Homeland Security Leader

From Reuters.com, by Daren Butler

Istanbul - Four Iraqi men are suing U.S. military contractors who they say tortured them while they were detained in Abu Ghraib prison, according to lawsuits being filed at U.S. federal courts on Monday.

The lawsuits allege the contractors committed violations of U.S. law, including torture, war crimes and civil conspiracy.

The scandal over the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib unleashed a wave of global condemnation against the United States when images of abused prisoners surfaced in 2004.

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1:00 PM EDT  US-VISIT Director Robert Mocny will deliver remarks at the Land Border Biometric Exit Industry Day (Arlington, VA).

From New Yorker by Seymour M. Hersh

L ate last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations.

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From TheNewYorker.com, by Seymour M. Hersh

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

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From Financial Times   By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington

The US military cannot locate hundreds of sensitive nuclear missile components, according to several government officials familiar with a Pentagon report on nuclear safeguards.

Robert Gates, US defence secretary, recently fired both the US Air Force chief of staff and air force secretary after an investigation blamed the air force for the inadvertent shipment of nuclear missile nose cones to Taiwan.

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From IHT.com, by Scott Shane
In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda’s engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew about the next plot, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a CIA offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called “knuckledraggers.”

Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mohammed that astonished his fellow CIA officers.

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9:15 AM EDT  US-VISIT Director Robert Mocny will address the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Department of Homeland Security’s International Workshop on Usability and Biometrics on the benefits of biometrics (Washington, DC).

11:00 AM EDT  U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Acting Director Jonathan Scharfen will participate in an E-Verify informational session (Asheville, NC).

12:30 PM PDT  U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Thad Allen will deliver remarks at the American Petroleum Institute Tanker Conference on marine safety initiatives (San Diego, CA).

10:00 AM EDT  Acting Under Secretary of Management Elaine Duke will testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee at her nomination hearing (342 Dirksen Senate Office Building).

10:45 AM EDT  Chief Privacy Officer Hugo Teufel III will participate on a panel entitled “Criminal Aspects of Identity Theft: Financial Records, Data Mining, and Online Threats” at the American Bar Association’s Second Annual National Institute on Cyberlaw: Expanding the Horizons (Washington, DC).

http://homeland.house.gov/SiteDocuments/june2008.pdf

From IndyStar.com, by Kevin O’Neal

Two murder trials – one from a case more than two decades old – ended in convictions on Wednesday.

Jimmy Atteberry, accused of a 1985 rape and murder, was found guilty late Wednesday evening after a jury deliberated for 90 minutes.

“We can finally have some peace, now that this guy got the punishment he deserved,” said Adam Albertson, boyfriend of the woman Atteberry was convicted of killing. “I couldn’t be any happier.”

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