Terror Trials in Guantanamo Bay to Hide 9/11 Details

By Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
April 4, 2011

The sham performed by United States Attorney General Eric Holder -blaming Congress for not allowing a public trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 4 alleged 9/11 plotters- is just part of the American government’s PR campaign to keep important information hidden. This information would otherwise be made public in a traditional Court of Law.

Holder spoke about his frustration with Congress and the fact he ‘was not allowed’ to have an open and public trial of the supposed 9/11 mastermind and four other accomplices.  The American AG wanted to conduct the trial in New York City, but Congress conveniently refused.

Holder said he was left with no choice but to try the suspects in a military court instead of a civil one.  Such court would be set up inside the Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba. The torture central of the United States is a perfect place to carry out the trial, because neither the press nor the public have access to uncensored details. Although Guantanamo Bay provides a marvelous curtain of secrecy, a resource as valuable to any American administration as crude oil, the American government needs to put a sad face to Congress’ decision instead of a celebratory one.

The claims made by Holder that Congress’ decision is “unwise and unwarranted” coupled with the fact he believes he “knows better” is a nice smoke curtain to cheat distracted audiences. This is more so if one remembers that it was the very same American government that initially opposed a formal investigation of the attacks perpetrated on 9/11, and that it was only after a fair amount of public outcry that the Bush administration concocted a doomed to fail commission composed of gate keepers who omitted some of the most important details known today.

“Do I know better than them? Yes. I respect their ability to disagree but they should respect that this is an executive branch function, a unique executive branch function,” the Attorney General said during a press conference. After condemning Congress’ decision, Holder assured the press that he had plenty of confidence in one of George Bush’s children -the military commissions scheme- to bring this process to a good end. “Prosecutors from both the Departments of Defense and Justice have been working together since the beginning of this matter, and I have full faith and confidence in the military commission system to appropriately handle this case as it proceeds,” Holder said.

All Walid Muhammed Salih Mubarak Bin Attash, Ramzi Bin Al Shibh, Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed Al Hawsawi along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are accused of plotting and executing the 9/11 attacks which ended with the murder of 2,976 people.  All of the victims’ names are included in the official public indictment dismissed and unsealed Monday by a federal judge.  See indictment here.

The United States Congress prevent the federal trials of the alleged 9/11 mastermind and his shills by adding this decision to a a defense authorization bill which prohibits terror detainees from being tried in the United States.

ACLU’s Anthony D. Romero, who opposes the use of military commissions showed his discontent about the government’s unexpected decision. “There is a reason this system is condemned: it is rife with constitutional and procedural problems and undermines the fundamental American values that have made us a model throughout the world for centuries.”

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Where’s Jimmy? Just Google His Bar Code

Fox News

Scientists currently tag animals to study their behavior and protect the endangered, but some futurists wonder whether all humans

VeriChip Tracking Chip

should be tagged too.

Scientists tag animals to monitor their behavior and keep track of endangered species. Now some futurists are asking whether all of mankind should be tagged too. Looking for a loved one? Just Google his microchip.

The chips, called radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, emit a simple radio signal akin to a bar code, anywhere, anytime. Futurists say they can be easily implanted under the skin on a person’s arm.

Already, the government of Mexico has surgically implanted the chips, the size of a grain of rice, in the upper arms of staff at the attorney general’s office in Mexico City. The chips contain codes that, when read by scanners, allow access to a secure building, and prevent trespassing by drug lords.

In research published in the International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, Taiwanese researchers postulate that the tags could help save lives in the aftermath of a major earthquake. “Office workers would have their identity badges embedded in their RFID tags, while visitors would be given temporary RFID tags when they enter the lobby,” they suggest. Similarly, identity tags for hospital staff and patients could embed RFID technology.

“Our world is becoming instrumented,” IBM’s chairman and CEO, Samuel J. Palmisano said at an industry conference last week. “Today, there are nearly a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten-millionth of a cent. There are 30 billion radio RFID tags produced globally.”

Having one in every person could relieve anxiety for parents and help save lives, or work on a more mundane level by unlocking doors with the wave of a hand or starting a parked car — that’s how tech enthusiast Amal Graafstra (his hands are pictured above) uses his. But this secure, “instrumented” future is frightening for many civil liberties advocates. Even adding an RFID chip to a driver’s license or state ID card raises objections from concerned voices.

Tracking boxes and containers on a ship en route from Hong Kong is OK, civil libertarians say. So is monitoring cats and dogs with a chip surgically inserted under their skin. But they say tracking people is over-the-top — even though the FDA has approved the devices as safe in humans and animals.

“We are concerned about the implantation of identity chips,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the speech, privacy and technology program at the American Civil Liberties Union. He puts the problem plainly: “Many people find the idea creepy.”

“RFID tags make the perfect tracking device,” Stanley said. “The prospect of RFID chips carried by all in identity papers means that any individual’s presence at a given location can be detected or recorded simply through the installation of an invisible RFID reader.”

There are a number of entrepreneurial companies marketing radio tracking technologies, including Positive ID, Datakey and MicroChips. Companies started marketing the idea behind these innovative technologies a few years ago, as excellent devices for tracking everyone, all the time.

Following its first use in an emergency room in 2006, VeriChip touted the success of the subdermal chip. “We are very proud of how the VeriMed Patient Identification performed during this emergency situation. This event illustrates the important role that the VeriChip can play in medical care,” Kevin McLaughlin, President and CEO of VeriChip, said at the time.

“Because of their increasing sophistication and low cost, these sensors and devices give us, for the first time ever, real-time instrumentation of a wide range of the world’s systems — natural and man-made,” said IBM’s Palmisano.

But are human’s “systems” to be measured?

Grassroots groups are fretting loudly over civil liberties implications of the devices, threatening to thwart their  development for mass-market, human tracking applications.

“If such readers proliferate, and there would be many incentives to install them, we would find ourselves in a surveillance society of 24/7 mass tracking,” said the ACLU’s Stanley.

The controversy extends overseas, too. David Cameron, Britain’s new prime minister, has promised to scrap a proposed national ID card system and biometrics for passports and the socialized health service, options that were touted by the Labour Party.

“We share a common commitment to civil liberties, and to getting rid — immediately — of Labour’s ID card scheme,” said Cameron according to ZDNet UK.

These controversies are impacting developers. One firm, Positive ID, has dropped the idea of tracking regular folks with its chip technology. On Wednesday, the company announced that it had filed a patent for a new medical device to monitor blood glucose levels in diabetics. The technology it initially developed to track the masses is now just a “legacy” system for the Del Ray Beach, Fla., firm.

“We are developing an in-vivo, glucose sensing microchip,” Allison Tomek, senior vice president of investor relations and corporate communications, told FoxNews.com. “In theory it will be able to detect glucose levels. We are testing the glucose sensor portion of the product. It will contain a sensor with an implantable RFID chip. Today’s patent filing was really about our technology to create a transformational electronic interface to measure chemical change in blood.”

Gone are the company’s previous ambitions. “Our board of directors wants a new direction,” says Tomek. “Rather than focus on identification only, we think there is much more value in taking this to a diagnostic platform. That’s the future of the technology — not the simple ID.”

The company even sold off some of its individual-style tracking technology to Stanley Black and Decker for $48 million, she said.

These medical applications are not quite as controversial as the tracking technologies. The FDA in 2004 approved another chip developed by Positive ID’s predecessor company, VeriChip, which stores a code — similar to the identifying UPC code on products sold in retail stores — that releases patient-specific information when a scanner passes over the chip. Those codes, placed on chips and scanned at the physician’s office or the hospital, would disclose a patient’s medical history.

But like smart cards, these medical chips can still be read from a distance by predators. A receiving device can “speak” to the chip remotely, without any need for physical contact, and get whatever information is on it. And that’s causing concern too.

The bottom line is simple, according to the ACLU: “Security questions have not been addressed,” said Stanley. And until those questions are resolved, this technology may remain in the labs.

Dems’ immigration proposal creates national ID card, ‘fingerprints’ database

Raw Story

Democrat: Public more comfortable with idea of national ID card

Civil liberties groups and even some die-hard supporters of the Democratic Party are raising the alarm over the Democrats’ proposed immigration overhaul, which would see the creation of a national biometric ID card.

“If the biometric national ID card provision of the draft bill becomes law, every worker in America would have to be fingerprinted and a new federal bureaucracy – one that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars – would have to be created to issue cards,” the ACLU said in a statement Thursday, following the release of Senate Democrat’s 28-page proposal (PDF) for comprehensive immigration reform.

“Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy – one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA,” said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU Legislative Counsel.

As Ezra Klein notes at the Washington Post, no fewer than 10 pages of the proposal are devoted to the “Believe System,” which sets up an ID card for everyone in the work force. “Believe” is an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally-stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment. The Social Security Administration would be responsible for running the ID card system.

The Democrats’ proposal, whose main backers include Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, makes it clear that the ID cards are intended solely for the purpose of eliminating undocumented immigrants from the work force. It would be illegal for any corporation, level of government or law enforcement officer “to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes.”

But that does not satisfy many activist groups, including some pro-Democrat groups supporting immigration reform. An unnamed representative of one such group told The Hill that the ID card proposal sounds “Orwellian.”

The ID card proposal “will give people some pause,” said Angela Kelley, immigration policy chief at the liberal Center for American Progress, as quoted at The Hill.

Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, defended the proposal in the face of early criticism, telling The Hill that he believes the public has become more comfortable with the idea of a national identification card.

“The biometric identification card is a critical element here,” Durbin said. “For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification. … People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification.”

Among the other elements of the immigration proposal is an eight-year waiting list for amnesty for undocumented migrants. Provided an undocumented migrant currently in the US pays his or her taxes, does not commit a crime and learns English in an eight-year period, they will be eligible for legal status.

The proposal comes just one day after both President Barack Obama and the top Republican House representative suggested that immigration reform is unlikely to happen this year. There “may not be an appetite” for immigration reform this year, Obama said, while House Minority Leader John Boehner said, “There is not a chance that immigration is going to move through the Congress.”

The proposal is taking heat in many corners of the media that tend to be supportive of Democratic initiatives.

The plan “outdoes Arizona in bigotry,” asserts Anis Shivani at the Huffington Post.

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