2007 September 26

U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates on Wednesday asked Congress to approve nearly $190 billion (94.3 billion pounds) more in spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In prepared testimony to a Senate committee, Gates said the Bush administration sought the money for more training and equipment for the U.S. military, including new armoured vehicles that give extra protection to troops against bomb blasts. The funds were for the 2008 fiscal year beginning October 1.

More money was also needed to train and equip Iraqi security forces as well as to improve U.S. facilities in the region and “consolidate our bases in Iraq,” Gates said. Reuters obtained a copy of his remarks in advance of his testimony on Wednesday.

In asking for the money, Gates said he was aware of the controversy surrounding the unpopular war. Since September 2001, Congress has appropriated $602 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“I know that Iraq and other difficult choices America faces in the war on terror will continue to be a source of friction within the Congress, between the Congress and the president, and in the wider public debate,” Gates said.

But he said U.S. troops had done far more than had been asked of them, and “like all of you, I always keep our troops — their safety and their mission — foremost in my mind every day.”

$147 billion for the war effort in the coming fiscal year. Gates said it was seeking another $42 billion more, bringing the total war funding request for fiscal 2008 to $189 billion.

The biggest chunk of the new request would go for force protection, including $11 billion for fielding about 7,000 more of the new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, which have V-shaped hulls to disperse the impact of bomb blasts. This amount is being sought in addition to 8,000 MRAPS already funded or requested, Gates said.

9/11-1st Responder confirms countdown and massive explosion

Kevin Mcpattern a 9/11 first responder talks of his experience of the collapse of WTC 7. filmed at the world trade centre in New York on September 18th 2007 he stands below where the Twin Towers used to stand, part of a feature lentgh documentary ‘The Elephant In The Room’ Currently in Production …

Revealed: script for Bush’s mangled words

There is nothing mysterious about George Bush when he comes to the annual General Assembly of the United Nations. He comes, he excoriates countries he doesn’t care for and he leaves. Everyone knows the routine and while some other world leaders may spit his name, they sure know how to pronounce it.

But the President, who used his appearance at the podium yesterday to call for a “mission of liberation” to bring democracy and human rights to countries under dictatorship or repressive rule, needs a little help in this regard.

Heaven forefend that he mangles the names of Sarkozy, say, or Mugabe. We know this thanks to a snafu by the White House staff who mistakenly allowed a few journalists to glimpse a draft of the President’s address complete with phonetic spellings in brackets to assist him with names of people and places. In the correct version for the press, they had been erased.

Safe from Mr Bush’s famously dyslexic tongue, therefore, were the Presidents of France [sar-KO-zee] and Zimbabwe (moo-GAH-bee]. The speech-writers, whose names and even telephone numbers were also posted at the end of the wrongly circulated version, also helped him with the capitals of Zimbabwe [hah-RAR-ray] and of Venezuela [kah-RAH-kus].

Yet, Mr Bush was sometimes left to his own instincts. While prompts were provided for Kyrgyzstan [KEY-geez-stan] and Mauritania [moor-EH-tain-ee-a], he was offered no such help with Sierra Leone or with Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader in Burma. He made two runs at the latter and mangled the former, seemingly renaming it Syria Leone. (A member of his axis of evil, surely.)

Cuba he got right and it was the Cubans who provided still more distraction yesterday when its entire delegation upped and walked out of the General Assembly hall midway through Mr Bush’s speech. This after Mr Bush suggested, referring to the ailing Fidel Castro, that, “the long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing its end. The Cuban people are ready for their freedom.”

In a statement, the Cuban government last night said its boycott was a “sign of profound rejection of the arrogant and mediocre statement” delivered by the American President. “Bush is responsible for the murder of over 600,000 civilians in Iraq… He is a criminal and has no moral authority or credibility to judge any other country.” It concluded: “Cuba condemns and rejects every letter of his infamous tirade.”

Expressions of disdain for Mr Bush by other leaders have become an annual sideshow of the UN Assembly. Last year it was Hugo Chavez of Venezuela who achieved the greatest theatrics saying he could smell sulphur at the podium where Mr Bush had spoken hours before, thus likening him to Satan.

Mr Chavez announced at the last minute yesterday that he would be skipping the Assembly this year where he was scheduled to speak today. So there will be no Bush-Chavez spectacular. The starring role this time may be seized by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Mr Mugabe will have his chance to respond tomorrow when he is scheduled at the podium. Mr Bush said that his government “has cracked down on peaceful calls for reform and forced millions to flee their homeland”. He went on: “The behaviour of the Mugabe regime is an assault on its people.”

Mr Ahmadinejad has used his visit to the New York to underscore Iran’s determination to stand-up to pressure from most of the international community for a suspension of its uranium enrichment activities. But it was unclear how far he had furthered his cause with his appearance at Columbia University on Monday where he was labeled a “petty and cruel dictator” by his hosts and went on to cause bafflement, and even bursts of laughter, when he flatly suggested that there are “no homosexuals in Iran”.

Hypocrite Bush hits out at tyrants and human rights abuse

Editors note: One word - Guantanamo

George Bush yesterday launched a fierce attack on countries which he accused of human rights abuse.

The president used a UN speech to hit out at ‘brutal regimes’ including Iran, as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad watched on.

He said: ‘In Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Iran, brutal regimes deny their people the fundamental rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of the United Nations.’

He singled out ‘tyrannical’ Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe and Cuban president Fidel Castro for criticism.

‘The United Nations must insist on change in Harare and must insist for the freedom of the people of Zimbabwe,’ he added.

‘In Cuba, the long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing its end. The Cuban people are ready for their freedom.’ The Cuban delegation walked out of the chamber in protest.

But Mr Bush’s speech in New York was branded ‘hypocrital’ and he was accused of abandoning human rights in Iraq and at the US prison camp Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Lawyer Louise Christian, who has represented Guantanamo Bay prisoners, said: ‘George Bush needs to realise when making these statements what is happening in his own back yard.’

And Phil Shiner, head of Public Interest Lawyers, described it as ‘absolute nonsense’.

‘He’s got as much in common with human rights as Pol Pot did,’ he added.

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=67594&in_page_id=34&ito=newsnow

Education agency to build fingerprint database

The Michael Maples scandal shook the Victoria community, and Texas leaders are pushing to safeguard against such future incidents.

When Maples was hired as principal of Memorial High School, the system for checking the criminal background of employees failed, said Eleanor Gonzalez, president of the Victoria Federation of Teachers.”Somehow people are slipping through,” Gonzalez said. “Whoever expected something like that to happen in Victoria?”

Scenarios such as Maples lying on his application for VISD principal show a need for urgency in the push for background checks by the Texas Legislature. Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick signed a letter directing the Texas Education Agency to cover fingerprinting costs for teachers and other education professionals, said Allison Castle, spokeswoman for Perry’s office.

“It was an unfunded mandate so the leadership wanted to do right by the teachers and the school districts,” Castle said.

Dewhurst became aware of incidents where educators lied on their applications or where it was found they committed prior offenses of which no one was aware, said Mike Wintemute, spokesman for Dewhurst’s office. Dewhurst wants to establish safeguards to prevent that.

“Parents deserve to know who is working with their children,” Wintemute said.

Senate Bill 9, passed through the 80th Legislature, requires that the TEA build a fingerprint database through the Department of Public Safety by January 2008, said Suzanne Marchman, spokeswoman with the education agency. The system would update information to provide the latest information, in case already-certified teachers stopped teaching for a while, committed a crime and wanted to go back to teaching.

The database would be accessible by school districts that could look at backgrounds for hiring or checking up on the activities of long-time teachers, Marchman said.A 2003 law required that all teaching candidates submit to national criminal background checks, but that did not cover those already certified.

Joe Bean, public affairs specialist with the Texas State Teachers Association, said the $50-per-person funding would cover the cost of the fingerprinting, which could cost from $47 to $52.

“Fingerprinting is the mechanism that makes the background check possible,” Bean said,

Bean said thorough background checks using fingerprints might keep other people like Maples from coming into Victoria.

Linda Bridges, president of the Texas American Federation for Teachers, said the group sent a letter to Dewhurst and Craddick last week raising the issue of the TEA passing on the cost to teachers.

“We’re delighted to see the leadership come through,” Bridges said. “All during the legislative session they said this would not be a cost item to teachers.”

The school district welcomes Senate Bill 9, said Diane Boyett, VISD communications specialist. Any funding that would help the school district meet its requirements is needed.

Boyett said she hopes it will serve as a deterrent to people seeking employment in schools who shouldn’t be.

But Boyett said covering the costs for Maples background check wouldn’t have done anything.

“This was an unfortunate situation where the person was not forthcoming with VISD about his history,” Boyett said.

Gonzalez said pushing funds toward background checks that don’t work are a waste of money. She would like to see the funds put toward other educational programs.

Diana: The unseen evidence which has been mysteriously ignored until now

Over English tea served in fine china cups at a sumptuous Paris apartment last November, an astonishing meeting took place to discuss the death of 36-year-old Diana, Princess of Wales.

The conversation was cordial. A butler carrying a teapot and tray of delicate sandwiches moved smoothly between the guests in the richly decorated drawing room of a building owned by the British Government, near the famous Champs Elysees.

In one Victorian armchair sat Lord Stevens, the respected former head of Scotland Yard. He had just finished a three-year investigation called Operation Paget into whether there was a conspiracy to murder the most famous woman in the world ten years ago and a cover-up to hide the truth.

The Princess was travelling with her Muslim lover Dodi Fayed in a Mercedes car when it smashed into the 13th column of the Pont D’Alma road tunnel in Paris at 12.23am on Sunday, August 31, 1997.

She was mortally injured, dying in hospital three-and-a-half hours later. Dodi was killed instantly, as was the driver of the car, Henri Paul.

Since that moment, the controversy over Princess Diana’s death has not abated. There is a veritable conspiracy theory industry which claims the Princess was assassinated, some even say at the instigation of the Royal Family or the British intelligence services because she was pregnant with Dodi’s baby.

The report of Lord Stevens is now published. It concludes that Diana died in a tragic road accident. The report was meant to provide the final, unequivocal chapter on her death and a factual framework for her inquest which will begin next Tuesday.

Yet, if anything, the debate over how and why the Princess came to die is fiercer than ever. At the epicentre of this brouhaha is Lord Stevens himself.

For in the Paris apartment last November, he met the parents of the Mercedes driver Henri Paul for the first time. The couple must have been apprehensive.

No one in the Diana saga has been more vilified than their 41-year-old son. Within 24 hours of the accident he was being blamed for driving “like a lunatic” through the tunnel while “drunk as a pig”.

Nevertheless, Giselle and Jean Paul, in their 70s, had bravely made the journey from their home in Brittany, on the west coast of France, to hear exactly what Britain’s most famous policeman had to say about their son.

Lord Stevens soon put their minds at rest. The couple had hardly sat down before the peer assured them that Henri Paul had not been drunk - indeed, he’d had only two drinks that night.

As the meeting finished on November 8, 2006, the couple shook hands with Lord Stevens and went off with their heads held high. “We were pleased to hear our son was innocent as we always believed,” Mr Paul senior told the Mail this week.

Yet a little over a month later the world was to hear a very different account from Lord Stevens. The 832-page Operation Paget report, compiled by 14 Scotland Yard detectives at a cost of £3.7 million, was published on December 14, 2006.

It declared that Henri Paul was driving at double the speed limit - 60mph - and had consumed a very considerable amount of alcohol before ferrying Diana and Dodi in the Mercedes from the Ritz Hotel in Paris to a private flat, where they were staying.

The driver was twice over the British drink-drive limit and three times over the French one. An expert cited in the report estimated that Paul had sunk the equivalent of ten small glasses of Ricard, his favourite liquorice-flavoured French aperitif, before taking the wheel.

If he had survived, he would be liable to prosecution for causing death by dangerous driving. It was a damning indictment of the dead driver, conflicting sharply with the account given by Lord Stevens to Henri Paul’s mother and father.

Now grief can do terrible things to people’s minds and it is possible Henri Paul’s parents misunderstood or misheard Lord Stevens. However, detailed and contemporaneous notes of the meeting by an Operation Paget police officer suggest that this was not the case.

So why did Lord Stevens appear to have such a massive change of heart in less than five weeks? Did the policeman nicknamed Captain Beaujolais because of his love of fine wines come under pressure to change the conclusions of Operation Paget? It seems implausible.

Yet this troubling question has been aired at the preliminary hearings, overseen by High Court judge Lord Justice Scott Baker, for the forthcoming inquest on Diana and her lover.

Controversially, the judge - acting as coroner - will now order the jury to entirely disregard the Operation Paget report. It is a slap in the face for Lord Stevens. The contents have been removed from an official website linked to the inquest.

Lord Justice Scott Baker insists that 20 vital questions on Diana’s death - and possible murder - still have to be answered.

They cover such matters as: whether Henri Paul was drunk or taking drugs; the possible pregnancy of Diana and why she was embalmed on British Embassy orders just an hour before her body was flown home to London, a process nullifying any later tests on whether she was expecting a baby; the presence, if any, of the secret intelligence service, MI6, in the French capital on the night she died; and the enduring mystery of why the Princess feared for her life.

Significantly, the judge has ordered that hundreds of explosive background documents, witness statements and tape recordings garnered during his investigation must now be made available to the jury. Some were not even alluded to in the Operation Paget report.

The background files cover the most contentious allegations surrounding the Princess’s death.

For instance, a tape recording of one unnamed informant claims that the Queen’s Private Secretary, Robert Fellowes, who was also Diana’s brother-in-law, was in the French capital an hour before the crash and was seen in the telecommunications room of the British Embassy. (For his part, he insists he was at home in Norfolk all night.)

Another piece of evidence, detailed in a sworn witness statement from an American man, states categorically that Diana told a close female friend that she was pregnant just before she died, although she never named the father.

The files also delve deep into the lifestyle of Henri Paul. To understand his pivotal role, one must return to the days following the Princess’s death.

The world was aghast. Flowers were heaped in Hyde Park, London, outside her home at Kensington Palace. Ordinary men and women wept in the streets across the globe.

Over in Paris, there was grieving too. Yet there was also something strange afoot. Within hours, rumours began to circulate that the driver of the Mercedes had killed the Princess.

By the Monday morning of September 1 - little more than a day after the crash - the French newspaper and television were publishing reports that Henri Paul had consumed “grossly excessive quantities of alcohol” and the speedometer of the Mercedes had jammed at 121mph. None of these stories was denied by the authorities.

Indeed, the allegations grew more detailed. On September 9 there were reports that a search of Henri Paul’s flat in Paris had revealed a veritable drinking den. Shelves were groaning with bottles of spirits and wine. Tables were littered with bottles of vodka, Martini and fortified wines, while the kitchen contained open bottles of Ricard and American bourbon.

The reports contradicted what is now known to be the truth. An inspection of Henri Paul’s flat by the detectives of the French Brigade Criminale much earlier - 48 hours after the crash - had found only copious bottles of soda water and just one bottle of champagne and a bottle of Martini.

Nevertheless the story that Henri Paul, a deputy security chief at the Ritz Hotel in Paris who had stepped in at the last moment to drive the couple, was a hopeless alcoholic gained credence.

Conspiracy theorists ask was he deliberately turned into the scapegoat? Was the driver, suspected of being a paid informant of the French and British intelligence services, used to cover up a much more sinister set of events?

Almost every person who talked to Henri Paul that night has since confirmed that he did not appear intoxicated before he set off into the Paris night.

Furthermore, a crucial blood sample taken from Henri Paul’s suit jacket after his death - and the only one that has been firmly linked to him by DNA testing on his mother Giselle - shows no measurable trace of alcohol in his body.

In addition, a carbohydrate deficient transferring test ‘proving’ he was an alcoholic and conducted by the French authorities on Henri Paul after his death has also been undermined. A CDT test, the inquest will be told, is unreliable if performed on a dead body.

Meanwhile, what of the clutch of blood samples taken from his body in the days after the crash. They, apparently, showed that Henri Paul was hopelessly drunk. But were they really his own?

Intriguingly, they contained a medicine called albendazole, which the driver’s doctor said he was never prescribed. It is a drug taken to get rid of tapeworms and given to downandouts on the streets.

Could they have come from a dead Paris tramp lying in the public mortuary alongside Henri Paul?

Equally puzzling is that the same clutch of blood samples revealed no sign of another medicine named acamprosate, which Paul had been prescribed. It is the only solid piece of evidence that he was a heavy drinker.

The driver was worried about his love of Ricard and had begged his doctor to give him the drug, designed to help alcoholics reduce their intake without cravings.

Pertinently, his doctor has since said that he felt Paul was worrying unnecessarily, as his drinking was moderate.

The Henri Paul blood samples at the very heart of the Diana controversy reveal something else quite bizarre - that he had breathed in a very high quantity of carbon monoxide before his death: the same amount as a person committing suicide by putting a rubber hose from the exhaust through the window of his car.

Such a level would have left Paul visibly disorientated and almost certainly comatose. Yet at the Ritz that evening, minutes before he drove Diana, the CCTV cameras show him walking normally and even kneeling down to retie his shoe laces and gracefully standing up again.

It is now accepted that he never drew breath after the crash, ruling out the possibility that he inhaled poisonous exhaust fumes. Significantly, Dodi’s blood was tested and was shown to contain no carbon monoxide.

The tainted blood samples remain - as Lord Stevens and toxicology experts say in the Operation Paget report - a complete mystery. One possible explanation is that they are not the driver’s blood at all but come from someone else in the public mortuary who had committed suicide that weekend.

So were the samples tampered with? Were they mistakenly, or deliberately, swopped with those from another corpse?

The first samples of blood taken from the driver’s body were left unattended and unlabelled in a fridge at the mortuary for more than a day until Monday, September 1.

So what will happen next? Lord Stevens is to be called as a witness at the inquest. He will be asked by lawyers for Henri Paul’s family about the ‘gross discrepancy’ between the soothing account he gave in the Paris apartment on their son and the one contained in the official Operation Paget report.

He is also likely to be quizzed on the plethora of evidence on Diana’s death never included in his final report. Of particular concern is the testimony of a Paris jeweller, who sold Dodi an engagement ring on the day before the crash, sparking theories that the playboy was about to propose to Diana.

Of course, Diana might well have turned down any such marriage. But the jeweller, in a written complaint, says that he was pressured - unsuccessfully - by the Paget detectives to change his tale and say it was just a ‘friendship’ ring. There are other worrying matters too. The preliminary inquest hearings have revealed that important eyewitnesses of the crash - including those claiming there was a blinding flash in the tunnel and that they saw a mystery white Fiat Uno at the scene which may have deliberately clipped Diana and Dodi’s Mercedes, causing the accident - were never interviewed by Lord Stevens’ team.

Instead, his detectives relied heavily on old statements made years ago to the French police. Now Lord Justice Scott Baker has ruled that crash onlookers and other witnesses should give evidence via video links from Paris and in person at the London inquest. The jury will be taken to the accident site in the Alma tunnel in the French capital.

One important new witness will be a French fireman, Christophe Pelat. He discovered the body of a paparazzi photographer named James Andanson - thought by conspiracy theorists to have been driving the white Fiat Uno - in a remote woodland with a shot in the head three years after the crash.

The photographer amassed millions selling photographs of Diana and is suspected of tipping off British, American and French intelligence services on the Princess’s movements during her last holiday.

Andanson gave conflicting accounts of his movements to French police. They concluded that he was not in Paris on the night of the crash, although he had chased the couple relentlessly as they cruised on Dodi’s yacht the Jonikel in the days beforehand.

Why, one might ask, would he have stopped following her when there was still money to be made?

The evidence of Christophe Pelat is vital. It might indicate that Andanson knew the truth and was disposed of. Yet the fireman’s name and testimony - just like those of many others - appeared nowhere in the Operation Paget report in what was billed as the definitive account on Diana’s death.

Of course, all this must be somewhat discomforting for Lord Stevens. As a life peer and now an international security adviser to Gordon Brown, he moves in the upper echelons of society with a hitherto untarnished halo as a formidable investigator.

Meanwhile, Lord Justice Scott Baker faces the challenging task of guiding a jury through a monumentally complex inquest. For if the 12 men and women leave their verdict open - if there is no conclusion on the cause of the Princess’s tragic death - there will have to be a police inquiry.

Airport security arsenal adds behavior detection

DULLES, Va. — Doug Kinsey stands near the security line at Dulles International Airport, watching the passing crowd in silence. Suddenly, his eyes lock on a passenger in jeans and a baseball cap.

The man in his 20s looks around the terminal as though he’s searching for something. He chews his fingernails and holds his boarding pass against his mouth, seemingly worried.

Kinsey, a Transportation Security Administration screener, huddles with his supervisor, Waverly Cousins, and the two agree: The man could be a problem. Kinsey moves in to talk to him.

The episode this month is one of dozens of encounters airline passengers are having each day — often unwittingly — with a fast-growing but controversial security technique called behavior detection. The practice, pioneered by Israeli airport security, involves picking apparently suspicious people out of crowds and asking them questions about travel plans or work. All the while, their faces, body language and speech are being studied.

The TSA has trained nearly 2,000 employees to use the tactic, which is raising alarms among civil libertarians and minorities who fear illegal arrests and ethnic profiling. It’s also worrying researchers, including some in the Homeland Security Department, who say it’s unproven and potentially ineffectual.

“Terrorists or anybody who knows about screening will find this very easy to beat if you give them a little training,” says Michigan State University professor Timothy Levine, who’s published more than a dozen papers on deception and communication.

Advocates say behavior detection strengthens security by replacing “hunches” about who seems troublesome and worthy of scrutiny with research that shows how suspicious people actually look, sound and act.

Its growing use portends a transformation in airport security, and perhaps beyond. The technique could be used in anything from interrogations to job interviews. U.S. troops, FBI agents, Customs officers, consular officials, personnel managers and thousands of police at dozens of agencies have been trained to observe whether suspects, informants or applicants are being truthful. Bus drivers, airline ticket agents and airport custodians, sales clerks and waiters are getting milder instruction in spotting odd behavior.

At the vanguard is the TSA, which plans to train 600 more screeners in the next year and have “behavior-detection officers” in every major airport to spot possible terrorists.

“We have to get out front and take the fight to them and let them know that when they show up at an airport, they’re susceptible to being identified,” TSA chief Kip Hawley says.

The future could be a “Blade Runner” world of cameras and body scanners that monitor voice, movement, speech, gait, pulse, perspiration and body odor to spot suspicious people. Federal agencies are pouring millions of dollars into automated sensors that could read vital signs and help flag suspicious people. One leading San Francisco researcher, Paul Ekman, says he’s gotten Defense Department funding to finish his work building an interactive training game that teaches people to be alert for facial expressions that often precede a physical assault.

“Computer power can extract patterns the human wouldn’t see,” says University of Arizona psychologist Judee Burgoon. She led a recent Air Force- and Homeland Security-funded study that analyzed technology utilizing video cameras to chart tell-tale hand and head movements. “Much needs to be done” before machines can accurately analyze people, the study concluded, but the research “is a small first step.”

Computerized physiological readings chill researchers such as David Matsumoto of San Francisco State University, who’s spent 25 years studying how people reveal emotion in split-second “microexpressions” that flash across their faces. “We’re talking about feelings we don’t want others to know in the first place,” he says. Authorities “are becoming privy to information we’re not consenting to give.”

Hawley, who has emerged as the government’s leading behavior-detection advocate, says automated detection “is in the far distant future.” The TSA’s present system, he says, “is phenomenally successful” — even if more than 90% of questionable people turn out innocent.

At Dulles last week, Kinsey, the TSA behavior officer, approached a suspicious passenger going through security and guided the man to an open area for additional screening. Kinsey did a routine passport and boarding-pass check, searched the man’s messenger-style bag and chatted him up while paying attention to what he said and how he said it.

The man had caught Kinsey’s eye not just because he acted nervously, but because he acted differently. Other travelers shuffling blankly along the security line that quiet afternoon showed all the emotion of cattle. This passenger’s contrasting anxiety showed, in TSA parlance, “deviations from baseline behavior.” He merited a closer look, a face-to-face conversation where Kinsey could scrutinize his body, voice and speech to see if his score on a TSA checklist rose to a level requiring police attention.

“We’re looking to see if there’s any cognitive overload in responses to simple questions like, How are you today? Where are you headed?” says Carl Maccario, a TSA program analyst in Boston who helped launch the agency program at Logan International Airport in 2003. “If you’re trying to be deceptive or up to some malfeasance, people can pick up cues the body will display when that conflict is going on.”

But the ability of screeners to reliably detect deceit during conversations is questioned by Homeland Security researchers, who early this year launched a study of what security officials should look for to find dangerous people. “The research in this area is fairly immature,” says Larry Willis, who manages the department’s Project Hostile Intent. “We’re trying to establish whether there is something to detect.”

When Kinsey asked questions, the anxious look that the passenger wore in the security line melted into a smile as he explained how he got confused going through the unfamiliar Dulles terminal to make a connecting flight. Assured by the passenger’s chatty comfort and by his own search, Kinsey wished him a good trip without taking down his name.

The encounter underscored the rarity of problems that the TSA program has uncovered since January 2006 when it was expanded from a handful of airports.

In that time, 43,000 of the millions of travelers watched by crowd-scanning behavior-detection screeners have appeared suspicious enough to warrant a closer look, the TSA says. The closer looks generated 3,100 calls from the TSA to police for further questioning.

The police arrested 278 of those people, none on terror charges. Among the charges described in TSA news releases about behavior-related arrests are immigration violations and possessing guns and illegal prescription drugs.

At least one behavior-related stop has “developed meaningful information of interest to the intelligence community,” Hawley says. And many people who were questioned by police but not arrested were found with problems that could indicate terrorist intent, such as having fake identifications or appearing to do surveillance. Such incidents are logged with a subject’s name into a federal database.

“The vast majority of them are hiding something,” Hawley says of travelers who raise the highest level of suspicion.

The program has won converts among skeptics such as security technologist Bruce Schneier. The frequent TSA critic says behavior detection may be “really powerful” because it tries to find terrorists instead of keeping them from carrying an ever-changing list of dangerous objects on airplanes. “If you focus on a tactic, the terrorists pick a different tactic. This focuses on the bad guy,” Schneier says.

But critics who question behavior detection wonder if the TSA could net the same number of criminals by randomly pulling 43,000 travelers aside for extra screening and a few questions.

“It doesn’t seem like a lot of arrests, given how easy it is to arrest someone,” says Barry Steinhardt, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s liberty and technology program. “It’s a waste of law-enforcement resources” on a “completely unproven” program. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, supports the concept of singling out travelers based on behavior but fears that relying on screener observations could lead to ethnic profiling. “Any time you move from an objective system to one that is subjective, it is prone to abuse,” Zogby says.

Many leading researchers cite potential drawbacks and flaws but say behavior detection backed up by research and ample training can focus and improve security.

“The question is, by how much and at what cost?” says Bella DePaulo, a prominent deception researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “And by cost, I don’t mean money. I mean the cost of falsely accusing or stopping people. If this program becomes known and somebody gets pulled over, there’s a cloud of suspicion.”

The method by which screeners spot suspicious air travelers is questioned by Ekman, the San Francisco psychologist and one of the first deception scientists. Research and training has focused on people’s ability to detect deceit during interviews — not from silently watching someone, Ekman says.

Ekman jump-started deception detection in the 1960s when he studied a film of a psychiatric patient assuring doctors that she was not suicidal and could be released. Days later, the woman committed suicide. Scouring the film, Ekman noticed fleeting facial expressions on the patient lasting one-fifteenth of a second — he called them “microexpressions” — that revealed the distress she tried to hide. Ekman’s theory — that people reveal their true emotions through facial expressions, words, gestures and other uncontrollable responses — is the basis of contemporary behavior detection.

Ekman advised TSA officials while they were developing their system four years ago. His company, the Ekman Group, was paid $1 million to train 1,200 TSA inspectors last month in his interviewing technique. He proposed a study to Homeland Security researchers to find behaviors indicating hostile intent among travelers walking around airports.

“We might find things that are important clues that someone has malevolent intent,” Ekman says.

Willis, the Homeland Security researcher, said efforts are now focused on interviewing travelers, “not the broader and more difficult area of suspicious behavior detection.”

Levine, the Michigan State researcher, saw his suspicions of behavior-detection science grow when he did a study in 2005 of how well three groups of subjects detected lies told by lab volunteers. The subjects who were told to look for lies by focusing on the volunteers’ foot-tapping and other meaningless behaviors did just as well at lie-detection as subjects who watched facial expressions and other supposed cues to deceit. Those two groups did much better than a third group that got no instructions.

“With training, you just get people paying attention a little more,” Levine says. That might help security officers find easy-to-spot terrorists such as Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who looked to fellow passengers like he was crazed but nonetheless was allowed on the Paris-to-Miami flight. “And catching the Richard Reids,” Levine says, “is a good thing.”

The BBC - How Did It Get So Bad?

This article by Adrian Morgan (Giraldus Cambrensis of Western Resistance) appeared today in Family Security Matters and is reproduced with their permission. Alexandra Palace

Certain departments within the BBC seem to have their own political agenda. When BBC journalist Alan Johnston was kidnapped in Gaza this year, the head of the BBC Middle East bureau admitted engaging in secret talks with leaders of the terrorist group Hamas to secure a release. Before Johnston was freed, the journalist made a video statement in which he bemoaned the “huge suffering of the Palestinian people….” He spoke of their “absolute despair after nearly 40 years of Israeli occupation which has been supported by the West.” Johnston turned his attention to Afghanistan, blaming the Americans and British: “In all this, we can see the British government endlessly working to occupy, err, the Muslim lands, against the will of the people in those places.”

After his release, Johnston never said he had been subjected to violence to make him say such anti-British statements. After any Palestinian suicide bombing, Johnston would interview the mother and relatives of the terrorist involved, always failing to interview the relatives of the Israeli victims. Damien Thompson, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph has noted that the BBC’s “reporting of the Middle East has been so relentlessly pro-Palestinian for so long, and that coverage is so influential, that it finds itself an actual player in the conflict, as opposed to an impartial observer.”

The Balen Report was an internal BBC document which was commissioned in 2004 to investigate complaints of anti-Israeli bias in the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East conflicts. Even though the BBC is funded by the taxpayer, the organization allegedly spent $400,000 of tax-payers’ money to prevent the report from being made available to the public. The Telegraph quoted lawyer Steven Sugar, who was using the Freedom of Information Act to have the Balen Report released. The report was widely believed to have found the BBC guilty of anti-Israeli bias.

Sugar said: “This is a serious report about a serious issue and has been compiled with public money. I lodged the request because I was concerned that the BBC’s reporting of the second intifada was seriously unbalanced against Israel, but I think there are other issues at stake now in the light of the BBC’s reaction.” On April 27, 2007 the BBC won its battle to suppress the report’s publication. In 2006, an independent review, commissioned by BBC governors, had found that the corporation’s coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict had been to “constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an incomplete and, in that sense, misleading picture.” That report had found that the BBC “favored Israel” and claimed there was a “failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other side lives under occupation.”

The decision to suppress the Balen Report was condemned by Tory MP Philip Davies, who said: “This seems to be outrageous. If the BBC are embarrassed about what they are doing they should not be doing it. If they are not embarrassed they should release the information.” On October 30, 2004, on the BBC Radio 4 show “From Our Own Correspondent”, journalist Barbabra Plett had said she had cried when, in the previous month, Yasser Arafat was dying. She had said: “When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose from his ruined compound, I started to cry.” Immediately after Plett’s radio statement, a BBC News spokesman admitted that there had been hundreds of complaints, but claimed that Plett had upheld high standards in “fairness, accuracy and balance”. In November 2005, the BBC governors ruled that Plett had “breached the requirements of due impartiality”.

The BBC runs a “rolling news” channel, called News 24. One of its frequent guests and commentators on Middle East events is Palestinian-born Abdel Bari-Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. In June 2007, Bari-Atwan told a Lebanese TV station: “If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight… Allah willing, [Iran] will attack Israel.” Defending its decision to keep Bari-Atwan as a pundit, the BBC said that it was obliged to present “a range of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under-represented.”

In 2002 the then-head of BBC News, RIchard Sambrook, warned his journalists that they needed to be more concerned about “impartiality” on contentious issues such as the Middle East, the European Union and the gap between those living in the countryside and those in towns. Sambrook would later commission the Balen Report. His warnings were not heeded. In January 2005 an independent review commissioned by BBC governors found that reporting on the European Union was riddled with ignorance. Presenters were described as “ill-briefed” and there was lack of knowledge about the EU “at every stage” of the news gathering and presenting process. The report claimed that BBC reporting of this subject needed to be “more demonstrably impartial”, but stopped short of stating that the BBC was “pro-EU”.

Even though the BBC’s governors are appointed by the government, a poll revealed in July 2005 that four out of ten Labour party members of parliament (from the same party that has selected governors since 1997) claimed that they did not think the BBC was “free from influence and bias”. The figure amongst Tory MPs was higher, with six out of ten believing this.

In 2005, the BBC advised journalists to be cautious in the use of the word “terrorist”, as the term was deemed to be “judgmental”. In October 2006, a senior executive at the BBC, Richard Klein, admitted at a conference that the corporation was “ignoring” mainstream opinion and was out of touch with the British public. A month earlier the BBC held an “impartiality” summit. Alan Yentob, head of BBC Drama, admitted that he would not air a Koran being thrown in a garbage can, lest the act offended Muslims, but he would allow a Bible to be shown being thrown in a bin. The impartiality summit found that there was an anti-Christian bias within the corporation, as well as an anti-American bias.

A former political editor for the BBC, Andrew Marr, announced in the 2006 impartiality summit that the BBC was “a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people compared with the population at large.” Jeff Randall, a former business editor at the BBC, gave damning testimony. He said that he had complained about the “multicultural stance” of the BBC to a top news executive and was told: “The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it.” When Randall wore cufflinks into work, which bore the Union Jack (the national flag) he was told: “You can’t do that, that’s like the National Front!” The National Front is a racist political group. To Americans, the notion of being accused of racism for wearing an item carrying the Stars and Stripes would be unthinkable, but not so in the Britain of the BBC.

The issue of the BBC’s liberal and left-wing bias was brought to a head earlier this year. In June a BBC-commissioned report authored by John Bridcut was published, which stated that the corporation was existing in a “left-leaning comfort zone”, and that it had an “innate liberal bias”.
The full report, entitled From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel can be found in a pdf document.

In July 2005, after the 7/7 Muslim bombings in London, which killed 52 innocent people, the BBC had a discussion show entitled “Questions of Security: A BBC News Special”. The corporation admitted that it had deliberately stacked the audience with Muslims. As a proportion of the audience, there were five times as many Muslims as the proportion of Muslims in the national demographic.

During the 2006 Lebanese/Israel conflict, one BBC report by Orla Guerin, wrongly claimed that the Lebanese town of Bint Jbail had been “wiped out” by an Israeli bombardment.

In October 2006, while the BBC was discussing plans to introduce news anchor women wearing Muslim headscarfs, it was noticed that an existing news presenter, Fiona Bruce, had been wearing a crucifix. She had worn this on BBC News for a few years. A discussion among BBC heads included suggestions that she should not be seen to show religious bias.

The PC and leftist bias has extended to the BBC Drama Department. The popular drama “Spooks” is known in the US as “MI-5″ and is entertaining hokum. In November 2006, the BBC was facing complaints ofo anti-Christian bias, after an episode of this show featured religious terrorists murdering people from another faith. The terrorists were evangelical Christians, and the victims were Muslims. The show again foundered on the banks of realism and showed political prejudice with the first episode of its fifth series. This involved Al Qaeda terrorists taking control of the Saudi Embassy and murdering people inside. Except the Al Qaeda terrorists were not Muslim terrorists - they were dastardly Israeli agents, posing as Muslims. Jew-hating Islamists across the country must have been pleased.

“Casualty” is a long-running hospital drama, where patients get injured, brought into an Emergency Room, and then all their emotional problems are solved by the improbably intrusive staff. Recently, the show was to have featured the aftermath of a suicide-bomber blowing himself up in a bus station, with all the consequent mayhem and social hand-wringing amongst the caring, sensitive hospital staff. The suicide bomber was originally written as an Islamist. By the time BBC executives had got their hands on the script, the bomber had changed his allegiance to become an animal rights activists. Animal rights campaigners in the UK have set off car bombs, sent letter bombs, and have even indulged in grave-robbing, but none has so far been a suicide bomber.

Lord Tebbitt, who served in Thatcher’s government and whose wife was paralyzed in an IRA bomb attack in 1984, condemned the decision to change the Casualty storyline to avoid offending Muslims. He said: “People were perfectly free during the violence in Northern Ireland to produce dramas about terrorism for which presumably they might have been accused of stereotyping IRA terrorists or even suggesting that all Catholics were terrorists. What is the difference here? The BBC exists in a world of New Labour political correctness.”

The BBC produces international radio shows on its “World Service”, in the manner of “Voice of America”. These are produced at Bush House near Piccadilly. The reports from the BBC World Service used to be influential - so much so that in 1978 Bulgarian dissident and World Service broadcaster Georgi Markov was assassinated by a Bulgarian communist in the street outside Bush House. A device disguised as an umbrella was used to inject Markov with a pellet of ricin, as he stood at a bus stop. Markov died four days later. Now, the BBC World Service has succumbed to the leftist climate. In March this year, Professor Frank Stewart claimed that the BBC’s Arabic language service, which began in 1938, was “anti-Western and anti-democratic”.

Professor Stewart claimed that the Arabic BBC service spoke of Saddam’s 2002 election victory as if it was “straight” news, and said that Assad of Syria also received favorable coverage. When a member of the US State Department referred to Assad’s Ba’athist regime as a dictatorship, the interviewer “immediately interrupted and reprimanded him”. Stewart wrote that “authoritarian regimes and armed militants of the Arab world” had received “sympathetic treatment”.

The bias which exists on the BBC has been so frequent that blog sites have been created to document its transgressions, such as Busting BBC Bias and Biased BBC. As an institution connected with government, and considering the current Labour government is obsessed with “spin” and propaganda, bias is to expected within the institution. But the extreme examples of its bias, as presented to innocent children, are shocking.

The BBC has a strong presence on the internet, which rarely mentions the word “Muslim” when dealing with Muslim terrorism or crimes. The word “Muslim” appears mainly when Muslim “victimhood” is described. The BBC has a show called “Newsround” which purports to present news in a way that young people can understand. Two BBC internet articles connected with this Newsround show were subsequently re-edited after they initially appeared. Tom Gross, writing in The National Review presented the original content of one recent article.

Published this month to coincide with the sixth anniversary of 9′11, the article was entitled “Why did they do it?”. This gave an “explanation” of 9/11 from an Al Qaeda perspective: “The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda - who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks. In the past, al-Qaeda leaders have declared a holy war - called a jihad - against the US. As part of this jihad, al-Qaeda members believe attacking US targets is something they should do. When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.”

Remember that this was aimed at children. And of course, Al Qaeda are “widely believed” but not explicitly stated to have carried out the 9/11 attacks, opening the door for leftist and lunatic conspiracy theories. The BBC later amended the text, but still maintain that “Al-Qaeda is unhappy with America and other countries getting involved in places like the Middle East.” The amended text still tries to justify terrorism and thus implicitly blames the victims of 9/11. Another recent Newsround article aimed at kids begins: “Al-Qaeda has been accused of being behind a series of attacks and bombings since its formation in the late 1980s.” Al Qaeda is not just “accused” of terror attacks, it admits and actively glorifies its involvement in terrorist atrocities.

Tom Gross has pointed out that in 2005, the same children’s section of its internet site described the Holocaust, but astoundingly failed to mention the fact that Jews were victims, let alone that six million Jews died. The original text merely stated: “Most of the victims died because they belonged to certain racial or religious groups which the Nazis wanted to wipe out, even though they were German citizens. This kind of killing is called genocide.” The article failed to mention the Jews in France, Poland, the Netherlands and elsewhere who were not German citizens, but still were sent to Nazi gas chambers.

It is bad enough for the BBC to be blatantly anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Christian and pro-Islamist. But recently in a series of scandals the BBC has been exposed blatantly lying to the public. To compound their guilt, they have lied to the nation’s children. The problems began in March this year. “Blue Peter” is a children’s magazine show which has been on air since 1958. It frequently invites child viewers to take part in competitions. When I was a child, the competition entries were sent by mail, but now premium rate phone lines are employed. It was revealed that a phone competition to raise money for Unicef had failed to select a winner, so a child who was visiting the studio was asked to “phone” the show. She was awarded the prize. TV regulator Ofcom ruled that the BBC should pay $100,000 for the deceit.

Most recently, the same show was involved in a similar incident. “Blue Peter” has a menagerie of “pets”. The first of these was a mongrel called Petra who was introduced in 1963. The latest in the line of pets for children with no animals at home is a cat who first appeared in January 2006. The nation’s children were given a vote, and chose the name “Cookie”. For some reason, a producer decided to ignore the viewers’ (expensive) phone votes and claimed that they had chosen the name “Socks”. Perhaps a lover of Bill Clinton, whose cat bore the same name, the producer has since been fired. The BBC refuses to comment on its deception.

Though the story of Socks aka Cookie made front page news this weekend, one should not be surprised. I remember the lies they told about “Petra”. On Friday November 22, 1963, aged five, I was waiting to see Blue Peter. The week before, the show had announced that the nation’s kids had voted to name the new Blue Peter pet “Peter”. Peter was a male puppy, but shortly before the show went on air, the creature had died. Rather than confront kids with the truth, presenters Valerie Singleton and Christopher Trace claimed that they had “made a mistake” and said that Peter was in fact a girl. Fiery producer Biddy Baxter had substituted a female puppy, as it was the closest look-alike for the deceased TV pet. This substitute animal was “Petra”. Despite such deception, aimed at protecting children’s feelings, the show was interrupted with the news that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Which is why I remember my father (who was in the room at the time) fuming about the “nonsense” of the BBC being unable to ascertain the gender of a puppy.

In July this year, Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, admitted that at least six BBC shows had involved rigged competitions. As a result, he cancelled all subsequent phone-in competitions. More recent revelations of BBC deception involved a further five faked phone-in shows.

The BBC has come a long way since it began broadcasting radio shows in 1922, under its original title the “British Broadcasting Company”. It began TV broadcasting in 1936 from Alexandra Palace, though these broadcasts were suspended for the duration of WWII. In 1937, the company became nationalized as the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC still produces good natural history documentaries, but its dramas are hackneyed. With a few rare exceptions its comedy fails to raise a titter. Its news output is still biased, and every UK citizen with a TV is expected to pay $270 per year to be patronized and lied to by the BBC’s mandarins.

Is the BBC worth its license fee? If it cannot present the truth, and deliberately misinforms both adults and children, it short-changes the nation in more ways than one. What was once a great British institution is now a club for the commissars of political correctness. Alexandra Palace, where BBC TV began, is no longer used by the BBC. The last “Open University” shows were made there in 1981. Alexandra Palace was built when Britain had an empire. That empire was given away after World War II. In a symptom of the times we live in, Alexandra Palace still has a purpose. In 2006, while London marked the first anniversary of 7/7, Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood held an “Islam Expo” at the site. Last month, the terror supporting Hizb ut-Tahrir held its annual conference at Alexandra Palace.

Israel Opens Criminal Probe of Prime Minister

A new corruption scandal is dogging Israel’s embattled Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. As Robert Berger reports from VOA’s Jerusalem bureau, it could distract him from efforts to revive the peace process with the Palestinians.

Israeli police are opening a criminal investigation into Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s purchase of a home in Jerusalem. The attorney general suspects bribery and fraud because Mr. Olmert bought the house at far below the market value.

According to an investigation by the state comptroller, Mr. Olmert received a discount of more than $300,000 in exchange for helping a developer obtain construction permits from Jerusalem authorities. This allegedly occurred when he was a Cabinet minister in 2004.

In a statement, Mr. Olmert denied any wrongdoing and insisted that the price he paid was fair.

Right-wing opposition leaders are calling for the prime minister to resign. But Michael Partem of the Movement for Quality Government says he is innocent until proven guilty.

“The investigation is not an indictment. It is only an investigation,” he noted. “So until there is a decision as to whether or not to indict the Prime Minister, we would not be calling on him to step down.”

The scandal is another blow to Mr. Olmert whose popularity has plunged since an official inquiry described his handling of last year’s Lebanon War as a failure.

The prime minister is also trying to advance peace talks with the Palestinians. Mr. Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are working on a document on Palestinian statehood to be presented at an international peace conference planned for November in the United States.

Partem says the investigation is bound to be a distraction from the prime minister’s official duties.

“It is certainly not healthy, and this is obviously not within his purview of the job,” he said. “And it is wasting his time and it is wasting our resources.”

It is the latest in a series of scandals involving government officials. The justice minister stepped down in a sex scandal, the finance minister resigned amid charges of embezzlement and Mr. Olmert is facing separate allegations of influence peddling. The scandals have eroded public confidence in the government.

Israel Says Tension with Syria Subsiding

Israel is playing down tensions with its arch-enemy to the north - Syria. As Robert Berger reports from VOA’s Jerusalem bureau, there are new moves to bring Syria into the Middle East peace process.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel is not interested in war with Syria. Speaking behind closed doors to parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Mr. Olmert said he believes tensions between the two countries will subside.

There have been unconfirmed reports in the foreign press of a secret Israeli air strike on a Syrian nuclear facility more than two weeks ago. Syria denies reports that it received nuclear materials from North Korea, but confirms that Israeli jets violated its air space.

The incident occurred months after Israel warned of a Syrian military buildup. Israeli generals said Syria could opt for war to retrieve the strategic Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967.

“Syria all the time said that it has one hand extended to peace and the other one is preparing for war,” said Liel. “Israel believes the second half, that Syria is preparing for war, and did not believe the peace option.”

The United States has signaled that it would invite Syria to an international peace conference expected to take place in November. Israeli spokesman Mark Regev says Israel would not object to Syrian participation.

“Israel is interested in as many Arab states attending this meeting as possible, states that support peace, that support reconciliation, that oppose terrorism,” said Regev.

Israel hopes that if Syria attends the conference it would be pulled away from the radicals and into the camp of the Arab moderates. At the same time, Israel says it will not resume peace talks until Syria cuts ties with Iran and stops supporting Islamic militant groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

North Korea accuses US of helping Israel develop nuclear weapons

SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea accused the United States on Tuesday of actively providing nuclear weapons assistance to Israel while seeking to deprive other countries of the right to peaceful nuclear programs.

North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator, meanwhile, denied accusations that his country had cooperated with Syria on a secret nuclear project.

The United States is “shutting its eyes” to the nuclear programs of its allies while “taking issue with the rights to nuclear activities of other countries for peaceful purposes,” North Korea’s communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

“As an illustration, the U.S. has long actively promoted and cooperated with the Israeli nuclear armament plan,” the newspaper said. “They decided to provide assistance to Israel’s nuclear development program. Then the U.S. dispatched nuclear experts to Israel and transferred highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for nuclear weapons, to them.”

Israel is widely believed to be a nuclear power, but its government has never formally confirmed or denied that it has nuclear weapons. The Israeli “nuclear ambiguity” doctrine is largely meant to scare potential enemies from considering an annihilating attack while denying them the rationale for developing their own nuclear deterrent.

North Korea’s criticism came amid news reports that Israeli warplanes attacked an installation in northern Syria earlier this month which was allegedly either a joint Syrian-North Korean nuclear project or a shipment of arms for Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

North Korea has flatly denied any nuclear link with Syria, calling the accusation a fabrication by “dishonest forces” who want to obstruct recent progress in North Korean-U.S. relations.

“That matter is fabricated by lunatics, so you can ask those lunatics to explain it,” North Korea’s top nuclear envoy, Kim Kye Gwan, told reporters Tuesday after arriving in Beijing for talks on his country’s nuclear weapons program.

International negotiations aimed at convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear programs have reported progress in recent months, with the North shutting down its only functioning nuclear reactor in July and pledging to declare and disable all its nuclear facilities by year’s end.

A new round of six-party talks — involving the U.S., the Koreas, China, Russia and Japan — is scheduled this week, with the participants expected to firm up a deadline for North Korea to disable its nuclear facilities.

How easy is it to create false flag terrorism?

How much nuclear material would terrorists such as renegades within CIA or MI6 need to make a Nuclear Bomb to blame on Muslims to undermine or eliminate our DEMOCRACY?

A simple gun-type nuclear bomb were you use conventional explosives to fire one charge of material into the other to obtain critical neutron density and hence a nuclear explosion would require approximately 50 kilograms of Highly Enriched Uranium — an amount that would fit in an MI6 or CIA suitcase.

The basic first-generation implosion-type bombs like the Nagasaki bomb can be made with 6 kilograms of plutonium or 15 kilograms of Highly Enriched Uranium. With these amounts, a terrorist group such as a Renegade CIA or MI6 could potentially build a bomb with the power of thousands of tons of C4 high explosive, which is what MI6 & Guliani Associates used on 7/7 in the London underground blaming Muslims.

Sophisticated nuclear weapon states can potentially make nuclear bombs with smaller amounts of nuclear material and Renegade CIA and MI6 could easily thieve these and again misappropriate public funding to pay its mindless minions to terrorise the population.

If anyone is in any doubt why the British Government refuses to allow a public enquiry into 7/7 they should understand it is because the public enquiry would identify the Explosive was military grade C4 and the explosions came from under the trains.

The public would then ask, how did a Muslim terrorist get hold of military grade C4 and how is it physically possible for a Muslim terrorist to put a rucksack bomb under a tube train whilst it is still moving? - Immediately the general public would smell the whiffiest of RATS and of course the real culprits would then be in the frame CIA/Guliani Associates (as in former mayor of New York Guliani) & British MI6.

War psychosis of our ruling class, check out this experts take on what is really going on:

How many people know that on both 911 and 7/7 identical terror bomb scenarios were being practiced by the security services and military exactly as to what really happened. On 911 there was a jet hijacking training operation ongoing and on 7/7 there was an exercise involving the same trains, same stations and same scenario to what was being practiced – Google Video: Terrorstorm

The same goes for 911; Renegade CIA did this inside job False Flag terrorism also, “the evidence” is overwhelming, indeed the Treason goes straight to Bush’s door because he sighed an executive order number W199I-WF-213589. If researchers goggle this number and then bypass the first few links put up by the CIA to misinform the true extent of the BUSH deception and protection of Criminals & Terrorists becomes apparent.

On both occasions, 7/7 & 911, the political motive behind the “False Flag” “Inside Job” terrorism was to secure fewer Human rights for British and US citizens and reduce civil liberties whilst producing a pretext for “Profitable never ending War on terrorism” in which corporations are making Millions if not Billion in WAR profits.

Halliburton charged the US tax payer over $24,000,000 (million) to deliver fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad, a distance of about 300 miles, which under normal circumstances would have cost only $3,000 - $10,000 – does this sound ridiculous? That is because it is ridiculous – BUT FACT.

Once you realise 911 was a deliberate demolition the whole world becomes a safer place because every other lie the UK & US governments spout then becomes so much easier for YOU to see.