GARDEZ, Afghanistan – The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. They shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ – God is great – as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar’s head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face. Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as ‘the worst of the worst.’ But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed ‘infidel’ and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy. ‘He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government,’ a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was […]
Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest U.S. securities firm, told thousands of clients this week that they won’t be allowed to withdraw money on their home-equity credit lines, said a person familiar with the situation. Most of the clients had properties that have lost value, according to the person, who declined to be identified because the information isn’t public. The New York-based investment bank will review home-equity lines of credit, or HELOCs, monthly from now on, the person said yesterday. Wall Street firms including Morgan Stanley are ratcheting back on risks after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and ensuing credit contraction saddled banks and brokerages with almost $500 billion of writedowns and losses. Consumers fell behind on home-equity credit lines at the fastest pace in two decades in the first quarter, the American Bankers Association reported last month. ‘Morgan Stanley periodically reassesses client property values and risk profiles,” said Christine Pollak, a Morgan Stanley spokeswoman in Purchase, New York. “A segment of clients was recently notified of a change in the status of their home- equity line of credit, or HELOC, due to a change in the value of their property and/or their credit profile.” Pollak […]
Just west of El Paso, near where Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1598, construction crews have completed a steel fence authorities say is a new model for border security. The five-meter (18-foot) tall fence has a mesh woven so tightly that feet and fingers cannot grab hold, but it still allows people to see through. Steel pylons are set close enough to stop a truck from bursting through, and two meters of reinforced concrete underground deters any tunneling. The structure is designed to push would-be illegal immigrants and drug smugglers out into the desert where they are more easily caught, said Border Patrol Agent Martin Hernandez. ‘Will it completely stop them from coming across? Of course not,’ Hernandez said. ‘Rest assured, there will eventually be holes in parts of the wall made by people trying to get in. But it buys us valuable time.’ The US Department of Homeland Security is racing to meet a December 31 deadline to raise 670 miles of steel fences and vehicle barriers along the 3,200 kilometer (2,000 mile) long southern border. About half has been completed, including a six kilometer (four mile) segment […]
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration and former top CIA officials denounced a new book’s assertion that the White House ordered the forgery of Iraqi documents to suggest a link between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the lead hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. The claim was made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, whose book ‘The Way of the World’ also contends that the White House obtained compelling evidence in early 2003 that Iraq possessed no significant stocks of nuclear or biological weapons but decided to invade anyway. Suskind, who has written two previous investigative books that contained criticism of Bush administration policies, described the alleged forgery as one of the great lies in modern American political history, likening it to Watergate. White House condemnations of the book were equally dramatic, with officials blasting it as ‘gutter journalism.’ In separate statements, several former and current CIA officials disputed portions of the account, including two named by Suskind as key sources. The book’s most contentious allegations involve Tahir Jalil Habbush, Hussein’s intelligence chief before the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003. As the deadline for war neared, U.S. and British officials met with Habbush and confronted him […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
