cryptogon.com

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

McChrystal concludes the document’s five-page Commander’s Summary on a note of muted optimism: “While the situation is serious, success is still achievable.”

But he repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely. McChrystal describes an Afghan government riddled with corruption and an international force undermined by tactics that alienate civilians.

He provides extensive new details about the Taliban insurgency, which he calls a muscular and sophisticated enemy that uses modern propaganda and systematically reaches into Afghanistan’s prisons to recruit members and even plan operations.

McChrystal’s assessment is one of several options the White House is considering. His plan could intensify a national debate in which leading Democratic lawmakers have expressed reluctance about committing more troops to an increasingly unpopular war. Obama said last week that he will not decide whether to send more troops until he has “absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.”

The commander has prepared a separate detailed request for additional troops and other resources, but defense officials have said he is awaiting instructions before sending it to the Pentagon.

Senior administration officials asked The Post over the weekend to withhold brief portions of the assessment that they said could compromise future operations. A declassified version of the document, with some deletions made at the government’s request, appears at washingtonpost.com.

Public records available from state and federal courts and from Web site registrations have raised new questions about a company contracted to operate a detention facility in Hardin, as well as a potential supplier of police equipment to the venture.

Local officials have released almost no details on American Police Force, and company representatives have been tight-lipped, leaving everyone from Hardin residents to a New Zealand blogger turning to the Internet for answers.

Separate research efforts by The Billings Gazette and others turned up connections and similarities between the APF Web site and sites for other little-known defense procurement companies.

All of the Web sites share similarities in design, and some include exactly the same phrases, a red flag to Kevin Flaherty, an American blogger living in New Zealand who writes about private military contractors.

Flaherty, owner of the Cryptogon blog, said that plans by APF to provide Hardin with a homeless shelter, computers for schools, free meals for the needy and an animal shelter “read like something out of The Onion,” a satirical newspaper.

Flaherty said his online research revealed “a lot of weirdness to chase down.”

Public records show that the APF Web site, Americanpolicegroup.com, was first registered on May 15, about two weeks after an effort by the Two Rivers Authority to pursue prisoners from Guantanamo Bay made national headlines.

A section of text on the APF site refers to the company’s “U.S. Training Center,” and matches word for word text from the Web site for Xe, formerly Blackwater. That company’s U.S. Training Center is touted as the largest facility of its kind.

APF representatives have said that their company is a subsidiary of an undisclosed parent corporation founded in 1984. Blackwater was started in 1997.

Public Internet records show that the APF Web site is one of six hosted on a single Web server, including a site for Defense Product Solutions.

Both share the same double-eagle logo, and the same company, Purepoint Design, developed both Web sites. No one answered a call to Purepoint’s office in Newport Beach, Calif.

A section of text on the Defense Product Solutions Web site matches word for word text found on Web sites for Allied Defense Systems and Defense Logistic Services, all promising a similarly exhaustive range of military products and services.

Public records for those companies and others with similar Web sites – including Defense Contracting and Consulting, and Worldwide Military Exchange – all show connections to Edward Angelino, a government contractor in Huntington Beach, Calif.

Angelino said that he is not an owner of APF and has had not met with anyone from Hardin, but added that he has been in discussions with APF over the past four months about supplying police and prison gear for use at the Hardin facility.

“Our role is simply, if we land a contract, to provide some supplies to the guards themselves and what they need,” he said, adding that there is “nothing concrete, nothing in writing” with APF.

According to documents filed in connection with a civil lawsuit in Superior Court of California in Orange County, Angelino graduated from Al-Roda High School in Kuwait City, Kuwait, and is a U.S. citizen.

Sometimes referred to in court documents by the first name “Emad,” Angelino lists on his resume degrees in electrical engineering from California State University, Fresno and engineering management from the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Public government procurement records show that he has serviced tens of millions of dollars in federal contracts, supplying items as varied as sporting goods, turbine parts and police gear.

Angelino said APF is a separate entity, and that the only company he operates, Allied Defense Systems, has been in business since 2005.

He said that he had “no idea” why there are similarities between Web sites for his company and APF.

Angelino is named in state and federal civil lawsuits dating back to 2004, including one dispute stemming from a $17 million contract to provide police gear to U.S. troops and Iraqi police.

Owners of a business that employed Angelino got a temporary restraining order, and later an injunction, barring him from acting on behalf of the company, said Ira Rivin, an Orange County attorney for the plaintiffs.

“Our claim was that Mr. Angelino was attempting to take over the company for himself,” Rivin said, adding that the case was settled on the day it was scheduled to go to trial. He did not disclose details of the settlement.

Angelino also was named in a federal civil suit in Kentucky filed by U.S. Cavalry, the distributor of police equipment in that same contract. Company executives declined to comment specifically on that case, which also was settled.

The complaint alleges that the company Angelino had managed failed to honor the terms of a joint venture with U.S. Cavalry, resulting in additional costs and logistical complications.

In answers to both complaints, Angelino states that he was attempting to work with U.S. Cavalry to ensure compliance with an existing contract after his employers failed to follow through on promises to finance the deal.

U.S. Cavalry, a supplier for 35 years of uniforms and other gear for military and law enforcement, was able to successfully complete the contract, said Dennis Garvey, the company’s chief operating officer.

Garvey said that a lack of oversight by overwhelmed federal supply-chain workers has created a gold rush to fulfill contracts for homeland security and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 9/11, many small companies “became very proficient in tracking out contract opportunities and worrying later about how they were going to fulfill them,” Garvey said, adding that many other small contractors are competent and reputable.

“But a lot of small companies, if they run into trouble and get caught not playing by the rules, can close down and open up under another name next week,” he said.

“There’s a lot of people attracted by all the money being spent, and the normal due diligence done on some contracts is often not as tightly controlled as you would expect,” he said.

A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as “agents” to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.

Its main objectives include the “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence”.

Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a “sinister step” for any country, adding that it was “positively chilling” on a European scale.

The Indect research, which began this year, comes as the EU is pressing ahead with an expansion of its role in fighting crime, terrorism and managing migration, increasing its budget in these areas by 13.5% to nearly £900 million.

The European Commission is calling for a “common culture” of law enforcement to be developed across the EU and for a third of police officers – more than 50,000 in the UK alone – to be given training in European affairs within the next five years.

According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple.

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded “Orwellian” and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

“This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them,” he said.

“The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked ‘is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?'”

Miss Chakrabarti said: “Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.

Research using a massive sample of 24 million individual credit files has found that homeowners with high scores when they apply for a loan are 50% more likely to “strategically default” — abruptly and intentionally pull the plug and abandon the mortgage — compared with lower-scoring borrowers.

National credit bureau Experian teamed with consulting company Oliver Wyman to identify the characteristics and debt management behavior of the growing numbers of homeowners who bail out of their mortgages with none of the expected warning signs, such as nonpayments on other debts.

With foreclosures, delinquencies and loan losses at record levels, strategic defaults and walkaways are among the hottest subjects in residential real estate finance. Unlike in earlier academic studies, Experian and Wyman could tap into credit files over extended periods to identify patterns associated with strategic defaults.

Among researchers’ findings are these eye-openers:

* The number of strategic defaults is far beyond most industry estimates — 588,000 nationwide during 2008, more than double the total in 2007. They represented 18% of all serious delinquencies that extended for more than 60 days in last year’s fourth quarter.

* Strategic defaulters often go straight from perfect payment histories to no mortgage payments at all. This is in stark contrast with most financially distressed borrowers, who try to keep paying on their mortgage even after they’ve fallen behind on other accounts.

* Strategic defaults are heavily concentrated in negative-equity markets where home values zoomed during the boom and have cratered since 2006. In California last year, the number of strategic defaults was 68 times higher than it was in 2005. In Florida it was 46 times higher. In most other parts of the country, defaults were about nine times higher in 2008 than in 2005.

* Two-thirds of strategic defaulters have only one mortgage — the one they’re walking away from on their primary homes. Individuals who have mortgages on multiple houses also have a higher likelihood of strategic default, but researchers believe that many of these walkaways are from investment properties or second homes.

* Homeowners with large mortgage balances generally are more likely to pull the plug than those with lower balances. Similarly, people with credit ratings in the two highest categories measured by VantageScore — a joint scoring venture created by Experian and the two other national credit bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion — are far more likely to default strategically than people in lower score categories.

But Schwartz says this requirement will be dropped, mainly because there aren’t enough fighter pilots to fill the growing demand for UAV crews. “There’s no need for them to be pilots,” one senior Pentagon official says. “It’s sort of like a union regulation.”

This year, the Air Force will train more joystick pilots than new fighter and bomber pilots. “If you want to be in the center of the action, this is the place to be,” Schwartz says. “It’s not a temporary phenomenon…It’s a sustainable career path. I’ve made that very clear.” Lt. Col. Travis Burdine, a Predator pilot-from-afar, has gotten the message: “We all joined the Air Force to go flying, but word on the street is that job satisfaction is very high [manning a joystick]. Every day we’re doing this, we’re in the thick of the fight. We fly 36 [combat air patrols] a day. Where they’re happening, the hottest 36 things are going on.”

Zeitoun weathered the storm’s harrowing landfall, and ended up in a tent on his house’s roof. He dug a secondhand canoe out of the garage and began paddling around, seeing how he could help. He spent the first days aiding neighbors and strangers, saving the life of at least one person trapped in her house, and even feeding stranded dogs.

Then the standing feet of water became toxic with organic material and spilled pollutants, his meetings with people became more fraught and weird, he saw his first body and his first criminal entrepreneurs, and decided it was time to go. And that’s when the unnatural disaster happened.

On Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2005, armed and badged black-uniformed men and a tall woman in a power boat appeared at the door of one of his properties that he, his tenant, and two others were using as a meeting place because it still had a working phone. Zeitoun was in the middle of a call with his brother Ahmad, a ship captain, calling from Spain to repeat his pleas to Zeitoun to leave town.

With no questions asked and no questions allowed, Zeitoun and the others were handcuffed and shackled at automatic weapon-point, dropped into the boat, and taken away; the officers didn’t secure the house or treat it as a crime scene and left it unlocked, which meant it was eventually completely stripped and looted.

Zeitoun documents a little-known fact: the existence of “Camp Greyhound,” an outdoor jail built in New Orleans’ central bus station within hours of the hurricane’s landfall at the behest of the federal Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. Similar to Guantanamo Bay, Camp Greyhound (the guards’ name for it) was a kennel, runs of wire fencing and concrete flooring; there was nothing to sit or sleep on, and toilet facilities were portables outside the enclosures. Power was provided by a running diesel locomotive parked within yards of the cages, providing a continuous deafening hum and diesel pall.

Zeitoun was not formally charged, was not read Miranda rights, was not allowed a phone call. He was physically and verbally abused, pepper sprayed, strip-and body-cavity searched; and was accused of being a “terrorist” during his processing at the “camp.” The details of his captivity only become increasingly outrageous.

Fellow prisoners he was able to talk to included a New Orleans firefighter ordered to stay in the city to work who was arrested in his own yard, and a Houston sanitation worker whose company contracted to help in the cleanup effort — arrested wearing his work uniform, possessing ID, and with the keys to his garbage truck in his hand.

Prisoners included Marlene Maten, 73-year-old diabetic deaconess at Resurrection Mission Baptist Church, arrested as she carried a package of sausages from a cooler in her car, parked beside the hotel to which she was returning.

Marlene, along with Zeitoun and hundreds of others from Camp Greyhound, ended up at maximum security Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, in St. Gabriel, La., 70 miles from New Orleans. They were FEMA prisoners: FEMA rented state prison space and Camp Greyhound transfers were, according to prison staff, “FEMA’s problem.” Again: transferred with no charges, no information, no opportunity to make a phone call or talk to a lawyer.

Thanks to a volunteer prison missionary who agreed to call Kathy, she found out Zeitoun was alive. (His family had assumed him dead once contact was broken for weeks.) She immediately hired a lawyer, who found out there would finally be a hearing on Zeitoun’s “case.” However, when Kathy contacted the Hunt center to find out where the hearing would be held, she was told that location, and whether Zeitoun was even at the prison, was “private information.”

Putin, who spoke at an international investment forum in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, chided the United States for “an uncontrolled issue of dollars” and said the American currency’s dominance had been “one of the triggers” of the global crisis.

Putin renewed Russia’s call on the U.S. administration and global community to give the green light to alternative reserve currencies: “If there are several reserve currencies, this will not harm the U.S. economy in any way.”

President Dmitry Medvedev’s economic advisor, Arkady Dvorkovich, said Thursday that Russia would at next week’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh press for more follow-through on measures to confront the global downturn and to change Western-dominated international financial institutions.

“It is the biggest taxer of them all. Diluting the value of the dollar by increasing its supply is a vicious, sinister tax on the poor and middle class.”

Paul makes the case that the Fed is the main culprit responsible for the current economic mess the country faces through the destructive policies of cheap credit and excessive money printing.

“Prosperity can never be achieved by cheap credit,” says Paul. “If that were so, no one would have to work for a living. Inflated prices only deceive one into believing that real wealth has been created.”

The Federal Reserve, created in 1913, has been acting as the main central bank of the United States for nearly one hundred years. Many Americans are either not sure or not interested in what role the Fed plays in managing the economy. “The economic crisis has changed everything,” writes Congressman Paul.

Paul is currently pushing for passage of a bill, H.R. 1207, that would allow for an unprecedented audit of the Federal Reserve. The bill has 289 co-sponsors, and is gaining solid momentum in the House of Representatives.

“The worse the economy gets, the more power Congress is willing to grant to the Federal Reserve. Trillions of dollars created and distributed by the Fed with no requirement to submit to any oversight” argues Congressman Paul.

“End the Fed” is a sharp counter to Keynesian economic theory, and takes aim at the hazards of a managed economy.