sands and fishing areas threatens to cripple the tourist economy, said Linda Hornsby, executive director of the Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association

“It’s not here. It may never be here. It’s costing a lot of money to counter that perception,” Hornsby said. “First it was cancelations, but that evolved to a decrease in calls and there’s no way to measure that.”

Yet there was fear the oil would eventually hit the other Gulf coast states. Hentzel Yucles, of Gulfport, Miss., hung out on the beach with his wife and sons.

“Katrina was bad. I know this is a different type of situation, but it’s going to affect everybody,” he said.

Attorney General Eric Holder plans to visit the Gulf Coast on Tuesday and meet with state attorneys general. Several senators have asked the Justice Department to determine whether any laws were broken in the spill.

source: RT America
May 28, 2010 — Was the destruction of the South Korean warship Cheonan a provocation? Can it be compared to the Gulf of Tonkin? RT contributor Wayne Madsen says that the sinking of the warship was really intended to convince Japan not to move US forces off Okinawa as well as divert the attention of Americans from the dire economic situation at home.

source: National Geographic News

“We don’t have any idea how to stop this,” expert says.

Published May 13, 2010
by Christine Dell’Amore

If efforts fail to cap the leaking Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico (map), oil could gush for years—poisoning coastal habitats for decades, experts say.

Photograph by Gerald Herbert, AP

(See satellite pictures of the Gulf oil spill’s evolution.)

Last week the joint federal-industry task force charged with managing the spill tried unsuccessfully to lower a 93-ton containment dome (pictures) over one of three ruptures in the rig’s downed pipe.

Crystals of methane hydrates in the freezing depths clogged an opening on the box, preventing it from funneling the spouting oil up to a waiting ship.

Watch video of the failed attempt to cap the leaking pipe.

Yesterday a smaller dome was laid on the seafloor near the faulty well, and officials will attempt to install the structure later this week.

But such recovery operations have never been done before in the extreme deep-sea environment around the wellhead, noted Matthew Simmons, retired chair of the energy-industry investment banking firm Simmons & Company International.

For instance, at the depth of the gushing wellhead—5,000 feet (about 1,500 meters)—containment technologies have to withstand pressures of up to 40,000 pounds per square inch (about 28,100 kilograms per square meter), he said.

Also, slant drilling—a technique used to relieve pressure near the leak—is difficult at these depths, because the relief well has to tap into the original pipe, a tiny target at about 7 inches (18 centimeters) wide, Simmons noted.

“We don’t have any idea how to stop this,” Simmons said of the Gulf leak. Some of the proposed strategies—such as temporarily plugging the leaking pipe with a jet of golf balls and other material—are a “joke,” he added.

“We really are in unprecedented waters.”

Gulf Oil Reservoir Bleeding Dry

If the oil can’t be stopped, the underground reservoir may continue bleeding until it’s dry, Simmons suggested.

The most recent estimates are that the leaking wellhead has been spewing 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons, or 795,000 liters) of oil a day.

And the oil is still flowing robustly, which suggests that the reserve “would take years to deplete,” said David Rensink, incoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

“You’re talking about a reservoir that could have tens of millions of barrels in it.”

At that rate, it’s possible the Gulf oil spill’s damage to the environment will have lingering effects akin to those of the largest oil spill in history, which happened in Saudi Arabia in 1991, said Miles Hayes, co-founder of the science-and-technology consulting firm Research Planning, Inc., based in South Carolina.

During the Gulf War, the Iraqi military intentionally spilled up to 336 million gallons (about 1.3 billion liters) of oil into the Persian Gulf (map) to slow U.S. troop advances, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hayes was part of a team that later studied the environmental impacts of the spill, which impacted about 500 miles (800 kilometers) of Saudi Arabian coastline.

The scientists discovered a “tremendous” amount of oiled sediment remained on the Saudi coast 12 years after the spill—about 3 million cubic feet (856,000 cubic meters). (See “Exxon Valdez Anniversary: 20 Years Later, Oil Remains.”)

Oil Spills Create Toxic Marshes

Perhaps most sobering for the marsh-covered U.S. Gulf Coast, the 2003 report found that the Saudi oil spill was most toxic to the region’s marshes and mud flats.

Up to 89 percent of the Saudi marshes and 71 percent of the mud flats had not bounced back after 12 years, the team discovered. (See pictures of freshwater plants and animals.)

“It was amazing to stand there and look across what used to be a salt marsh and it was all dead—not even a live crab,” Hayes said.

Saudi and U.S. Gulf Coast marshes aren’t exactly the same—Saudi marshes sit in saltier waters, and the Middle Eastern climate is more arid, for example. “But to some extent they serve the same ecological function, which is extremely important,” he said.

As the nurseries for much of the sea life in the Gulf of Mexico, coastal marshes are vital to the ecosystem and the U.S. seafood industry.

It’s also much harder to remove oil from coastal marshes, since some management techniques—such as controlled burns—are more challenging in those environments, said Texas Tech University ecotoxicologist Ron Kendall.

“Once it gets in there, we’re not getting it out,” he said. (See pictures of ten animals threatened by the Gulf oil spill.)

Gulf Coast Should “Plan for the Worst”

Depth isn’t the only factor that can stymie attempts to plug an oil leak.

The 1979 Ixtoc oil spill, also in the Gulf of Mexico, took nine months to cap. During that time the well spewed 140 million gallons (530 million liters) of oil—and the Ixtoc well was only about 160 feet (49 meters) deep, noted retired energy investment banker Simmons.

Efforts to contain the Ixtoc leak were complicated by poor visibility in the water and debris from the wrecked rig on the seafloor.

Also, the high pressure of oil in the well ruptured valves in the blowout preventer, a device designed to automatically cap an out-of-control-well. Recovery workers had to drill relief wells nearby before divers could cap the leak.

(See “Rig Explosion Shows Risks in Key Oil Frontier.”)

In general, Simmons added, officials scrambling to cap the Deepwater Horizon well should be working just as hard to protect the shorelines in what could become a protracted event.

“We have to hope for the best,” he said, “but plan for the worst.”

source: Wired

The Pentagon’s plan to fire ballistic missiles at terrorists isn’t just a nuclear Armageddon risk. It’s a ludicrously expensive way to accidentally start World War III: each weapon could cost anywhere from a few hundred million to $1 billion.

The Defense Department wants to spend about $240 million next year on the controversial “prompt global strike” project. Eventually, it could lead to weapons that could strike virtually anywhere in the planet within an hour or two. (Here’s an interview I did with Rachel Maddow on Friday about the plan.) But that quarter-billion would be the tiniest of down payments.

“There are no accurate cost estimates for the program, largely because the technology is unproven,” writes Joe Cirincione at ForeignPolicy.com. His back-of-the-envelope calculation: $10 billion for 10 conventionally-armed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, meant to strike at terrorists on the move. “Each missile with its tiny payload could easily go over $1 billion each.”

Official price tags are a little lower. The Air Force figures a single demonstration of such a missile might eat up $500 million. Follow-on weapons missiles might only cost $300 million apiece, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz guessed at a recent House subcommittee hearing. But Schwartz isn’t at all sure such how much use there’d be for a budget-buster like that.

“There is a place, I think, for that kind of capability. I don’t think that that’s the sort of thing you would use broadly, because you know, fundamentally what you don’t want to have is a 300 — let’s just say, a $300 million weapon applied against a $30,000 target,” Schwartz recently told a House subcommittee.

Critics like Cirincione (and me) are worried such conventional ICBMs would look to Russia and China like nuclear launches — risking an atomic response every time one of the weapons was sent into the sky. Defenders of the prompt global strike effort note that the missiles would be based far from America’s nuclear arsenal, and would follow different flight paths. So the risk of one of these missiles touching off an atomic showdown are very small. “Nuclear in one place. Conventional in another. This isn’t a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup,” notes the National Space Studies Center’s blog.

Maybe the U.S. can put enough safeguards in place to persuade Moscow and Beijing that America’s conventional ICBMs aren’t nukes. (And maybe, as commenter “Almanac” notes, the Russian and Chinese radars are functioning well enough to tell the difference.) Maybe. But what happens other countries follow our lead, and start assembling their own conventional ballistic missile stockpiles? Will Pakistan and India be able to assure eachother that their intentions are pure? How and Israel and Iran? Perhaps a unipolar planet can survive an American global strike arsenal. A multipolar planet — that’s less likely.

Prompt global strike first came to prominence during Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon. Back then, the Defense Department had a knack for spending outlandishly on far-fetched programs: laser-equipped 747s, lightning guns, quarter-weight tanks that could stop bombs with data. Under Bob Gates, the culture has shifted a bit. Common sense, wartime relevancy, and fiscal restraint now figure more prominently in weaponeering. And that’s what makes the embrace of prompt global strike such a mystery. It’s a Rumsfeld throwback – risky, willfully ignorant of how the world works, and ridiculously expensive.

source:Wired

With a dizzying array of announcements this week, it seems almost inevitable that the web will become, at least for the near future, an extension of Facebook. Like it or not.

In some ways it’s a great development, making it simpler to connect what you read, watch and listen to. But there’s a nagging suspicion that when Facebook says it’s simply reacting to changing norms about how public we want our lives to be, that it’s actually forging that condition, not reacting to it.

And when I say forging, I intend both meanings of the word.
The question is whether you are actually using Facebook to keep in touch with your friends and family — or whether Facebook is just using you.

With a few deft maneuvers, Facebook is aiming to make itself the center of the internet, the central repository and publisher of what users like and do online. Facebook’s new tendrils will likely give what is already the world’s largest social network enough data to compete with Google for billions from advertisers who are hungry to spend their ad dollars on ads they can target specifically.

Facebook’s main lever to get all this data funneled to them is a simple “I Like” button, which websites can embed on their pages with very little effort. When a user clicks on that button, they signal to Facebook to add their vote on their user stream that they are a fan of this NFL player, this romantic comedy or that blog. Websites that embed some smart metadata (geared mostly for Facebook) into their pages let Facebook know what kind of thing a user likes, so Facebook can automatically add it to the relevant section of that person’s profile — with a link back to the original site.

Sites can also choose to install a sharing toolbar that sits at the bottom of your browser while you are on your site, or an even larger widget that shows what you and your friends are currently doing on Facebook — and with the “Like” button — around the net.

The setup makes it simple for users logged into Facebook to update their profiles and broadcast their activities to the world (liking something, including a political or religious group, like many parts of all Facebook profiles these days, is public information, no matter how you configure privacy settings.)

Logged-in Facebook users will also be transmitting information about their travels around the net to Facebook servers whenever they visit a page deploying the Like button, regardless of whether they actually click that button or not. Facebook also plans to transmit user data to some web services ahead of their visit — so that when you visit the site, it’s “instantly personalized.” In practice, this means that if you are new to the music site Pandora, they’ll have a custom station waiting for you based on the music you’ve liked in your profile.

While such tracking happens with third-party ad networks, they don’t know your name or anything about you other than where you go on the net. Facebook has far more to connect your browsing information to. Perhaps the closest analog is Google’s creepy Web History which tracks you around the web and records every URL you visit, but that system only works for people who install the Google Toolbar and who don’t unclick the “Web History” button when they create a Google account. That system, along with your search history, are also separate from Google’s ad tracking system, which doesn’t know your name or who your friends are.

Certainly, this sets Facebook in some competition with Google, especially with AdSense, which is Google’s ad platform that publishers use to put ads on their sites.

But reports that Facebook has “won” the web are laughable, especially given the numbers Google put up this month, with more than $6 billion in revenue over the first 3 months of the year. Moreover, the bulk of Google’s ad revenue comes from “contextual” ads, which rely on the contents of a web page or search query. It’s far from clear that targeted ads — even ones based on deep profiles — would do better than the ads on Google’s search page, even if Facebook eventually thinks it can build a search engine whose rankings are set via the data it collects from users.

Facebook built much of this easy-to-use system on “open” standards, as WebMonkey’s Michael Calore reports, even as it sucks the data into a closed community. But those standards are used almost exclusively by Facebook, and ignore the work that’s been done by others to create universally understandable meta-data.

Moreover, the Like button feeds exclusively to Facebook. If your primary identity on the net is at LinkedIn or Google or MySpace or god forbid, on your own domain, this button does you no good. Facebook didn’t build this architecture to make the net better, it built it to make Facebook money.

You can opt out of some of this through Facebook’s increasingly arcane privacy settings, though most won’t do anything to stop Facebook’s relentless push to make people’s profiles public.

And at least until someone comes up with a universal “like” button that feeds your votes to the place you want it to go, the web will increasingly become an extension of Facebook. The question for many in the days to come is whether you are actually using Facebook to keep in touch with your friends and family, or whether Facebook is just using you.

See also: Facebook Tags Everyone at F8 with RFID Chips

source: Raw Story

A few miles from the White House, anti-government protesters will be brandishing guns, rifles, and cartridges of ammunition.

Civil war? Nope. Just an anti-government militia protest in a national park, where activists will be able to legally carry multiple weapons in open sight.

The gun-backers’ “Restore the Constitution” rally is set to be the first armed protest in a US national park, held at Fort Hunt and Gravelly Point, Virginia, locales run by the National Park Service. Their target? President Barack Obama and his agenda, health-care reform, climate control and bank bailouts.

It turns out, however, that it’s President Obama who actually made their rally possible. In May 2009, he signed a measure allowing Americans to carry guns in national parks into law.

The National Rifle Association, in a press release at the time, wrote:
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On Wednesday, NRA-backed legislation to restore the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens in national parks and wildlife refuges passed in the U.S. House of Representatives by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of 279-147. Today, the measure was signed into law and, as specified in the legislation, will take effect in nine months, on February 22, 2010. This was a major repudiation of the gun control community’s anti self-defense agenda.

The current Department of Interior (DOI) regulations were amended by the Bush Administration in 2008, allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves by carrying a concealed firearm in national parks and wildlife refuges. However, early this year, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. granted anti-gun plaintiffs a preliminary injunction against implementation of the new rule. NRA has been working for the past several years in the regulatory, legal, and legislative arenas to achieve this policy change.

“It has been an NRA priority to change the old, outdated rule, and we are pleased that Congress passed this critical legislation,” said NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox. “This step brings clarity and uniformity for law-abiding gun owners visiting our national parks and wildlife refuges. NRA will continue to pursue every avenue to defend the American people’s right of self-defense.”

The National Park Service’s recent report revealed that 11 murders, 35 rapes, 61 robberies and 261 aggravated assaults occurred on parklands in 2006. Our parks also contain hidden methamphetamine labs, marijuana fields and illegal drug and illegal alien smuggling routes. In addition to these dangers and potential attacks from human predators, park visitors have to consider attacks from animal predators. Between April and December 2007 there were at least a dozen grizzly bear attacks reported by park visitors. Today, 31 states allow the carrying of firearms in state parks–all with safe and satisfactory results.

The national park carry law took effect in February.

The rally, to be held today, comes on the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombings. But a spokesman says the date was chosen to honor the 1775 battles in Lexington and Concord during the Revolutionary War.

According to The Washington Post, which reported on the protest Monday, those in attendance at the rally will include: “Mike Vanderboegh, who advocated throwing bricks through the windows of Democrats who voted for the health-care bill; Tom Fernandez, who has established a nationwide call tree to mobilize an armed resistance to any government order to seize firearms; and former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who refused to enforce the Brady law and then won a Supreme Court verdict that weakened its background-check provisions.”

The Post noted that activists have “full support of the federal government they fear.”

Approval for them to carry weapons is “carefully detailed in the 26-page event permit, complete with the gun regulations of both Virginia and the Interior Department and a commitment to provide fencing, barricades and bike racks for the event.”

“We handle tens of thousands of demonstrations of a First Amendment nature annually,” a spokesman for the U.S. Park Police told the reporter. “We are handling this event no differently than any of the others. We assess what their needs are to allow us to facilitate a safe and successful demonstration so they can exercise their rights to free speech and free assembly without interference.”