12.08.2009 Banned by the Catholic Church

If you go to this link and listen to it 3 times in a row…. you tell me why the church banned this ghost band?

http://margaretnoble.net/blog/banned-by-the-catholic-church/

Please leave your comments on the original page… and wait to see what happens….guess what the church was scared off???

lets see who posts the right answer before October 31 2010

USE THE FORCE LUKE

12.08.2009
Banned by the Catholic Church
Categories: Sound Oddities

800px-Shepard_Tones_spectrum_linear_scale

Sound Clip: Shepard Tone by Roger Shepard

This is a classic sound oddity and illusion. Or is it? There are some corrections to this post with much discussion, see below and follow the trail of comments to clarify the inaccuracies.

Originally posted:

“It is rumored to be called the “devil’s tone” by the Catholic church. The Shepard tone is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the
Shepard Scale. This creates an auditory illusion that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower.”

shepard_tone2

Corrections here and below in comments from Brent Williams:

“Hi Margaret.

“Baned by the Catholic Church“, about a Shepard-Risset Glissando. This post contained links to certain webpages, but when the post went up (even before it was moderated) the links were missing. Just in case you want to put them up for your readers, here they are:

The original source page for this sound file is here . It is in French.

You can find the Wiki source page here . This contains a little more info on the sound. This is where I confirmed that the sound is a minor chord of synchronised Shepard-Risset glissandi.

Read about Diana Deutsch here . She is currently a Professor at UCSD.

All the best, and please continue with your excellent website.

Brent Williams”
Categories: Sound Oddities -

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Karzai urges Afghans not to panic as bank withdrawals accelerate

By Andrew Higgins, David Nakamura and Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 2, 2010; 10:20 PM

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – As depositors thronged branches of Afghanistan’s biggest bank, President Hamid Karzai told Afghans on Thursday not to panic shortly after his brother, a major shareholder in the beleaguered Kabul Bank, called for intervention by the United States to head off a financial meltdown.

“Kabul Bank is safe,” Karzai said at a joint news conference at the presidential palace in Kabul with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “People need not panic, need not be worried.”

Earlier in the day, Mahmoud Karzai voiced concern over Kabul Bank’s ability to withstand an onslaught of depositors demanding their money back. “America should do something,” he said in a telephone interview. He suggested that the Treasury Department guarantee the funds of Kabul Bank’s clients, who number about 1 million and have more than $1 billion on deposit with the bank.

The rush to withdraw funds from Kabul Bank, which handles salary payments for soldiers, police and teachers, began Wednesday, a day after news that Afghanistan’s Central Bank had removed the bank’s top two executives and installed a Central Bank official as chief executive.

Depositors withdrew $85 million Wednesday and $109 million Thursday, leaving Kabul Bank with about $300 million in liquid cash, said the bank’s ousted chairman, Sherkhan Farnood.

Speaking in his first interview since his ouster Monday, Farnood, who remains a substantial shareholder, said he hoped the bank could weather the storm without U.S. help. “If we survive Saturday and Sunday, we will be okay,” said Farnood, who spoke at his luxury waterfront villa in Dubai shortly after his return to the Persian Gulf emirate from Kabul. Friday is a holiday, and all Afghan banks are closed.

“If Kabul Bank collapses,” he added, “it will be a disaster.”

Farnood has pledged to hand over to Kabul Bank the titles of real estate purchased with bank money but registered until now in his name and that of his wife. The property, he said, is worth about $160 million.

The Treasury Department has sent a team of experts to help the Afghan Central Bank handle the crisis, but it has so far ruled out any injection of U.S. money to revive Kabul Bank. “While we are providing technical assistance to the Afghan government, we are taking no steps to recapitalize Kabul Bank,” said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But Mahmoud Karzai, who owns 7 percent of Kabul Bank, warned that while the bank “is stable and has money,” it might take U.S. intervention to beat back panic. “If the Treasury Department will guarantee that everyone will get their money, maybe that will work,” said the president’s brother, who rushed to Kabul on Wednesday from Dubai, where he spends most of his time in a Palm Jumeirah villa purchased with Kabul Bank money.

Kabul Bank has scores of branches across Afghanistan and holds the accounts of key Afghan government agencies. It was also a big contributor to President Karzai’s fraud-tainted election campaign last year.

The collapse of the bank would probably spread panic throughout the country’s fledgling financial sector and wipe out nine years of effort by the United States to establish a sound Afghan banking system, seen as essential to the establishment of a functioning economy. This would give a big boost to a mostly unregulated “hawala” system, a network of informal money exchanges that, in addition to serving ordinary customers, also provides a secure and opaque channel through which drug traffickers and terrorists are believed to move their funds.

Farnood, a world-class poker player who founded Kabul Bank, blamed the panic on the Central Bank’s decision to remove him as chairman. “I’ve never cheated anyone and have always paid everyone. People trust me,” said Farnood, referring to his years running a successful hawala money exchange in Russia and Afghanistan.

He said he was flying back to Kabul on Friday for a meeting with President Karzai. Rumors spread in Kabul on Thursday that Farnood had been barred from leaving Afghanistan. “Not true. I’m here,” he said soon after his arrival in Dubai.

At the start of the week, Kabul Bank had deposits of $1.31 billion. By the close of business Thursday, those had slipped to $1.11 billion. But most of this money is not immediately available to pay depositors, as it has been given out in loans. Several of the bank’s biggest borrowers are its own shareholders, most notably the brother of Afghanistan’s vice president, Mohammed Fahim, who is hospitalized in Germany for heart surgery.

Alarmed by the spreading panic, the Afghan government moved forcefully Thursday to try to calm the public. Kabul Bank’s main branch in the capital stayed open four hours later than usual to handle payments. Crowds also gathered outside the bank’s branches in Mazar-e Sharif in the north, Kandahar in the south and Badakhshan in the northeast.

At his news conference, President Karzai assured hundreds of thousands of government employees who get their salaries through Kabul Bank that “we have enough cash to support the bank. We have $4.8 billion in cash. Even if the whole banking system collapsed, we’d still have enough money to support it.”

Earlier, Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal played down concerns about the bank’s future, blaming foreign news media for stirring alarm. “Kabul Bank will never collapse,” Zakhilwal said. “It will remain strong. The government will support Kabul Bank.”

The finance minister acknowledged that fearful customers have flocked to Kabul Bank branches to demand their money but insisted that “it’s not a crisis.”

Nonetheless, Shafiq Javed, 38, said he decided to withdraw $900 of the $2,000 he had in savings. “We used to trust them,” he said, referring to bank managers. “Since this revelation, everybody is concerned.”

At a nearby branch where many government workers cash their paychecks, tellers were giving out no more than $1,000 per customer.

The Central Bank has presented its decision to oust Farnood and former chief executive Khalilullah Fruzi as a routine affair aimed at bringing Kabul Bank into line with new regulations that bar shareholders from management.

But bank insiders give a more dramatic account of events. The Central Bank’s move on Kabul Bank followed weeks of volatile feuding between Farnood and Fruzi, as well as mounting concern over large and probably illegal loans to the bank’s shareholders and other well-connected insiders.

U.S. officials are hoping that because only up to 5 percent of Afghans hold bank accounts and most of the economy revolves around cash, the fallout from the Kabul Bank crisis can be contained. Afghan businessmen and others, however, said that should Kabul Bank fall, the consequences would be catastrophic for both the economy and security of Afghanistan.

Londo??o and Nakamura reported from Kabul. Staff writer Brady Dennis in Washington contributed to this report.

CIA chief authorizes every drone strike

Published on 03-22-2010

Source: PAK Observer

Washington—CIA Chief Leon Panetta has said the US counter terrorism polices in Pakistan are legal and highly effective and that he is acutely aware of the gravity of some of the decisions thrust upon him.

In an interview Wednesday at CIA headquarters, Panetta refused to directly address the matter of Predator strikes, in keeping with the agency’s long-standing practice of shielding its actions in Pakistan from public view.

“Any time you make decisions on life and death, I don’t take that lightly. That’s a serious decision,” he said. “And yet, I also feel very comfortable with making those decisions because I know I’m dealing with people who threaten the safety of this country and are prepared to attack us at any moment.”

Panetta had personally authorized the Drone strike that killed Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud at his fatiehr in law’s home on August 5, 2009, according to a senior intelligence official who described the sequence of events.

Since 2009, as many as 666 terrorism suspects, including at least 20 senior figures, have been killed by missiles fired from unmanned aircraft flying over Pakistan, according to figures compiled by the New America Foundation as of mid-March. According to the foundation, 177 civilians may also have been killed in the airstrikes since 2009.

Intelligence officials say their count of noncombatants killed is much lower and noted that on Aug. 5 only Mehsud and his wife were killed, despite reports that other family members and bodyguards died in the attack.

Panetta authorizes every strike, sometimes reversing his decision or reauthorizing a target if the situation on the ground changes, according to current and former senior intelligence officials.

After weathering a number of storms on Capitol Hill, including a face-off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after the California Democrat accused the CIA of lying, Panetta has studiously cultivated his old colleagues, holding informal get-togethers with the Senate and House intelligence committees.

Another former senior intelligence official, who served under Bush, commends Panetta for his aggression but noted that the current successes are built upon agreements made with Pakistan in the final year of the previous administration. The Obama administration has “been operating along the same continuum,” the former official said.

In the interview, Panetta said he recognized that the administration’s strategy entailed risk. “You can’t just conduct the kind of aggressive operations we are conducting against the enemy and not expect that they are not going to try to retaliate,” he said. —INP

US creates terror groups, ex ISI-intelligence chief says

Source: Press TV

Former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency Hamid Gol says the United States is seeking to create and train terrorist groups in the region.

In a Wednesday interview with Fars news agency, Gol said Washington had been making efforts to destabilize the region through supporting groups like the Pakistan-based Jundallah terrorist group.

Gol went on to say that such attempts by the US intelligence agencies were in particular directed at fomenting unrest in Iran.

“The US intelligence agencies pursued just one goal by forming Rigi’s group which was provoking unrests and instability in Iran,” Gol was quoted as saying.

He also accused Washington and its western allies of seeking to strain ties between Iran and Pakistan.

The remarks come days after Iranian security forces arrested Jundallah ringleader Abdolmalek Rigi while he was aboard a Kyrgyz airliner on a flight from the United Arab Emirates to Kyrgyzstan.

In his confession broadcast by Press TV in late February after his arrest, Rigi talked about offers of unlimited support by the US spy agency, the CIA, saying the Americans offered to “cooperate with us” and “promised to give us a base along the border with Afghanistan near Iran.”

Rigi’s group has claimed responsibility for numerous terrorist attacks in Iran. The group has carried out murder, armed robbery, kidnappings, acts of sabotage and bombings inside Iran.

Marine reportedly killed by opium-fueled private contractors

By John Byrne
Thursday, March 4th, 2010 — 9:43 am

Pentagon originally said Marine killed in combat

The Pentagon confirmed late Tuesday that it is investigating the death of a 24-year-old Indiana Marine after he was shot to death in Afghanistan, allegedly by several US-paid private security contractors.

The contractors, according to a fellow Marine in Afghanistan who communicated with an investigative reporter in Chicago, were Afghanis who were found with “copious amounts of opium” and had been paid by the United States as guards.

“He was killed by American Hired Local National Contractors that were high on opium the morning of the 19th,” the ABC reporter quotes a friend and fellow colleague of Lance Corporal Joshua Birchfield as saying in an email message.

Lance Corporal Joshua Birchfield was killed after being shot in the head Feb. 19. The Department of Defense originally reported that he died of “small arms fire” while in combat.

But the story is apparently darker and more complex — raising questions of whether the Pentagon originally concealed information about the Marine’s death.

The Chicago Marine who tipped off the ABC reporter purportedly wrote a detailed email surrounding the circumstances of Birchfield’s death. In it, he asserts that the young Marine was killed by Afghanis paid as private contractors.

“These men are armed to the teeth and supposedly here for our protection,” the fellow Marine is said to have emailed. “We have been shot at by the contractors on several cases before this incident. We have been told to refrain from returning fire and attempt to identify ourselves as Marines so they stop shooting.”

“They are also drug abusers,” he continued. “The shooter was found to have copious amounts of wet opium on him shortly after the shooting … we found a bag of wet opium in the compound that the contractors were using to get high.”

“A mix of drugs and gray areas of loyalty between U.S. forces and Taliban seems to be the motivation behind the shooting,” he added.

The Pentagon, announcing an investigation into the death on Wednesday, declined to say what exactly they were investigating.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told the Associated Press “the military is looking into the circumstances surrounding the Feb. 19 shooting of 24-year-old Lance Cpl. Joshua Birchfield of Westville. He declined further comment.”

“Maj. Carl Redding of the Marine Corps confirmed the investigation but referred additional questions to Marine Corps officials in Afghanistan,” the AP added.

Investigators reportedly found the private security guards with drugs and weapons and placed several under arrest.

ABC reporter Chuck Goudie wrote about Birchfield’s death in a column in the local newspaper The Daily Herald. Curiously, his column includes the caveat, “The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV.” WLS-TV is an ABC affiliate.

Goudies says Birchfield “was on a security patrol about a half-mile from a Marine forward operating base. About 7 a.m., as day broke, shots were fired at Birchfield’s patrol team, according to members of his unit. The ambush was by U.S.-hired security guards who were supposed to be protecting a highway paving project from Taliban-installed roadside bombs.”

“The contractors were able to have such proximity to a U.S. patrol because we pay them to work on our FOB (forward operating base), pave the 515 (highway), and provide security from Taliban IED (roadside bomb) implacers in the area,” he says he was told.

Pentagon calls for ‘Office of Strategic Deception’

By Sahil Kapur
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 — 9:47 am

WASHINGTON — Remember the Pentagon Office of Special Plans that helped collect dubious intelligence that led to the war in Iraq? Or the program where the Pentagon secretly briefed military analysts to promote the Iraq war?

Meet the would-be Office of Strategic Deception.

In a little-noticed report earlier this month, the Defense Department’s powerful Defense Science Board recommended creation of an entity designed solely for “strategic deception” against US adversaries.

“Specifically,” the report reads (pdf), “we recommend that the Secretary [of Defense] task both the Under Secretaries of Defense for Policy and Intelligence, and the Joint Staff, working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to create a tiger team to lay out courses of action and a way ahead for establishing a standing strategic surprise/deception entity. Once the initial work has been completed, all parts of the interagency should be brought into this effort.”

“Strategic deception has in the past provided the United States with significant advantages that translated into operational and tactical success,” it continues. “Successful deception also minimizes U.S. vulnerabilities, while simultaneously setting conditions to surprise adversaries.”

Deception is a common war-time tactic nations use to gain a leg up on their enemies, but as Wired notes, the Pentagon apparently believes the United States must begin engaging in strategic tricks even before it wages war against another country.

“Deception cannot succeed in wartime without developing theory and doctrine in peacetime,” the DSB report reads. “In order to mitigate or impart surprise, the United States should [initiate] deception planning and action prior to the need for military operations.”

And such attempts at strategic trickery must occur at virtually every stage in the United States’ dealings with other nations, the Pentagon’s science board says.

“Denial and deception efforts will be included from the onset, factors into both intelligence and response research and development activities at every stage, including war gaming.”

The DSB report was first flagged by InsideDefense.com.

In 2003, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh highlighted the Office of Special Plans, a closely guarded cabal that did an end-run around the Pentagon to collect purported intelligence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction.

“They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans,” Hersh wrote. “In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.

“According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States,” Hersh added.

Late last year, Raw Story’s Brad Jacobson revealed evidence that directly tied the activities undertaken in the military analyst program under President George W. Bush — where analysts were briefed to promote the Iraq war — to an official US military document’s definition of psychological operations. Such propaganda that is only supposed to be directed toward foreign audiences.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, who remains a spokesman for the Pentagon today, told Raw Story the program was intended only to “inform.”

Whitman said he stood by an earlier statement in which he averred “the intent and purpose of the [program] is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American public.”

US to Pay Taliban Fighters to ‘Lay Down Their Arms’

Karzai to pay Taliban to lay down their arms 22 Jan 2010 Afghan President Hamid Karzai unveiled an ambitious Western-funded plan Friday to offer money and jobs to tempt Taliban fighters to lay down their arms in an effort to quell a crippling insurgency. His comments to the BBC came as US Defence Secretary Robert Gates described the Taliban as part of Afghanistan’s “political fabric”, but said any future role would depend on insurgents laying down their weapons. Karzai’s plan echoed similar proposals by Washington to try and bring low and mid-level extremists back into mainstream society, but the leadership of Islamist insurgent groups remain hostile to negotiations. Militants led by the Taliban movement have been waging an increasingly deadly rebellion against the Afghan government and foreign troops since a US-led invasion ousted the Taliban regime from power in late 2001.

‘Further incentives could include pensions for older fighters and allotments of land.’ Taliban leaders ‘offered asylum’ under London peace plan 20 Jan 2010 Taliban leaders could be offered exile abroad and have their names deleted from a UN sanctions blacklist as part of a peace plan for Afghanistan to be unveiled in London next week. A briefing paper on the Afghan government’s proposals seen by The Daily Telegraph says any peace deal may include “potential exile in a third country” for insurgent leaders… [Nato commanders] are now backing a “carrot and stick” strategy of more troops to reverse the Taliban’s military momentum coupled with incentives for fighters to rejoin society. International donors are preparing to pay hundreds of millions of pounds towards the scheme, with Japan and the US already allocating substantial budgets. In the first phase, junior fighters, who commanders believe are mainly motivated by money, will be offered jobs, training and education if they lay down their weapons and renounce violence. Further incentives could include pensions for older fighters and allotments of land.

And, if the Taliban fighters *don’t* lay down their arms, and instead continue to raise them in battle against the West? Then, the US government will be in the awkward position of funding the enemy of the US soldier on the battlefield. Hmm. ‘Some dare call it treason.’

Paying Taliban fighters to ‘lay down their arms.’ That’s like Barack Obama supplicating himself to Joe Lieberman for his health care vote: Not gonna happen.

We can’t get single-payer health care in the US because the GOP sociopaths and their blue dogs (and their little blue puppy dog Obama, too) claim that such a measure would add to (the Bush-born) trillon-dollar deficit. But, we can simultaneously pay Blackwater to ‘stop’ those we are funding? Hello, McFly?!?

The Taliban Stimulus: ‘Junior Taliban fighters’ are going to be offered jobs at US taxpayer expense. Maybe we can include the newly hired Taliban insurgents in US economic data so the unemployment rate will appear to be on the wane. And, not a GOP signal of discontent in sight! After all, it’s the *Taliban* getting jobs, training and education — not the US poor, so it’s all good.

To top it all off, Bush’s High Whore Court just opened the corporate floodgates to *steal* the last vestiges of democracy in the US. Most of the lamestream media was SILENT or covering John Edwards’ love child.

I’ve covered a lot of BULLSH*T since Coup 2000, but this takes the cake bakery.

It is time (long, long past time) for American Revolution #2. Maybe then the US government can pay *us* to lay down OUR arms, bring us back into mainstream society — and give us health care.

See also: The Obusha AfPak Money Pit –Unlike the ‘public option,’ Congress doesn’t ask if funding the Taleban to blow up contractors’ bridges will add to the US deficit By Lori Price.

*****

5 Americans from Washington D.C. in Pakistan to face terror charges

D.C.-area men are set to appear before anti-terror court on Monday
The Associated Press
updated 11:21 a.m. ET, Thurs., Dec . 31, 2009

ISLAMABAD – Pakistani police said Thursday they plan to ask a court to charge five Americans arrested in early December with terrorism, and will seek life sentences against them.

The young Muslim men, who are from the Washington D.C. area, were captured in the eastern Pakistan city of Sargodha in a case that has spurred fears that Westerners are traveling to Pakistan to join militant groups.

Tahir Gujar, a senior police investigator in Sargodha, said police had almost concluded their investigation and that the men would appear in an anti-terrorist court in the city on Jan. 4.

“We are certain that these five Americans wanted to carry out attacks in Pakistan, and we will seek life imprisonment for them,” he said.

Under Pakistan’s complicated judicial system, the police will recommend the charges during the court appearance on Monday. However, the court might not charge the men immediately, and the five will likely be given time to prepare their defense after they have seen the charges.

Gujar didn’t say what police believe the men intended to target.

Map reportedly found on men
Authorities have said that the five had a map of Chashma Barrage, a complex that includes a water reservoir and other structures in the populous province of Punjab. It is located near nuclear power facilities about 125 miles southwest of the capital, Islamabad.

Pakistan has a nuclear weapons arsenal, but it also has nuclear power plants for civilian purposes.

Any nuclear activity in Pakistan tends to come under scrutiny because of growing Islamic militancy and the South Asian nation’s past history of leaking sensitive nuclear technology due to the actions of the main architect of its atomic weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan. But as militancy has spread in Pakistan, officials have repeatedly insisted the nuclear weapons program is safe.

Pakistani police and government officials have made a series of escalating and, at times, seemingly contradictory allegations about the five men’s intentions, while U.S. officials have been far more cautious, though they, too, are looking at charging the men.

Officials in both countries have said they expected the men would eventually be deported back to the United States, but charging the men in Pakistan could delay that process. Pakistan’s legal system can be slow and opaque.

Taliban contact alleged
In an interview with The Associated Press last week, Punjab province Law Minister Rana Sanaullah said the men had established contact with Taliban commanders. He said they had planned to meet Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud and his deputy Qari Hussain in Pakistan’s tribal regions before going on to attack sites inside Pakistan.

The nuclear power plant “might have been” one of the targets, Sanaullah alleged.

The U.S. Embassy declined to comment on the potential charges and would not say what efforts Washington was making to bring the men back.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34642398/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/

Al-CIA-Duh Claims Responsibility for Fudged Underwear Bombing

Infowars.com
December 28, 2009

Three days after the underwear bomber managed to detonate a blasting cap and burn himself in the air above Detroit, the CIA and bogus global jihadist network have claimed responsibility for the boneheaded “attack.”

From the AFP this afternoon:

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula claimed the failed December 25 bombing of a US-bound aircraft in a statement posted on an Islamist website on Monday, US monitoring organization SITE Intelligence said.

SITE is a known Israeli intelligence asset that makes a lot of money fleecing the American taxpayers and promulgating the scary and mythical al-Qaeda and jihadist threat. It is the ideological twin of MEMRI.

More on SITE from Prison Planet:

SITE, described as “a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, that provides information related to terrorist networks to the government, news media, and general public,” has a rather suspicious history. “The listed staff consists of two individuals, and the website seems to be an aggregator of publicly-available data on the internet, mostly consisting of current news items,” notes the SourceWatch wiki. SITE’s “Terrorism Library, on cursory investigation, looks to be a straight data scrape from the U.S. Department of State’s Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2003, Appendix B.”

Not surprisingly, SITE is connected to Israeli intelligence. “Rita Katz is Director and co-founder of the SITE Institute. Born in Iraq, her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family moved to Israel [the move has been described as both an escape and immigration in different sources]. She received a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997.” Katz’s partner, Josh Devon, is less colorful. “Devon is Senior Analyst and co-founder of the SITE Institute. He has a BA from University of Pennsylvania (English) and a BS from Wharton College (Economics). Devon is currently attending the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University with the intentions of receiving an International Studies Degree with a focus on the Middle East,” that is to say a globalist perspective on the Middle East. According to this article, SAIS is a CFR cover. “CFR member Zbigniew Brzezinski is SAIS Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy…. CFR member Paul Wolfowitz, Ph.D. is SAIS Chairman and Dean.” As well, SAIS appears to be connected to the American Enterprise Institute, where the neocons get their criminal minds.

Obama Seeks to Assure U.S. as “Qaeda Group” Stakes Claim to Christmas Terror Plot

HONOLULU — President Obama emerged from Hawaiian seclusion on Monday to try to quell gathering criticism of his administration’s handling of the thwarted Christmas Day bombing of an American airliner as a branch of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility.

“We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable,” Mr. Obama told reporters during a break in his 10-day holiday vacation. “This was a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature of those who threaten our homeland.”

He added that he had ordered reviews of the air navigation screening system and the terrorist watch list system. “The American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season,” he said.

The president spoke after the branch of Al Qaeda in Yemen and Saudi Arabia claimed responsibility for the attempted attack and said it was in retaliation for recent American-backed attacks on its members in Yemen, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks militant Islamist Web sites.

In a statement issued on jihadist forums, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula boasted the success of the “Nigerian brother” in breaking through security barriers and of its own explosives technology, SITE reported. Federal authorities say Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, tried to set off explosives aboard a trans-Atlantic Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit on Friday.

The Qaeda branch blamed a technical fault for the low-power detonation, according to SITE. The group has mounted attacks within Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and in 2004 it captured and beheaded a 49-year-old American engineer working in Riyadh, Paul M. Johnson Jr.

Government terror experts said the Qaeda claim was apparently legitimate.

“The statement is certainly credible,” one government official said, “and it reflects this group’s growing desire to strike beyond the Arabian peninsula.”

Mr. Abdulmutallab has told federal authorities that he received training and materials from a bomb expert in Yemen associated with Al Qaeda.

The government of Yemen said in a statement on Monday that Mr. Abdulmutallab had been in Yemen this year from early August to early December “after obtaining a visa to study Arabic at a language institute.”

The statement, issued by the Yemeni embassy in Washington, said Mr. Abdulmutallab had a valid United States visa and other foreign visas. “There was nothing suspicious about his intentions to visit Yemen, especially considering he had also visited the U.S. in the past,” the statement said.

Questions about how Mr. Abdulmutallab slipped through the aviation security system have been compounded by the Obama administration’s assertion over the weekend that “the system worked,” a judgment it reversed Monday.

Just hours before the president’s appearance — his first public remarks since arriving in Hawaii on Thursday — Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano recalibrated the assessment she and another top official had offered on Sunday. Speaking on NBC’s “Today” show, Ms. Napolitano said her remark had been taken out of context and that the thwarted bombing in fact represented a failure of the nation’s aviation security system.

“Our system did not work in this instance,” she said. “No one is happy or satisfied with that. An extensive review is under way.”

Until now, Mr. Obama had tried to strike a balance between signaling that he is on top of the situation and not drawing more attention to it than it already was generating. Each day since Friday, his staff accompanying him here in his home state put out statements indicating that the president was holding conference calls and requesting action of government agencies. But he declined for three days to address it in public himself, cognizant perhaps of warnings by some terrorism experts against elevating such incidents and by extension their authors.

Yet the visual contrasts have been jarring. Pictures of passengers enduring tougher security screening at the airport were juxtaposed against images of the president soaking in the sun and surf of this tropical getaway. Appearing at a Marine base near the Kailua beachfront house he has rented, Mr. Obama on Monday praised the “quick and heroic actions of passengers and crew” but made no attempt to defend the security system that allowed the suspect onto the plane with explosives in the first place.

Beyond the reviews, he pledged unspecified action against any groups that were involved. “We will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us, whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere they are plotting attacks against the U.S. homeland,” Mr. Obama said.

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