Thursday, November 14, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com



News Clips For The Day



Hunting Osama bin Laden was women's work – NBC

By Robert Windrem, Correspondent, NBC News
Navy SEALs may have killed Osama bin Laden, but women led them to their prey.
Women made up the majority of analysts – at one point all the analysts -- in “Alec Station,” the unit charged with finding Bin Laden, managed the ramp-up at the CIA's Counter Terrorism Center after 9-11, and participated in the interrogation, and the waterboarding, of al Qaeda suspects. They were critical to the first capture of a major al Qaeda target, Abu Zubaydah; helped find and kill Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq; ran "black sites," the secret CIA prisons used to interrogate terror suspects; and in the case of two senior analysts, died in an attack by al Qaeda on a CIA compound in Afghanistan.

Fran Moore, then and now the CIA’s director of intelligence, its fourth-ranking official, said she doesn’t know if there was “something explicit” about their gender that sparked the female al Qaeda hunters. “But I can say,” said Moore, “that if those individuals hadn't been working the issue, I am not confident we would've been successful.”
Some of Moore’s male colleagues are more effusive. In a speech this January, former CIA Director Michael Hayden said an "incredible band of sisters” led the search for Osama. Michael Scheuer, who ran “Alec Station,” told Newsweek last year that, “If I could have put out a sign on the door that said ‘No men need apply,’ I would have done it.”

So why are the women of the war on terror so driven, and so valuable as analysts?
Nada Bakos, the head of the targeting team that killed Zarqawi, said her team was "three quarters women," and their relentless focus on taking down Zarqawi and other al Qaeda leaders may have been influenced by a distinctly female view of security.

After 9-11, she said, the women working for her seemed to have vowed, "You're not going do that to me again."
"We're aggressive in the protection of our children,” said Bakos. “We see risks differently, longer term."
Carol Rollie-Flynn, former executive director of the agency's Counter Terrorism Center, said she thinks “the real strengths of these women were their intense dedication and incredible attention to detail."

Detail and more detail, said Bakos, was a big part of the Zarqawi team’s day. The women sifted through communications intercepts, interrogation reports, snippets from human spies, and satellite images, trying to make their analysis “operational” – meaning good enough to find their target and strike him.

Whatever the intangibles, even two years before 9-11, all the staffers in "Alec Station" except Scheuer were female. After 9-11, women were involved in setting up the earliest "black sites,” and participated in the controversial interrogations themselves. Officials told NBC News that both Zubaydah and ”KSM” -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9-11 mastermind -- were interrogated by women, sometimes with the aid of "enhanced interrogation techniques," including waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique since outlawed.

A former CIA official told NBC News that he thought women might have been especially effective at interrogating terror suspects because of the combination of surprise and shame. Jihadis were stunned that women, whom they saw as inferior, had been chosen to question them.

Jose Rodriquez, the head of the CIA's Counter Terrorism Center and National Clandestine Service during much of the hunt for bin Laden, said in his book “Hard Measures” that “KSM” once told one of his female interrogators that he much preferred dealing with women. According to Rodriguez, KSM said he believed women were "better prepared and less judgmental." KSM told male debriefers something different, however – that he was glad to see "the CIA wasn’t entirely run by women."

The woman with perhaps the biggest role in the hunt for bin Laden, however, wouldn’t live to see her mission completed. Portrayed as “Jessica” in “Zero Dark Thirty,” Hollywood’s take on the bin Laden raid, Jennifer Matthews had been an analyst with Alec Station in the late ‘90s, then moved to the clandestine side.

“There were a handful who formed a human database on al Qaeda and I recall they were all women," said Rollie-Flynn. "Jennifer Matthews was one of them. They knew everything. Their knowledge was encyclopedic. They would brief the director and had all the answers.”

In early 2002, Rodriguez appointed Matthews to head a task force tracking the elusive Zubaydah. Then pregnant with her third child, she dove into the challenge and by March had determined he was at one of 16 sites in Pakistan. Between the FBI and Pakistan’s ISI, there was enough manpower to carry off simultaneous raids on all 16, though she told National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that the chances for success were no better than 40 percent.

The raids were launched on March 28, 2002. Afterwards, Matthews broke into CIA Director George Tenet's 5 p.m. "threat meeting" to read a brief email from a CIA team leader in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Zubaydah had been severely wounded in a firefight and captured.

In 2008, Matthews was promoted to head a CIA station in the belly of the beast, Afghanistan. Matthews arranged for a jihadi she thought had been "turned" to meet with CIA officers and provide information on the whereabouts of bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri. But the mole was really an assassin. Five days after Christmas 2009, he entered the CIA compound in Khost without being searched and detonated a bomb, killing himself and seven CIA officers, including Matthews and another female analyst.

Some used the tragedy to criticize Matthews, and question her skills. While defenders said the opportunity was too good for anyone to pass up, others thought she’d been blinded by seeing her quarry too close at hand and failed to follow security procedures.

The al Qaeda hunter now known to the public as "Maya" didn't escape criticism either. In “Zero Dark Thirty,” Maya, who is based on a real person, helps lead the hunt for bin Laden, grieves for the death of her mentor “Jessica,” and then demands to go to Afghanistan as the SEALs prepare to raid Osama’s lair. She watches the helicopters disappear into the darkness, knowing that her years of effort led them to their quarry.

After bin Laden’s death, the real Maya got a cash bonus and a medal. She had been crucial to the search, if not as central as her movie counterpart. But she was denied a promotion and a $16,000 pay raise -- perhaps, suggested one former CIA official, because she doesn't “play well with others. She has very sharp elbows." She is not permitted to speak to the media, and has not responded publicly to the criticism.
No one suggests that criticism is going to slow the rise of women at the CIA. As the agency moves on to other crises, women have new roles. The Syria "shop" is filled with women and a woman holds a key position in the group that tracks Iran's nuclear program. The deputy director of the National Clandestine Center, the agency's undercover arm, is a woman.

John Brennan, the current director of the agency, told NBC News women have a unique perspective.
"We all are products of our experiences," said Brennan. "In addition to the innate intelligence and capability and creativity that women bring to the workforce, I think they have the opportunity to see the world through -- and I think this is very important-- the eyes of a woman."  


I have always been shocked at the interrogation techniques that have been used since George W. Bush's administration, and I don't agree with them. Senator McCain said that torture produces lies rather than good information. I am even more shocked to find out that women have been so deeply involved in it. I have always tended to blame aggressive actions on men. Of course, there are teenaged girls in the schools these days who are physically beating other girls, usually over a boy.

I wish we could live without war and cold wars like the one we are involved in now in the Middle East. Women will be more actively involved in things like this – interrogation and torture – from now on, since they, in some cases, actually want to participate in combat situations. At least they are getting promotions, which will help to loosen up the restrictions that our society places on women. They are subtler restrictions than those that are found in the Middle East, but they are of the same nature – male supremacy. So this is a step forward for women in status. I just wish no one would be doing these things.

As for the actual killing of Bin Laden, I can't help thinking that if anybody deserves to die, he did. I doubt that they could have successfully captured and arrested him for trial in the US. I was relieved when I heard he was dead, and felt no pity for him. He was a man who chose evil with his eyes open. He laughed when he heard that the twin towers had both fallen. So these women have served a purpose, whatever their methods. It's a war.





White House urges Senate to hold off on Iran sanctions – NBC

By Kasie Hunt, NBC News

The Obama administration is pressing the U.S. Senate not to slap even tougher sanctions on Iran, with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry both visiting Capitol Hill on Wednesday to make a personal pitch against imposing stricter penalties aimed at curtailing Iran's nuclear program.

New sanctions "could destroy the ability to be able to get agreement and it could actually wind up setting us back in a dialogue that's taken 30 years to be able to achieve," Kerry told reporters as he arrived at the Capitol on Wednesday. "We're asking the Congress to give the diplomacy they sought a chance to be able to work."
But there's an intense appetite among lawmakers for punishing Iran even further -- a bill to do it has already passed the House -- and the administration is facing an uphill battle in pressing the Democratic-controlled chamber to delay them.

"It is both an insurance policy for the United States and its allies if Iran ultimately doesn't pursue the path of the negotiations ... and as an incentive to Iran to understand that if they don't strike a deal, then here are the consequences," Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said Wednesday of possible new sanctions.
"In one form or another -- in the next week or two -- the Senate's likely to move on a new package," said a Democratic aide familiar with the leadership's thinking.

The administration wants more time. Kerry came close to striking a deal with Iran and European allies over the weekend in Geneva, and another round of talks is scheduled to begin Nov. 20. The president and vice president have been lobbying members of Congress to hold off on new sanctions until Kerry has another chance to ink an agreement on the future of Iran’s nuclear program.

But 76 senators signed an August letter calling for tougher sanctions, representing a broad bipartisan majority. Menendez and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., have been leading a push to move forward. Pro-Israel groups have been lobbying intensely for the new sanctions as well. And there's widespread, bipartisan doubt about the potential agreement that Kerry has been working on.

"The administration's negotiations with Iran failed to achieve an interim agreement this past weekend, and if published reports are accurate, we owe our French allies a great deal of credit for preventing the major powers in the negotiations, the so-called P5+1, from making a bad, bad, bad interim deal with Iran," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Wednesday on the Senate floor.

"From my perspective, depending upon what I hear today, if the public reports that I've heard are the essence of the interim agreement, that interim agreement doesn't do very much to degrade Iran's nuclear facilities," Menendez said.
And at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, both Republicans and Democrats called for more aggressive sanctions and expressed fear that weakening sanctions would strengthen Iran's hand. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., labeled the talks "fairy-tale progress." Tougher sanctions passed the House with an overwhelming 400-20 vote this summer.

Kerry defended the deal he has been working on.
"What we have negotiated, we believe, is a very strong protocol which will restrict Iran's ability to be able to grow its program and to reach an agreement with them that we go into six months of negotiations with them on the real tough part of this," he said Wednesday. "I suppose that anybody who thinks that we haven't driven a hard bargain ought to ask themselves why it wasn't accepted."

The Senate Banking Committee has already written a bill to impose a new round of sanctions, and had been set to hold a formal markup on the legislation on Wednesday. But it's been postponed until after the classified session with Kerry on Wednesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, a must-pass bill to fund the Defense Department -- likely to come up on the Senate floor in the next week or two -- is likely a vehicle that Iran hawks will try to use to get new sanctions through the Senate. The administration had been pushing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to delay action on that legislation because they're afraid of possible amendments that might pass before Kerry's next round of talks.

Realistically, any new sanctions would take between three and six months to be implemented. Sources said the White House is concerned about even sending the message that the Senate would act, for fear of upending a deal -- though some of that might be posturing aimed at showing the Iranians that the administration is serious about making a deal.

Kerry on Wednesday argued that the negotiations he's involved with are exactly what the U.S. has wanted all along.

"We didn't put sanctions on this for the sake of sanctions, we did it to be able to negotiate and to negotiate a final agreement," he said.


I wonder what the potential agreement that didn't go through would have included – the one that was “bad, bad, bad.” I think no further actions on new sanctions should be made until Kerry can continue to negotiate. We should usually try harder for peaceful agreements than we do, I think. Right now Congress and the Senate want to do something negative and flex their muscles. Of course, Obama's muscle flexing toward Syria probably caused Syria to cooperate sooner in getting rid of their chemical weapons. Iran has been a bit more cooperative with us, though, so I would like to see us pursue Kerry's plan until it fails. We have plenty of time to make peace. There is no emergency.






At 3.5 billion years old, they're among the oldest life forms ever – NBC
Tia Ghose LiveScience

Scientists have found fossil evidence of ancient microbial communities that lived 3.5 billion years ago.
The new fossils, described in the journal Astrobiology, may be among the most ancient fossil life forms ever found.

"This is one of the, or the, oldest fossils ever found. You've got a 3.5-billion-year-old ecosystem," said study co-author Robert Hazen, an earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

The new find reveals that a scant 1 billion years after Earth's origin, complex microbial communities that clung to sediments along the windswept seashore had already begun harvesting energy from sunlight, rather than the rocks.

Oldest fossils
Scientists hotly debate how life began on Earth. Though chemical evidence of carbon-based life forms, such as isotopes (or different forms) of carbon, reveal that life existed on early Earth, scientists have discovered a few controversial traces of its existence.

A few stromatolites, or domelike like rock structures built by ancient microbial communities, have been found at the Strelley Pool formation in Australia that may date to about 3.45 billion years ago. Fossil sulfur-eating microbes from about 3.4 billion years ago have also been found there as well. Other fossils from South Africa reveal microbial communities that date to 2.9 billion years ago. [Images: One-of-a-Kind Places on Earth]

Hazen's colleague, Nora Noffke, a researcher at Old Dominion University in Virginia, was studying ancient rocks at the Dresser Formation in Australia when she spotted some unusual formations.

The region had tens of meters of spots with a rough, wavy texture. To the untrained eye, the texture could have been anything, but Noffke had spent years studying similar formations that were created by ancient and modern microbial communities.
"So many geologists have walked over the same rocks and never noticed anything," Hazen told LiveScience.

The areas had ripple marks going in many different directions, which often form because the microbial mats protect sediments in some areas while exposing others.
Under a microscope, the formations revealed a series of individual black filaments intertwined with sand grains that are characteristic of microbial mat communities.
"This is what's called binding and trapping — this is how a mat structure becomes stabilized against waves," Hazen said. And the rocks also contained key mineral forms that are characteristic of the structures.


Oldest photosynthesizers
The ancient microbial communities, which may have been purple or brown and very smelly, Hazen said, probably lived along hundreds of miles of seashore, anchoring to the sand via filaments and harvesting nutrients from the sediments that washed ashore. Similar mats are found today in coastal regions with stagnant water.
More primitive rock-eating bacteria, called chemolithotrophs, likely evolved before the microbial mats, though no trace of Earth's earliest pioneers has yet been found. Chemolithotrophs harvest energy by chemically modifying minerals such as iron or sulfur in the rock, and many such bacteria are still alive today.

But the newly discovered communities were anchored to the seashore close to sun and water, so they probably weren't eating minerals found in rock. Instead, they must have harvested energy through photosynthesis, suggesting such bacteria evolved earlier than previously thought.

"That means very early in Earth's history, microbes had switched from using rocks for its energy to using light," Hazen said.


College Course Material From http://pages.geo.wvu.edu/~kammer – on the origin of life with experiments from 1953 by Miller:

5 Principal components for all life:
Water
Carbohydrates: starches and sugars for energy
Fats: for energy storage
Proteins: structural tissues
Nucleic acids: for reproduction

Combining Elements into complex Organic compounds:
•Miller’s 1953 experiment:
Combine gases of the early atmosphere in a sealed system with no oxygen.
Heat the gases, add electrical sparks, cool the mixture.
Amino acids formed after several days. They are the building blocks of protein.

Combining Elements into complex Organic compounds:
Several variations of Miller’s experiment have been run. These experiments have produced carbohydrates, fats, simple proteins, and the building blocks of nucleic acids: sugars, phosphates, and nitrogenous bases (ATCG).

The 5 Major Biochemical Steps in the Evolution of Life
1.Fermentation –archaea
Sugar ethyl alcohol + 2 units of energy
2. Methane production –archaea
CO2+ 4H2CH4+ 2 H20 + 1 unit of energy
3.Anaerobic photosynthesis –bacteria
H2S + CO2sugar + water + sulphur
uses sunlight for energy
4. Aerobic photosynthesis -bacteria, 3.5 BY
H20 + CO2sugar + O2
uses sunlight for energy
5. Aerobic respiration -bacteria and eukarya
Sugar + O2 H20 + CO2+ 36 units of energy

Populations of archaea and bacteria are found in hot springs runoff, Yellowstone National Park


Some scientists have theorized that the life we find on Earth came from Mars or another planet via meteorites or comets, but I don't see why it couldn't have started on Earth. The above information from the Department of Geology at the University of West Virginia show steps which theoretically may have produced early life. A life form called “archea” and other bacteria are found to this day in the boiling springs at Yellowstone National Park. That's a long way from the ocean, so it seems to me that these life forms may have developed in various places under the right conditions.

According to the WVU article, the archaea are thought to be the earliest known life forms, and they can tolerate boiling water, as at Yellowstone. Other volcanic sites also, located at the bottom of the ocean in the rift between two continental plates, have been found to be full of life forms, including archaea. I vote for life originating here on earth, and possibly still to this day being developed in volcanically heated water.




­

Obama Moving To Delay Cancellations Of Insurance Plans – NPR
by Mark Memmott
­ President Obama is expected to announce Thursday that Americans who have had their health insurance plans canceled because of his Affordable Care Act can keep those plans for another year if they wish.

Those cancellations — most effective on Jan. 1 — have sparked intense criticism of the ACA, in part because the president pledged many times that if Americans liked the health plans they had, they wouldn't have to give them up under the terms of his program.

The White House says Obama will make his announcement at 11:35 a.m. ET.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested earlier this morning that "the president's remarks would include a proposal to assuage consumers whose health care plans have been canceled as a result of the Affordable Care Act," NBC News writes.

We'll update this post. NPR.org will also stream the president's remarks, and they will be carried on many NPR stations.
Update at 11:15 a.m. ET. Back On For 11:35 A.M.:
The White House tells NPR that an official's earlier comment that the president would start speaking at 11:45 a.m. ET was a slip. The announcement is still set for 11:35 a.m. ET., the White House says.

That said, the president is often several minutes late at such events. So stay tuned.
Update at 11 a.m. ET. Will Allow Insurers To Renew Current Policies:
NPR is now reporting that sources with knowledge of the announcement say the president "is set to allow insurance companies to renew current private health care policies for one year even if they do not comply with the minimum coverages required by the Affordable Care Act."

In other words, insurers who have notified some policyholders that their plans have been canceled will be told they can contact those policyholders to offer them the old coverage again.
Update at 10:45 a.m. ET. Time Change:
Earlier the White House said Obama would speak at 11:35 a.m. ET. Now, officials say, he's expected to start at 11:45 a.m. ET.


The president just spoke on this subject and said that his “fix” will guarantee that policies will not have to be full coverage until another year passes, and that the insurance companies may, if they want to, issue the old lesser coverages until the year is up. He didn't say that they must issue the old policy for another year. I hope the "fix" will solve the problem.




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Intelligence Officials Aim To Pre-Empt More Surveillance Leaks – NPR
by Tom Gjelten
­ NSA officials are bracing for more surveillance disclosures from the documents taken by former contractor Edward Snowden — and they want to get out in front of the story.

In a recent speech, NSA Director Keith Alexander said Snowden may have taken as many as 200,000 NSA documents with him when he left his post in Hawaii. If so, the vast majority of them have yet to be released.

Intelligence officials tell NPR they believe Snowden's secrets fall into four categories:
ŸInformation on NSA capabilities, such as how it is able to collect communications data through its electronic surveillance of telephone records and online information transfers;
ŸNSA intelligence reports on threats, foreign leaders and other topics, assembled on the basis of its collection of signals intelligence — SIGINT — i.e., electronic intercepts;
ŸInformation on NSA partnerships, such as those made with private U.S. tech companies and foreign intelligence services;
ŸDetails of SIGINT "requirements" levied against the NSA by other U.S. government agencies, meaning the specific intelligence requests made to the NSA by the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, or the FBI.

Most of the disclosures so far have pertained to NSA capabilities and NSA partnerships. Officials are most concerned about the fourth category of secrets — the "requirements" disclosures.

NSA officials say the agency is now dealing with about 36,000 pages of such requirements from various government agencies, all of them specifying intelligence targets about some government agency that wants more information.
Disclosure of these requests could reveal where there are gaps in U.S. intelligence and therefore highlight some U.S. vulnerabilities. NSA officials say few, if any, of the disclosures so far fall into this category.

With respect to other information held by Snowden and his allies but not yet publicized, the NSA is now considering a proactive release of some of the less sensitive material, to better manage the debate over its surveillance program.
"We're working on how do we do that," says Richard Ledgett, the NSA official in charge of the agency's response to the Snowden disclosures.

For a proactive release not to cause problems, Ledgett says, the NSA would first have to consider which secrets cannot be divulged without harming national security.


This whole Snowden affair has been halfway funny to me. He seems so mild mannered and lacking in obviously inflated ego. He just doesn't seem like the type to have pulled something like this off. And, of course, he has moral reasons for why he did it – to expose an overweening, intrusive national government body.

I personally agree with Snowden that we are spying on everybody, but especially on sometimes totally innocent US citizens, way too much. I don't think all this intrigue is Obama's fault. It started as a reaction to 9/11, and it's understandable as such, but I think it has gone too far. I wish they would promise Snowden immunity from prosecution and make a deal with him to get back the rest of the secrets – or make him pay a $15,000 fine and give him two years probation or something. If he were a minor sex offender that's what they would do.