Docudharma Times Friday August 21

C.I.A. Said to Use Outsiders to Put Bombs on Drones  



By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: August 20, 2009



WASHINGTON – From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders, according to government officials and current and former employees.

The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.

Robert Fisk: Democracy will not bring freedom

 

 Friday, 21 August 2009

So they voted. But for what? Democracy? Certainly not “Jeffersonian” democracy, as President Obama reminded us. Yes, the Afghans wanted to vote. They showed great courage in the face of the Taliban’s threats. But there’s a problem.

It’s not just the stitched-up Karzai administration that will almost certainly return, nor the war criminals he employs (Abdul Rashid Dostum should be in the dock at The Hague for war crimes, not in Kabul), nor the corruption and the hideous human rights abuses, but the unassailable fact that ethnically-divided societies vote on ethnic lines.

 Europe

Putin criticizes Russian “technological discipline” after hydro accident

In the wake of an accident at a Russian hydroelectric plant that has left at least 17 people dead, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says there is a need for “serious inspections” of all major infrastructure in the country.

RUSSIA | 20.08.2009

Speaking at a government meeting in Moscow on Thursday, Putin said all “strategic and vitally important” installations in Russia needed greater supervision.

“The recent tragic events at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant showed with all clarity how much more we should do to increase reliability of technical constructions on the whole and hydrotechnical ones in particular,” he said. “Technological discipline is very low.”

The official death toll from the catastrophic flood that engulfed Russia’s largest hydroelectric station in the country’s Khakassia region rose to 17 on Thursday after search teams found another three bodies.

Russian officials said there was still some hope that some of the 58 people still missing after the Aug. 17 accident could be found in air pockets amid the flooded wreckage.

Anger at Lockerbie bomber welcome

Relatives of those who died in the bombing of a US plane over Lockerbie voiced anger as the man convicted of the attack was welcomed home in Libya.

The BBC Friday, 21 August 2009  

Crowds in Tripoli greeted Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, after he was freed from prison on compassionate grounds.

The son of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi called his release a courageous step by Scotland and Britain.

But there was angry reaction from families of those killed in the bombing and from US President Barack Obama.

Most of the 270 people who died when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie in 1988 were Americans.

Mr Obama said Megrahi’s release, eight years into his life sentence, was “a mistake”.

He said his administration had told the Libyan government that Megrahi, who has terminal cancer, should not receive a hero’s welcome and should be placed under house arrest.

Africa

Mugabe using police to crush opposition, MDC says

 Law enforcement officials are carrying out a covert operation to arrest Movement for Democratic Change politicians on trumped up charges as a way to diminish the opposition’s clout in a fragile unity government, say MDC officials.  

 By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer

and a correspondent    

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA; AND HARARE, ZIMBABWE – The party of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is working with the country’s law enforcement agencies in a covert operation designed to harass, intimidate, and decimate its chief partner in Zimbabwe’s fragile, seven-month-old coalition government, the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC officials have told the Monitor.

The covert operation targets MDC supporters in rural areas – despite an agreement between the two parties to work together to rebuild the country and its shattered economy – the MDC says. The operation aims to arrest or intimidate enough of MDC’s parliamentarians to winnow down MDC’s its majority, and thus retain political control.

MDC deputy national organizing secretary Morgan Komichi says that Mugabe’s party, the ZANU-PF, continues to use its militia, including so-called “war veterans” and others used in land invasions of white farmers, along with the police, to silence its MDC parliamentarians, and is also turning the heat on ordinary supporters of the MDC in the rural areas.  

Middle East

 President Ahmadinejad nominates Cabinet of inexperienced cronies

From The Times

August 21, 2009

Martin Fletcher

President Ahmadinejad faces a confrontation with Iran’s disgruntled Parliament after packing his proposed Cabinet with inexperienced cronies and purging it of critics.

MPs including Ali Larijani, the Speaker, warned that as many as 6 of the 21 nominees stood scant chance of being approved when parliament votes on his list in nine days.

Commentators said that the nominees reflected the President’s weakness after his re-election.

An analyst in Tehran told The Times: “He’s in defensive mode, there’s no question about that. He doesn’t have the strength, tenacity and confidence he had before.

USA

 The Deadly Cost of Swooping In to Save a Life

FATAL FLIGHTS A Perilous Rush to Profit

 By Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, August 21, 2009

SANTA ROSA BEACH, Fla. Shortly after midnight on a storm-swept October night in 2004, Tom Palcic, a medical helicopter pilot, started across Choctawatchee Bay to pick up a hospital patient and transport him to a facility 60 miles away.

Such flights are common in the highly competitive multibillion-dollar air-medical business. Although the public profile of medical helicopters has them swooping to crash scenes at the edge of highways, most flights, like Palcic’s, involve shuttling patients between hospitals.

The director of the helicopter program for which Palcic flew called these lucrative patients “golden trout” and pushed pilots to reel in as many as possible. When pilots balked at flying in bad weather, he called them sissies and second-guessed them, records and interviews show.Washington .

Tom Ridge says he was pushed to raise terror alert level



The former Homeland Security secretary says in his new book that he was pressured by other administration officials to raise the threat level in the weeks before the 2004 presidential election.

Associated Press

August 21, 2009

– Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge says in a new book that he was pressured by other members of President George W. Bush’s Cabinet to raise the nation’s terrorism alert level just before the 2004 election.

Ridge says he objected to raising the security level despite the urgings of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, according to a publicity release from Ridge’s publisher. In the end, the alert level was not changed.

But Ridge said the encounter persuaded him to follow through with his plans to leave the administration; he resigned on Nov. 30, 2004.