JNN 02 Mar 2011 : Child trafficking and exploitation in the United States have become a booming industry for the wealthy at the cost of victimizing a huge number of many teenagers and even children. Continue reading
JNN 02 Mar 2011 : Thousands of imams have staged a demonstration in Egypt against what they call state security agencies’ excessive interventions. Continue reading
JNN 21 Feb 2011 : The Midwestern US state of Wisconsin has become the scene of angry protests against a Republican proposal targeting the rights or public workers’ unions among other things. Continue reading 
JNN 16 Feb 2011 : The Corrupt and Inefficient Government of Pakitan have made all the necessary arrangement to pardon the American Killer involved in the Killing of 4 Innocent Pakistani. Continue reading
JNN 28 Dec 2010 : It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.
Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.
He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.
Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.
Not so secret cables…
The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document,[1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.[2]
Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.
But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, send dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.
Excuse to police the Internet?
What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.
The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.
The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away.
JNN 11 Dec 2010 : Hundreds of angry Afghans have taken to the streets of Gardez city to protest against the rising number of civilian casualties at the hands of US-led troops.The protest was held in Gardez, the capital of Paktia Province. Protesters chanted slogans against the US for killing civilians.
The demonstration followed the killing of seven civilians in a US-led strike in the volatile region.
Sources say the protest in eastern Afghanistan turned violent, leaving at least six people wounded.
NATO blames the deaths on bad targeting and communication errors.
Meanwhile, 15 more civilians, including children, were killed when a bomb hit a pick-up truck in the southern Helmand Province.
Civilians have been the main victims of violence in Afghanistan, particularly in the country’s troubled southern and eastern provinces.
According to official figures, more than 2,500 civilians were killed in NATO operations last year, undermining support for the presence of US-led forces in the country.
A recent UN report shows civilian deaths have jumped by 31 percent in the first half of 2010.
Hundreds of civilians have lost their lives in US-led airstrikes or ground operations in different parts of the war-ravaged country over the past months.
The loss of civilian lives has dramatically reduced support for the Afghan war.
The invasion of Afghanistan was launched with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the country. Nine years on, however, Afghanistan remains unstable and civilians continue to pay the price.
JNN 23 Nov 2010 Senior Afghan and US officials have confirmed reports of a series of secret peace talks with a fake Taliban leader in Kabul over the past months, a media report says.According to the New York Times, secret talks between officials and a senior Taliban commander collapsed after Washington concluded they were dealing with an impostor.
The secret high profile talks with Mulla Akhtar Muhammad Mansour — a senior commander of the Taliban — were intended to end the nine-year long war.
However, the man was apparently not Mansour at all.
Western officials intimately involved in the discussions say the negotiator was not even a member of the Taliban leadership.
“It’s not him,” a Western diplomat in Kabul said. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
NATO and Afghan officials say they held three meetings with the man, who had traveled to Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan.
Based on the report, the fake Taliban leader even met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the presidential palace in Kabul.
The report comes as a US delegation has reportedly arrived in Pakistan to hold a secret meeting with pro-Taliban figures.
The meetings are said to be aimed at pushing for talks between Taliban militants and the Afghan government.
The developments come after Karzai called on tribal elders and civic representatives to get together and discuss measures for a national reconciliation.
Karzai recently formed a peace council to lead talks with the Taliban, electing Afghanistan’s former president Burhanuddin Rabbani as chairman of the council.
The newly-established peace council has been making efforts to initiate dialogue with discontented Afghans and militants who have engaged in warfare with the government.
The council has expressed willingness to listen to legitimate demands by the militants.
The development comes after senior officials in the UK floated the idea of making peace with the Taliban whose uprooting was one of the main objectives of the 2001 Us-led invasion.
The US-led invasion was launched with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the war-ravaged country.
Anti-war groups have highlighted the fact that Afghanistan remains unstable nine years after the invasion.
The Taliban have repeatedly rejected peace talks, calling for the withdrawal of US-led foreign forces from Afghanistan
JNN 23 Nov 2010 Senior Afghan and US officials have confirmed reports of a series of secret peace talks with a fake Taliban leader in Kabul over the past months, a media report says.According to the New York Times, secret talks between officials and a senior Taliban commander collapsed after Washington concluded they were dealing with an impostor.
The secret high profile talks with Mulla Akhtar Muhammad Mansour — a senior commander of the Taliban — were intended to end the nine-year long war.
However, the man was apparently not Mansour at all.
Western officials intimately involved in the discussions say the negotiator was not even a member of the Taliban leadership.
“It’s not him,” a Western diplomat in Kabul said. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
NATO and Afghan officials say they held three meetings with the man, who had traveled to Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan.
Based on the report, the fake Taliban leader even met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the presidential palace in Kabul.
The report comes as a US delegation has reportedly arrived in Pakistan to hold a secret meeting with pro-Taliban figures.
The meetings are said to be aimed at pushing for talks between Taliban militants and the Afghan government.
The developments come after Karzai called on tribal elders and civic representatives to get together and discuss measures for a national reconciliation.
Karzai recently formed a peace council to lead talks with the Taliban, electing Afghanistan’s former president Burhanuddin Rabbani as chairman of the council.
The newly-established peace council has been making efforts to initiate dialogue with discontented Afghans and militants who have engaged in warfare with the government.
The council has expressed willingness to listen to legitimate demands by the militants.
The development comes after senior officials in the UK floated the idea of making peace with the Taliban whose uprooting was one of the main objectives of the 2001 Us-led invasion.
The US-led invasion was launched with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the war-ravaged country.
Anti-war groups have highlighted the fact that Afghanistan remains unstable nine years after the invasion.
The Taliban have repeatedly rejected peace talks, calling for the withdrawal of US-led foreign forces from Afghanistan
A recent US probe confirms that Americans had been faulty in carrying out certain airstrikes in western Afghanistan in early May that killed 150 civilians. According to IRIB, citing an unnamed senior US military official, the report said that the US air force and ground troops had made serious mistakes when US war planes bombed suspected Taliban positions.
The report quoted the official as saying “American personnel made significant errors in carrying out some of the air strikes in western Afghanistan on May 4 that killed dozens of Afghan civilians”.
Nearly 150 civilians, including 95 children, were killed last month when US warplanes dropped bombs on two villages in the Bala Baluk district of the western province of Farah.
General Stanley McChrystal warned about the consequences of civilian deaths caused by US and NATO-led forces, saying “this may be the critical point.”
The deadly strikes also sparked days of protests in Kabul and other major cities across the violence-wracked Afghanistan.
Medics told Press TV that some of those wounded in the attack have unusual burns which could have been caused by the flesh-eating chemical — white phosphorus.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has demanded a halt to Washington’s airstrikes in his country following the deadly incident.
Washington says it will not stop airstrikes in Afghanistan which have frequently led to civilian casualties across the war-ravaged country.
Jafria News 
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