US: "Irrefutable" Proof Iran Arms Taliban, Diplomat Says Regime Knows What's Going On; Ahmadinejad Defiant On Nuke Sanctions - CBS News

US: "Irrefutable" Proof Iran Arms Taliban, Diplomat Says Regime Knows What's Going On; Ahmadinejad Defiant On Nuke Sanctions - CBS News

US: "Irrefutable" Proof Iran Arms Taliban
PARIS, June 13, 2007(CBS/AP) The United States has "irrefutable" evidence that Iran is transferring weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan, with the knowledge of the Iranian government, and NATO has intercepted some of the shipments, a senior U.S. diplomat said Wednesday.

"There's irrefutable evidence the Iranians are now doing this," said Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns on CNN. "It's certainly coming from the government of Iran. It's coming from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps command, which is a basic unit of the Iranian government."

Speaking separately to The Associated Press, Burns also said that NATO needs to act to stop the shipments. The Iran-Afghanistan frontier is "a very long border. But the Iranians need to know that we are there and that we're going to oppose this."

"It's a very serious question," he said, adding that Iran is in "outright violation" of relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Burns' claims of evidence Tuesday came after he first accused Iran of supplying the Taliban the day before. Speaking to reporters in Paris, he said Iran was funding insurrections across the Middle East.

"It's a country that's trying to flex its muscles, but in a way that's injurious to the interests of just about everybody else in the world," he said. "I think it's a major miscalculation."

Burns also criticized Iran's perceived intransigence over its nuclear program, which many Western powers fear masks a plan to build weapons, though Iran says its intentions are to generate energy.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shrugged off the West's criticism Wednesday of Tehran's controversial nuclear program and said that eventual new U.N. sanctions would not harm Iran.

Speaking to a crowd of several thousand supporters in the city of Semnan, 150 miles southeast of Tehran during a two-day provincial trip, the Iranian leader stuck to his belligerent rhetoric.

"This nation will punch its intimidators in the mouth," said Ahmadinejad, in a reference to U.S.-led group of Western nations that have chastised Iran over its uranium enrichment. His speech was broadcast live on state television.

"You — the West — have to know that your resolutions will not be worth a red cent for the Iranian nation," added Ahmadinejad.

The U.N. Security Council is preparing to debate a third set of sanctions against the Islamic republic in response to Tehran's continuing refusal to suspend the enrichment, which can produce fuel for civilian energy or fissile material for a bomb.

Referring to two previous rounds of sanctions imposed by the Security Council, Ahmadinejad said they had no negative impact on his country and reiterated that Iran would not give up its right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology under any circumstance.

Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in Afghanistan that Iranian weapons were falling into the hands of Taliban fighters, but stopped short of blaming the government itself.

Iran's possible role in aiding insurgents in Iraq has long been hotly debated, and last month some Western and Persian Gulf governments charged that the Islamic government in Tehran is also secretly bolstering Taliban fighters.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Monday, U.S. Army Gen. Dan McNeill said Taliban fighters are showing signs of better training, using combat techniques comparable to "an advanced Western military" in ambushes of U.S. Special Forces soldiers.

"In Afghanistan it is clear that the Taliban is receiving support, including arms from ... elements of the Iranian regime," British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote in the May 31 edition of the Economist.

Iran, which is also in a dispute with the West over its nuclear program, denies the Taliban accusation, calling it part of a broad anti-Iranian campaign. Tehran says it makes no sense that a Shiite-led government like itself would help the fundamentalist Sunni movement of the Taliban.

Tony Blair has turned Britain into a land where we are all prisoners

CHRIS ATKINS
UK Daily Mail
Wednesday June 13, 2007

Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy.

Although he famously coined the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you', even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.

Today, in Tony Blair's Britain - which I naively voted into power ten years ago - we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.

The truth is we are fast becoming an Orwellian state, our every movement watched, our behaviour monitored, and our freedoms curtailed.

Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences - taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.

Then there has been the incredible number of CCTV cameras - a total of 4.2 million, more than in the rest of Europe put together.

And, yesterday, we learnt that the Government has agreed to let the EU have automatic access to databases of DNA (containing samples of people's hair, sperm or fingernails) in order to help track down criminals, even though many thousands of those on record are totally innocent

How did all this happen? Who allowed it? To try to answer these questions, I have made a film, Talking Liberties, about the attack on our freedoms.

I uncovered a disturbing roll call of ancient basic rights which have been systematically destroyed in the self- serving climate of fear this government has perpetuated since the 9/11 attack.

First there was the Act which banned the age- old right of protest within half-a-mile of Parliament without special police authorisation.

And who can forget Walter Wolfgang, the pensioner who was dragged out of the Labour Party Conference for daring to heckle the Home Secretary? He was detained under the Terrorism Act 2000, which gives the police unprecedented stop and search powers.

In 2005 alone, this law was used to stop 35,000 people - none of whom was a terrorist.

But this is only the thin end of the wedge - our civil liberties, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta, are being whittled away.

There has been an unprecedented shift of power away from the individual towards the state - but now this power is being used not to defeat terrorism, but to keep tabs on ordinary citizens. As well as a raft of repressive anti-terror legislation, there are the more insidious infringements of our freedom and privacy.

We will soon see the introduction of the vast National Identity Register, linking all databases such as the DNA database to which the EU will soon have access.

The tentacles of these networks will intertwine until they form a vast state surveillance mechanism, which can track every detail of your life: what books you borrowed from the library as a student, your sexual health, your DNA profile, your spending and your whereabouts at any given moment in time.

Ministers are even creating a children's database, which will record truancy, diet, and medical history.

And, of course, ID cards will be issued in 2009 - to be used every time we carry out routine tasks such as visiting the dentist. Soon, biometric data - your iris scan, fingerprints and DNA, will help to identify you further.

And, all the time, there are those CCTV cameras - 20 per cent of the global total, even though Britain only has 0.2 per cent of the world's population.

New Labour has an absolute obsession with these devices. Soon, more sophisticated cameras will be able to recognise your face and the information matched to one of the national databases.

All cars will eventually be fitted with a GPS chip, officially to simplify road tax payments but they will also allow government agencies to track every vehicle in the country.

There are, of course, more alarming implications to being constantly monitored - as Orwell understood. Soon, we will be living in an open-air prison.

Some may ask: why does all this matter? The answer is that to surrender our identity and privacy so comprehensively is to give up something we will never get back.

Although New Labour says its mania for data-gathering is all part of its plan to protect us, there's no guarantee that future governments (who will be inheriting a nationwide surveillance machine and the National Identity Register) won't use it to more malign ends.

Totalitarian regimes have, after all, always collected information on their citizens. Hitler pioneered the use of ID cards as a means of repression. The Belgians left Rwanda with a bloody legacy by implementing an ID card system which divided the population into Hutu and Tutsi.

When the 1994 genocide began, these cards proved a device for horrific ethnic cleansing, with one million people dying in 100 days. The Stasi secret police in Soviet East Germany kept millions of files in order to keep track of everyone in the country.

Of course these examples are the extremes - but basic liberties such as privacy and free speech have been hard-won over centuries and history shows that we should not allow them to be brushed aside.

This shift away from individual freedom towards state power has happened slowly, and almost without us noticing.

Like so many others, I was proud to put a cross against the box next to New Labour in 1997 as a first-time voter. But now I have become shocked at the vast swathe of new laws which had been introduced, most of them in response to terrorism.

We are told that this is all for the good - these laws, and the surveillance cameras and ID cards will stop terrorists. Is that the case? Sadly not.

The London bombers carried ID and were observed on CCTV - of course it did not stop them committing their terrible crime.

Intelligence experts say that most information leading to genuine breakthroughs come from informants, not through random tracking or surveillance of the general population.

In any case, liberty and security aren't balanced on some delicate equilibrium, as John Reid, the Home Secretary, and Tony Blair would have us believe. History has shown us that it is precisely when you undermine people's basic rights that they mobilise towards radical groups.

After all, one of the greatest recruiters for the IRA in Northern Ireland was the policy of internment, under which people were imprisoned without trial. Have we learnt nothing from our past?

Stop and search laws applied to Britain's Muslim communities will simply polarise those groups. Instead, we need them to help us protect the country from terrorism.

It's not all doom and gloom, of course - as I hope my film reflects. The sheer absurdity of the bewildering array of idiotic new laws has given us an abundance of bizarre and hilarious situations for our documentary.

But behind this dark comedy is something much more disturbing. Faced with the threat of terrorism, the Government has told us that we must lay down our freedoms for our lives.

Perhaps it has forgotten the millions of people from past generations who have laid down their lives for our freedom. I think we owe it to those people to turn this tide.

• Taking Liberties is on show in cinemas across the country. Visit www.noliberties.com

Grave concern by US over Iran's nuclear defiance

AFP Wednesday June 13, 2007

The United States expressed "grave concern" Tuesday over Iran's defiance in ramping up its nuclear capability amid new estimates by the UN atomic agency that the Islamic republic could have 8,000 centrifuges enriching uranium by December.

The significant rise in Iran's nuclear capability is likely to fuel fears that Tehran seeks nuclear weapons, diplomats close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in Vienna Tuesday.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has been telling political leaders in private conversations that Iran shows no sign of slowing down in its uranium enrichment, a process that can be used to make nuclear fuel but also atomic weapons, one diplomat said.

"It's a source of grave concern to the international system that they persist in this behavior in defiance of the will of the international community, the Security Council, the IAEA Board of Governors," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

He said the international community had to make it "clear to Iran that it can't persist in this behavior, that they have to change course, and that failure to change course is only going to result in greater isolation" and more punitive sanctions.

ElBaradei's estimate of Iran obtaining 8,000 centrifuges was based on "the technical assessment of his inspectors" and so was sound, another diplomat close to the IAEA said.

The United States is stepping up moves with its allies for a third set of UN Security Council sanctions against Iran, which again failed to obey a Security Council deadline to suspend uranium enrichment.

The sanctions over the past half year target Iran's ballistics and nuclear industries.

The United States accuses Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, but Iran insists its nuclear drive is entirely peaceful and it just wants to generate energy for a growing population.

Washington says it wants a diplomatic solution to the nuclear question but has not ruled out a military intervention and has placed sizeable naval forces in the Gulf.

China Threatens War Escalation Over Bush Handshake

Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet Wednesday, June 13, 2007

In an astounding development that has completely failed to register any attention amongst mainstream U.S. media, China promised to escalate preparations for war in advance of a potential conflict, after President Bush shook hands with a Taiwanese government official yesterday.

Bush shook hands and met with Taiwan's representative to the United States, Joseph Wu, on Tuesday, during a commemoration for victims of Communism in Washington DC.

In a headline story that aired at 10pm Shanghai time Wednesday night on the Hong Kong based PHTV news channel, Chinese government leaders threatened to plan new war games and heighten military readiness in anticipation of any attempt by the U.S. to defend Taiwan should a Chinese invasion occur, or simply if Taiwan declares its independence.

According to the news station, Taiwanese media were manipulating the handshake for their own geopolitical agenda.

Click here for video in Chinese.

Officials expressed stern-faced concern and spoke of dire consequences during a press conference as China made clear its fury that Bush had even chosen to acknowledge Wu's visit.

"We insist to keep the current peaceful relations as we promised Taiwan's citizens. We have prepared to stop (prohibit) any activities, conduct and any excuses to divide Taiwan away from China in whatever cause, the activities are going to cause serious harm. Chenshuibian's (President of Taiwan) conspiracy of an independent Taiwan causes serious harm in our peaceful relations. We will resort to military action if they continue these irresponsible actions," said Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Yang Li. (rough translation).

The news anchor noted that the handshake heralded a change of direction in the Bush administration's approach to Taiwan, with the U.S. government having previously backed away from its resolve to defend Taiwan should an invasion occur, as its treaty with the country dictates.

If anything's for sure, it's the fact that China, unlike Kim Jong-Il and his routinely belligerent rhetoric, isn't bluffing.

According to an editorial in the China Post today, "Beijing has deployed some 1,000 missiles targeting Taiwan and the sea-lanes surrounding the island, with 50 to 100 being added annually."

When considered alongside recent talk of a new cold war between the U.S. and Russia after Vladimir Putin's vocal opposition to Bush's plan to erect missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, this new escalation suggests the world is sleepwalking towards global conflict and a total breakdown of the existing international structure.

The news that China is intending to escalate tensions is clearly aimed at Taiwan directly, but we have managed to break through the electronic Berlin wall to provide this information to American citizens, whose corporate press seems too interested in Paris Hilton's latest escapade to bother about the fact that the globe's next superpower is openly hyping what could lead to world war three.

Browns Siege: Feds Say They Are Going In

Randy Weaver may join Browns at their New Hampshire home

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Federal marshals have called Ed and Elaine Brown to tell them that the authorities are coming in to their property at some point soon but "do not want to kill" the Browns.

US Marshall Gary Dimartino, who previously promised the Browns that federal authorities would not raid them only for the feds to then conduct an aborted raid last week, told Elaine Brown that they were coming in.

Given that the Browns now know the marshals have no honor and they have flat out lied before, it is likely that they mean exactly the opposite of anything they openly say to the Browns.

Local security hacks have also heard police scanner radios, on which it has been suggested that two Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, (SWORDS) combat robots (see picture below) are going to be sent into the property at some point soon.

In addition Federal vehicles have been spotted in local hotel parking lots. Yesterday we exclusively revealed that the Browns believed their home had been infiltrated by an informer.

The Browns remain without power, the internet and have telephone access fleetingly, seemingly only when the authorities wish to contact them.

Ruby Ridge Siege survivor Randy Weaver told the Alex Jones show yesterday that if he can raise the funds he will make a stand and travel to stay with the Browns in New Hampshire.

"I'm really worried for the Browns out there, personally I would like to be out there and stand with these people... If they had a bunch of people, that's what helped save us up at Ruby Ridge, those of us that survived anyway." said Weaver.

Weaver also hinted that the legal team that won him cases in the wrongful killing of some of his family at Ruby Ridge are watching the situation with the Browns carefully to see what transpires.

Weaver has walked a thousand miles in the Browns shoes, having his wife and child killed by federal authorities in the brutal siege that took place in 1992.

"As long as they are still allowing outside people to go into their place I don't think they are planning an imminent dynamic entry. They may be still trying to get snitches in there... But once they block the roads off and keep people at least a mile or two miles away that's when you know they are going to come down hard on them." Weaver continued.

Weaver offered some sound advice for the Browns:

"Be real cool, let them fire first, cos if they go in they'll be coming in hard and heavy real fast, and stand up and do what is right. But if it comes down to it then when its all said and done the feds will just claim that its their fault and leave it at that and get away with it."

Meanwhile Danny Riley, the man who was shot and tasered on the Browns' property has had his google and youtube accounts blocked so he cannot upload anymore videos. Riley told infowars that he was a nervous wreck and still feared for his safety.

He cannot reveal full details of what he is going through but informed us that the authorities are "hanging things over his head" in an attempt to get him to cooperate with them. The feds keep warning him to stop telling people that the FBI is involved in the case.

Continuing...

FBI Data Mining Program Raises Eyebrows in Congress

Justin Rood
The Blotter
Wednesday June 13, 2007

Lawmakers are questioning whether a proposed FBI anti-terrorist program is worth the price, both in taxpayer dollars and the possible loss of Americans' privacy.

The National Security Analysis Center (NSAC) would bring together nearly 1.5 billion records created or collected by the FBI and other government agencies, a figure the FBI expects to quadruple in coming years, according to an unclassified FBI budget document obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

Those numbers alone raised concerns from two congressmen, Reps. Brad Miller, D-Calif., and James Sensenbrenner, Jr., R-Wisc., the chair and ranking member of the oversight panel of the House Science and Technology Committee.

The FBI has a track record of improperly -- even illegally -- gathering personal information on Americans, most recently through the widespread abuse of so-called National Security Letters, the two men noted in a letter to Congress' investigative body, the Government Accountability Office.

Miller and Sensenbrenner asked GAO to determine whether the NSAC will include records on U.S. citizens, and whether there are protections in place to make sure all the data in the program was legally collected.

Of further concern to the two congressmen are the FBI's stated hopes to "pro-actively" mine the data to find terrorists using "predictive" analysis, according to its budget request, an unproven method according to experts and even the U.S. intelligence chief's office.

In theory, predictive analysis involves mapping a known pattern of terrorist behavior -- for instance, the sequence and timing of such mundane activities as bank transactions and travel purchases -- against a massive collection of such records like the NSAC databases. If an individual's actions match the pattern, they can be considered a suspect, even if they have no known ties to any suspected terrorists or known terrorist groups.

Such a method would help identify "sleeper cells," the FBI claims in its request -- secret groups of terrorists living innocuously within the United States, waiting for a signal from a terrorist group leader to assemble and strike.

But to date the approach has not proven workable. So far, terrorism researchers "cannot readily distinguish the absolute scale of normal behaviors" for terrorists or ordinary Americans, conceded a 2006 document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and obtained by National Journal magazine. In other words, no one can figure out how terrorists act differently from normal Americans.

"We had no idea how on God's earth you would characterize and capture normal behavior," a former researcher for the ill-fated Total Information Awareness (TIA) program told the magazine last October.

TIA, the government's first attempt at anti-terrorism data mining on a massive scale, had its funding stripped by Congress over widespread concerns it would violate privacy laws. The National Security Agency -- arguably a more tech-savvy outfit than the FBI, whose computer woes are legendary -- continues to pour millions into data mining research.

The FBI has requested $12 million for its NSAC project. That amount would pay for 90,000 square feet of space and an additional 53 employees, according to its budget request. Whether Congress will approve the funds has yet to be determined.

The bureau did not respond to a request for comment.