Documents obtained by Fox News suggest that for decades Pakistan spread nuclear weapon technology around the globe in exchange for cash, political influence and help with its own atomic bomb program. Among those on the other side of the deals: China, Iran, North Korea and Libya.
The charges are contained in two documents written by A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear arms trafficker long thought to be the mastermind behind an elaborate global supply and procurement network: a thirteen-page confession to government authorities and a dramatic letter hastily written to his wife as an international manhunt tightened around him.
In a Fox News exclusive, never-before-seen Khan photographs and documents will be featured in an upcoming special: "Fox News Reporting: Iran's Nuclear Secrets," airing Sunday at 9 p.m. ET. The documents include the thirteen-page confession, the letter to his wife, and a Pakistani intelligence service report on Khan. The exclusive photographs show the Khans in a variety of intimate settings, including under house arrest. Fox News is also releasing the documents and photographs over the Internet today.
The extent of official Pakistan government involvement with Khan is a matter of intense and at times acrimonious debate among counter-proliferation experts. Was Khan a master criminal operating outside the system—or was he part of the system?
The documents obtained by Fox News are A.Q. Khan’s version of events. They should be carefully weighed against other available evidence. But with U.S.-Pakistan relations severely strained by the killing of Usama bin Laden and the imminent draw-down of U.S. troops in neighboringAfghanistan, the question of nuclear-armed Islamabad spreading weapons of mass destruction takes on a new urgency.
At one time, Khan feared his own government might kill him.
“Darling,” he writes to his wife in December 2003, “if the government plays any mischief with me take a tough stand.” He warns her, “they might try to get rid of me to cover up all the things (dirty) they got done by me in connection with Iran, Libya & N. Korea.”
A scientist and strong-willed bureaucrat known as “the father of the Islamic bomb,” Khan was a popular figure in Pakistan.
But prodded by the United States over mounting evidence of smuggled nuclear shipments to Libya, Pakistan began tightening the noose around Khan in 2003.
In early 2004, the ISI, Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, brought Khan in for questioning. Khan’s written confession is a result of those sessions.In February 2004, Khan appeared on Pakistan television and offered a brief confession. The next day, President Pervez Musharrafpardoned Khan and sentenced him to house arrest. In recent years, the terms of Khan’s house arrest have been modified, but he remains under tight government control.
In his televised confession, Khan put the blame on himself, saying that “proliferation activities…over the last two decades” were “inevitably initiated at my behest.”
The documents, revealed in full here for the first time, suggest a different story.
On China, Khan writes in the letter to his wife: “We had cooperation with China for 15 years. We put up a centrifuge plant at Hanzhong. We sent 135 C-130 plane loads of machines, inverters, valves, flow meters, pressure gauges.” From China, Pakistan received “drawings of nuclear weapons” and fifty kilos of “enriched uranium”—a key component for a nuclear bomb.
On North Korea: “Gen. Jehangir Karamat took $3 million through me from the N. Koreans and asked me to give them some drawing and machines” related to uranium enrichment. General Karamat was Pakistan’s Army Chief of Staff from 1996 to 1998 and ambassador to the United States from 2004 to 2006.
In an email to Fox News, General Karamat of Pakistan said “I categorically deny this baseless allegation.” The claim that he accepted money from Khan, he wrote, is “preposterous, false and a malicious fabrication.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/09/16/exclusive-new-aq-khan-documents-suggest/#ixzz1eRzfoRMQ
BLUFFTON, Texas – Johnny C. Parks died two days before his first birthday more than a century ago. His grave slipped from sight along with the rest of the tiny town of Bluffton when Lake Buchanan was filled 55 years later.
Now, the cracked marble tombstone engraved with the date Oct. 15, 1882, which is normally covered by 20 to 30 feet of water, has been eerily exposed as a yearlong drought shrinks one of Texas' largest lakes.
Across the state, receding lakes have revealed a prehistoric skull, ancient tools, fossils and a small cemetery that appears to contain the graves of freed slaves. Some of the discoveries have attracted interest from local historians, and looters also have scavenged for pieces of history. More than two dozen looters have been arrested at one site.
"In an odd way, this drought has provided an opportunity to view and document, where appropriate, some of these finds and understand what they consist of," said Pat Mercado-Allinger, the Texas Historical Commission's archeological division director. "Most people in Texas probably didn't realize what was under these lakes."
Texas finished its driest 12 months ever with an average of 8.5 inches of rain through September, nearly 13 inches below normal. Water levels in the region's lakes, most of which were manmade, have dropped by more than a dozen feet in many cases.
The vanishing water has revealed the long-submerged building foundations of Woodville, Okla., which was flooded in 1944 when the Red River was dammed to form Lake Texoma. A century-old church has emerged at Falcon Lake, which straddles the Texas-Mexico border on the Rio Grande.
Steven Standke and his wife, Carol, drove to the old Bluffton site on a sandy rutted path that GPS devices designate not as a road but the middle of the 22,335-acre lake, normally almost 31 miles long and five miles wide.
"If you don't see it now, you might never see it again," said Carol Standke, of Center Point, as she and her husband inspected the ruins a mile from where concrete seawalls ordinarily would keep the lake from waterfront homes.
Old Bluffton has been exposed occasionally during times of drought. The receding waters have revealed concrete foundations of a two-story hotel, scales of an old cotton gin, a rusting tank and concrete slabs from a Texaco station that also served as a general store. The tallest structure is what's left of the town well, an open-topped concrete cube about 4 feet high. Johnny Parks' tombstone is among a few burial sites.
Local historian Alfred Hallmark, whose great-great-great grandfather helped establish Bluffton, said his research showed 389 graves were moved starting in 1931 when dam construction began. That's the same year Bluffton's 40 or 50 residents started moving several miles west to the current Bluffton, which today amounts to a convenience store and post office at a lonely highway intersection serving 200 residents.
Residents had to leave their ranches and abandon precious pecan trees, some of which produced more than 1,000 pounds of nuts each year. "It was devastating," said Hallmark, 70, a retired teacher, of the move. "They had no choice."
Other depleted lakes across Texas are revealing much older artifacts. More than two dozen looters have been arrested at Lake Whitney, about 50 miles south of Fort Worth, for removing Native American tools and fossils that experts believe could be thousands of years old.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees Lake Whitney, is patrolling a number of areas that contain artifacts, including some rock shelters once filled with water, said Abraham Phillips, natural resources specialist with the agency.
At Lake Georgetown near Austin, fishermen discovered what experts determined was the skull of an American Indian buried for hundreds or thousands of years. It's not clear what will become of the skull, said Kate Spradley, a Texas State University assistant anthropology professor who is keeping it temporarily in a lab. Strict federal laws governing American Indian burial sites bar excavations to search for other remains.
No such restrictions exist for the nearly two dozen unmarked graves discovered this summer in a dried-up section of a Navarro County reservoir. Some coffin lids are visible just under the dirt. Crews plan to excavate the site about 50 miles south of Dallas and move the remains to a cemetery, said Bruce McManus, chairman of the county's historical commission. He said the area of Richland-Chambers Lake is on property formerly owned by a slave owner.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime find ... and maybe the only silver lining in the ongoing drought," McManus said.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/11/20/as-drought-continues-depleted-texas-lakes-expose-ghost-towns-graves/#ixzz1eRyaAJJx
Is it the most significant policing technology since DNA testing or the next privacy disaster waiting to happen, setting us on the path towards, as The Guardian's editor puts it, "total surveillance"?
The battle lines have been drawn over face recognition technology, development of which Australia is at the forefront.
While NSW Police is keeping mum, the Australian Federal Police called face recognition a "potent tool" for linking criminals to crime while Customs said it could allow airport security clearances to be carried out in a more seamless fashion.
Private companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple are also investing heavily in face recognition.
University of Queensland professor Brian Lovell, project leader at federal government body NICTA's advanced surveillance project, earlier this month won a global Asia-Pacific ICT Alliance award for his team's five-year project, which he says solved the "holy grail" problem of face recognition.
For the first time, Lovell says he and his team have been able to use grainy, low quality CCTV video footage to identify individuals from databases and even find and track people as they move around an area.
Facebook's "Tag Suggestions" feature.Photo: Sophos
"Our 'face search' is like a Google search in that we can search through very large databases very fast," said Lovell.
"We do recognition in real-time so you walk up to a system and you're recognised; it can search a database of 10,000 or 50,000 instantaneously and do the matching."
You won't know you're being watched
But further to that, the technology doesn't even need to have people looking into the camera for it to work, which is a current limitation of the SmartGate technology at airports.
"What we specialise in is non-cooperative surveillance, that means the person doesn't have to be aware that they are being photographed to be recognised," said Lovell.
Lovell said movies had given the false impression that police have long been able to do face recognition but in reality they can only do it when the image quality is extremely high and on a very limited basis.
"We're working with police ... we're in Canberra at the moment – virtually all the local agencies that you'd be thinking of we're probably talking to them," he said.
Lovell, who wouldn't give specifics about formal trials in Australia, said that for example if there was an assault on a taxi driver the police could use low quality footage from the surveillance camera inside the cab to match against its photo database and identify the assailant.
It could also be used by police for automated pro-active policing rather than checking CCTV footage after a crime has been committed or getting humans to monitor footage in real time.
'Privacy disaster waiting to happen'
Privacy advocates are already up in arms while the Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim, has expressed concerns.
"Face recognition is the next personal information security and privacy disaster waiting to happen," said David Vaile, executive director of the UNSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre, adding that once your face has been hacked there is nothing you can do.
"The extra dimension of face recognition is that it is a form of biometric identifier. Unlike passwords or credit cards, they cannot be 'revoked' and replaced if hacked – see the surgery Tom Cruise needed in Minority Report when the baddies were after him."
Both Vaile and the head of the Australian Privacy Foundation, Roger Clarke, expressed concerns surrounding the accuracy of face recognition including the potential for significant "false positives".
But Lovell said he recently conducted a trial at an unnamed airport and out of 4000 passengers from all over the world, his technology was able to pick out 11 of 12 persons of interest.
He said performance of the system depended largely on capture conditions; in airports it could obtain "close to 100 per cent" accuracy but at night performance would be lower. "At CeBit Sydney we had virtually no errors in three days of testing and demonstration," said Lovell.
He said his technology was the natural progression of the SmartGate system at Australian airports but in addition to keeping a lookout for people on a watchlist it could also be used by airports to track how long it takes passengers to move through the terminal.
Google is one of the largest technology industry players working on face recognition and related technologies. This year it acquired face recognition firm PittPatt and it has previously bought another similar biometric firm, Neven Vision.
Already, Google Images allows people to search using photos, including images of people; however Google says this is not true face recognition. Additionally, the latest version of Google Android allows people to use their face to unlock their phone but users have already tricked the security tool using photographs.
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt remarked recently that face recognition technology now had "surprising accuracy" but such accuracy was "very concerning" due to the privacy implications.
'Formidable infrastructure for total surveillance'
The editor-in-chief of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, in his 2011 Orwell lecture earlier this month, revealed that he had a conversation with a "senior Google figure" who was musing about the potential of Google face recognition software, "whose effects are so far reaching the company can't quite yet decide what to do with it".
Rusbridger said the Google exec told him the software could match a face to a name with any images sitting anywhere on the web, as long as one match had been made.
"What made this so troubling he said, is that digital spiders could then crawl the web and find every picture in the public domain and match it with an identity," he said.
"So the moment one match is made it would be possible to scan every street or crowd scene over several decades to see where a particular individual was. Link that to the sort of all-pervasive CCTV systems we have in this country [Britain] and you have a formidable infrastructure – current, but also historical – for total surveillance."
Google refused to comment on this.
Facebook is also working heavily on face recognition and uses the technology in its "Tag Suggest" feature, which is able to automatically tag friends in photos that users upload. And last year, Apple bought Swedish face recognition firm Polar Rose.
Former cyber cop turned private security consultant Nigel Phair said there were "lots of good national security and law enforcement reasons" for adopting face recognition but the private sector should be careful, pointing out that Google learned the hard way via several Street View court cases that business interests did not outweigh the rights of individuals over their own image.
"The concept obviously does not sit well with civil liberties as personally identifying information (a person's face) is being captured, analysed, matched and retained against their knowledge," said Phair.
Significant privacy impacts: Privacy Commissioner
The Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim, said biometric technology including facial recognition was a "rapidly evolving area that may have significant privacy impacts, particularly when combined with CCTV and other public surveillance technology".
Pilgrim said privacy was not an absolute right and needed to be balanced against other considerations including national security and law enforcement.
"However, given the potential for facial recognition technology to be privacy invasive, I believe that the adoption of this technology by government agencies or organisations must be carefully considered," said
Pilgrim added that he expected agencies and organisations to conduct "privacy impact assessments" before rolling out face recognition. Customers should be informed with full details about any surveillance done.
NSW Deputy Privacy Commissioner John McAteer, who oversees NSW public sector agency privacy matters, said law enforcement bodies like the NSW Police were broadly exempt from NSW privacy law and state law already provided broad police powers when it came to surveillance.
He did not have a problem with state agencies using face recognition for specific crime fighting or other purposes (i.e. to look into a suspect after a crime has been committed). A similar tool, automatic numberplate recognition, was now widely used in NSW.
"However to run an application against the general populace (without their knowledge or consent) which identifies the individual person where they are in effect being investigated across the world wide web (unless they are a suspect in a matter), would appear contrary to the general functions of police or law enforcement bodies," said McAteer.
"Collecting broad criminal intelligence is one thing, but manipulating a huge information database to match it to random individuals (or large sectors or groups of the populace) not under investigation would offend the basic principles of privacy and privacy law."
Lovell said he was talking to agencies in Australia, including airports, but he expected his face recognition technology to be rolled out overseas first, pointing to significant demand for use at events like the 2012 London Olympics.
"In terms of international deployments I'm expecting two airports within the next few months, maybe 10 airports in the next 12 months," he said.
He swatted away privacy concerns, saying people did not have the right to privacy in places such as airports. Further, he said places like the Middle East and Northern Ireland and the West in general could actually use it to increase people's freedoms.
"If you want to just go about your business without being bothered surveillance is a much kinder technology than anything else – the alternative is basically having guards everywhere who are checking your records making sure you are who you say you are," said Lovell, adding that places like Britain were safer at night largely due to surveillance.
Lovell said people would struggle to find abuses of surveillance systems in Western societies. He said anything could be abused, pointing to the Nazis' use of technology in death camps.
"It's up to the government and the people running these things to use the technology sensibly," he said.
A 'potent tool' for investigations
A Customs and Border Protection spokesman said it was interested in all technologies relevant to its role on the border including emerging technologies such as "face-in-the-crowd" and "face-on-the-fly".
"These types of technology could potentially allow certain border clearance processes to be conducted as the traveler is moving through the airport while continuing to maintain the security of the border," the spokesman said.
However, Customs said it had not yet bedded down plans to trial or implement face recognition.
Asked whether face recognition technology was as significant for policing as the introduction of DNA testing, the Australian Federal Police said it was one of many tools that could enhance its investigations but performed a different function to DNA.
The AFP noted that while DNA could provide definitive proof of an individual's identity, facial recognition could merely "assist" this process.
"Facial recognition is a potent tool for investigations and intelligence to detect and investigate criminals," said the AFP.
"Its capabilities enable improved detection of criminals, linking of criminals to multiple crimes such as cold cases where only a facial image exists associated with the crime, and identification of aliases and false identities.
However, the AFP said face recognition technology could not be relied on in court as it "does not have the same power of identification" as fingerprinting and DNA.
"It does however assist in finding images to guide and inform an investigation to which experts or witnesses can then provide the requisite level of forensic identification," the AFP said.
The AFP said it had already developed its own facial recognition system to assist with identity crime investigations but refused to comment further due to the "risk of revealing police methodology".
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/facial-recognition--the-case-for-and-against-total-surveillance-20111122-1nry4.html#ixzz1eRwxNTnU
The Bundesbank sharply lowered Germany's growth forecast for next year to 0.5pc - savagely knocking confidence in Berlin's ability to solve the rapidly intensifying crisis. Meanwhile there were fears that France would succumb to spiralling borrowing costs as Moody's warned that the country could lose its cherished AAA rating.
A total of £36.2bn was wiped off the UK's biggest companies on Monday as the FTSE 100 dropped 2.6pc. European markets lost more. The Stoxx Europe 600 index fell 3.2pc; the French CAC and German Dax sank 3.4pc each; Italy's MIB dropped 4.7pc and Spain's Ibex fell 3.5pc. US markets also fell, with the deadlock on plans to cut America's debt driving the declines. The costs of insuring Spanish, Italy and French debt rose.
Investors were shocked by the rapid downward revision of the Bundesbank's prediction: five months ago, the central bank forecast growth of 1.8pc in 2012. On Monday in its monthly bulletin it said Europe's powerhouse economy could suffer "pronounced" weakness if the eurozone debt crisis continued.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said global growth was "slowing down". Min Zhu, IMF's deputy managing director, said: "Last year the world had 5pc GDP growth rates by IMF PPP measures, we forecast this year 4.4pc, with the downgrade in October it became 4pc. And I can tell you even that number becomes too optimistic. If we further adjust that, it can only go down, particularly for the advanced economies."
Francois Baroin, French finance minister, was quick to defend his nation's economy, saying current interest rates "correspond to financing conditions which are very favourable". He pointed to the radical emergency austerity measures undertaken by France and emphasised "one more time, the untouchable objective of reducing the public deficits".
But rating agency Moody's said: "A 100 basis points increase in yields roughly equates to an additional €3bn in yearly funding costs. With the government's forecast for real GDP growth of a mere 1pc in 2012, a higher interest burden will make achieving targeted fiscal deficit reduction more difficult."
The doubts pounded confidence in Europe's fragile rescue mechanisms. The ability of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) to raise debt would be seriously damaged if France lost its credit rating. The bail-out fund - designed as Europe's €1trillion "big bazooka" - has already struggled in the bond markets while leaders deliberate over the funds structure.
In Spain, Mariano Rajoy defied demands from the markets for his government to use its first day to unveil a plan stave off a bail-out, with his key ally Miguel Arias Canete adding: "We are going to do what needs to be done, but [markets] need to give us space."
Jose Maria Aznar, the prime minister who led Spain into the euro in 1999, said the European Central Bank (ECB) may have to stand in as lender of last resort "to avoid a disaster". While the new governments in Greece and Italy struggled to design new austerity packages to meet European demands, contagion spread outside the eurozone.
Hungary officially requested financial help from Europe and IMF. Its currency, the florint, has plunged in value while its credit rating is just one notch above junk.
The Telegraph
US carriers Stennis and Bush
Big power gunboat diplomacy is in full spate in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. Washington is underscoring its military option against Iran's nuclear program, while Russia is demonstrating its resolve to prevent NATO attacking Syria after Libya and defending Bashar Assad's regime. Monday, Nov. 21,
Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov accused Western nations of "political provocation" by urging the Syrian opposition to refuse to negotiate a settlement with Assad.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, advised Assad: "You can only continue with tanks and guns to a certain point, the day will come when you will go."
DEBKAfile's military sources note that Russia and America adopted aggressive postures on Nov. 12, when two American carriers, the USS Bush and USS Stennis sailed through the Strait of Hormuz side by side and took up position opposite the Iranian coast.
That was also the day when a mysterious explosion at the Revolutionary Guards base near Tehran wiped out the entire leadership of Iran's ballistic missile program.
Five days later, on Nov. 17, the Syrian news agency reported three Russian naval vessels on the Mediterranean were heading toward Syria.
Monday, Nov. 21, presidential sources in Damascus announced three warships had entered Syrian territorial waters outside Tartus port.
Those sources stressed the Russian ships would not anchor in the Syrian port, indicating that their mission was not just to show the flag for the Assad regime but was on operational duty along its coasts to resist any foreign intervention in Syria unrest.
Our military sources are watching to see whether the Russian flotilla targets the small craft transporting arms from Lebanon and Turkey to Syrian rebels fighting the regime. If so, Moscow would be able to present these strikes as actions against piracy which would fall under a UN Security Council resolution.
While Moscow and Damascus kept the identity of the Russian warships dark, Arab sources said at least two of them are equipped for gathering intelligence and electronic warfare.
As the Russian warships entered Syrian territorial waters, Canadian Defense Minister Peter McKay announced that in the light of the Syrian crisis, the Royal Canadian Navy would keep back in the Mediterranean until the end of 2012 certain vessels which took part in the Libyan campaign.
DEBKAfile's military sources report he was referring to two frigates:
HMCS Vancouver will stay in the Mediterranean Sea until early next year," he said, taking part in "locating, tracking, reporting (and) boarding vessels of interest suspected of international terrorism." It would be relieved by HMCS Charlottetown until the end of 2012.
Defense Minister Mckay explained: "…a lot of dictators are on notice that this type of behavior isn't going to be tolerated. How we go about it and what comes next is done on… an escalating scale before making any final decisions about intervention."
The Canadian defense minister was the first prominent Western official to admit the possibility of Western military intervention in Syria.
Three more events affecting the fate of the Assad regime, Tehran's closest ally, followed in quick succession Monday:
British Foreign Secretary William Hague received a delegation of the opposition Syrian National Council in London. Shortly before the interview the SNC published its plan for the transition of power from the Assad regime in Damascus, calling also for "international protection for Syrian civilians."
In Syria itself, three buses carrying Turkish pilgrims home from Mecca were accosted by a Syrian checkpoint at Cizre near Homs. The passengers were ordered to disembark for their papers to be inspected. The Syrian soldiers then started shooting at them, injuring a passenger and one of the drivers.
This incident will not be treated lightly by the Erdogan government.
Until now, despite vocal threats, Ankara has not intervened directly in the nine-month Syrian uprising aside from arming and training rebels.
Also Monday, Jordan's King Abdullah II paid a surprise visit to Ramallah for talks with the Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas. One of the items on his agenda was an attempt to find out where the Palestinian leader stands vis-Ã -vis the Arab Revolt, especially on the conflict in Syria.
While we will get into the nuances of why the Austrian AAA rating is the next to go (just after Hungary is downgraded in a matter of weeks if not days, following the country's request for IMF help earlier today) an event which we described ten days ago when the news that Austria's shaky rating was about to be downgraded first broke via the FTD and has since resulted in a major spike in Austrian credit spreads and bond yields, first we wanted to show readers the one ad which explains why the seeds of Austria's credit perfection collapse were sown back in 2007. In the ad, the second biggest Austrian bank, Raiffeisen Bank, explains precisely what its "selection" criteria were to get a loan in Hungary at the peak of the credit bubble (and yes, the ad is real). The ad explains the follow up news, which is namely that Austrian bank supervisors were today told to limit their lending to Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, the horses are out of the barn, and the biggest banks in Austria are about to be at the mercy of the markets, especially once the rating agencies do the inevitable and cur the country by at least 2 notches.
As to what the catalytic lit match is that will set the forest ablaze look no further than Hungary. As a reminder, 67% of Hungarian household debt is denominated in foreign currencies, mostly CHF. The average long term entry point is about 155 CHFHUF which now trades 60% higher at 248. bank assets are about 50% of GDP which is at $130bln. Household debt is 39% of GDP. Assuming 50% of fx loans we are talking about an amount of about $10 BN by which loans are under water, and Austrian bank equity is more than wiped out.
Which brings us to the actual story of the day, which ties in perfectly with the above, namely an FT story in which we learn that "Austrian central bank said in a statement that Erste Group, Raiffeisen Bank International and Bank Austria, owned by UniCredit of Italy, would be prevented from loaning significantly more in CEE countries than what they raise in local deposits. Subsidiaries that are “particularly exposed” must ensure the ratio of new loans to local refinancing is not more than 110 per cent." In other words, the sins of the fathers have now come back and are haunting the same banks that so willingly doled out cash to anyone with a heartbeat as recently as 4 years ago.
Needless to say, Austria's AAA rating is the only reason why its banking system (where as a reminder mega bank Erste recently "uncovered" billions in underwater CDS that had never been reported previously) has been spared the vigilante anger so far. All that is about to change.
Zerohedge
