cryptogon.com

White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend will preside over a group of senior officials—including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence John (Mike) McConnell—as they attempt to deal with the latest nightmarish scenario cooked up by government counterterrorism planners.

As part of the exercise, the officials will be handed a thick binder which lays out a scenario involving simultaneous terror attacks by “sleeper cells” of 20 to 25 individuals each dispersed in five cities across the country: New York, Washington, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. The officials will then be tested on how they direct their respective agencies to respond. “We’ve designed this to overtax the system, to push the system beyond the breaking point,” said one senior administration official familiar with planning for the event, who declined to be identified talking about it before it takes place.

Take the case of 55-year-old Lake Tahoe resident Greg Felsch. Stopped at the border in Vancouver this month at the start of a planned five-day ski trip, he was sent back to the United States because of a DUI conviction seven years ago. Not that he had any idea what was going on when he was told at customs: “Your next stop is immigration.”

Felsch was ushered into a room. “There must have been 75 people in line,” he says. “We were there for three hours. One woman was in tears. A guy was sent back for having a medical marijuana card. I felt like a felon with an ankle bracelet.”

Or ask the well-to-do East Bay couple who flew to British Columbia this month for an eight-day ski vacation at the famed Whistler Chateau, where rooms run to $500 a night. They’d made the trip many times, but were surprised at the border to be told that the husband would have to report to “secondary” immigration.

There, in a room he estimates was filled with 60 other concerned travelers, he was told he was “a person who was inadmissible to Canada.” The problem? A conviction for marijuana possession.

In 1975.

Welcome to the new world of border security. Unsuspecting Americans are turning up at the Canadian border expecting clear sailing, only to find that their past — sometimes their distant past — is suddenly an issue.

While Canada officially has barred travelers convicted of criminal offenses for years, attorneys say post-9/11 information-gathering, combined with a sweeping agreement between Canada and the United States to share data, has resulted in a spike in phone calls from concerned travelers.

“The Russian foreign minister said Wednesday U.S.-led multinational foreign forces in Iraq must not conduct military operations outside the country, including against Iran,” the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

“The multinational force in Iraq should abide strictly by the UN Security Council’s mandate, which does not provide for any operations outside the country,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Lebanese magazine Al-Watan Al-Arabi in an interview.

The official and other conspirators are being protected by the federal government “in a cover-up to escape its responsibility for the loss of life in Oklahoma,” Nichols claims in a Feb. 9 affidavit.

Documents that supposedly help back up his allegations have been sealed to protect information in them, such as Social Security numbers and dates of birth.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Utah had no comment on the allegations. The FBI and Justice Department in Washington, D.C., also declined comment.

Nichols does not say what motive the government would have to be involved in the bombing.

The affidavit was filed in a lawsuit brought by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, who believes his brother’s death in a federal prison was linked to the Oklahoma City bombing. The suit, which seeks documents from the FBI under the federal Freedom of Information Act, alleges that authorities mistook Kenneth Trentadue for a bombing conspirator and that guards killed him in an interrogation that got out of hand.

Trentadue’s death a few months after the April 19, 1995, bombingwas ruled a suicide after several investigations. The government has adamantly denied any wrongdoing in the death.

In his affidavit, Nichols says he wants to bring closure to the survivors and families of the attack on the Alfred B. Murrah Federal Building, which took 168 lives. He alleges he wrote then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2004, offering to help identify all parties who played a role in the bombing but never got a reply.

Nichols is serving a life sentence at the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo. McVeigh, who carried out the bombing, was executed in 2001.

McVeigh and Nichols were the only defendants indicted in the bombing. However, Nichols alleges others were involved.

McVeigh told him he was recruited for undercover missions while serving in the military, according to Nichols. He says he learned sometime in 1995 that there had been a change in bombing target and that McVeigh was upset by that.

“There, in what I believe was an accidental slip of the tongue, McVeigh revealed the identity of a high-ranking FBI official who was apparently directing McVeigh in the bomb plot,” Nichols says in the affidavit.

Nichols also says that McVeigh threatened him and his family to force him to rob Roger Moore, an Arkansas gun dealer, of weapons and explosives. He later learned the robbery was staged so Moore, who was in on the phony heist, could deny any knowledge of the bombing plot if the stolen items were traced back to him, Nichols claims.

He adds that Moore allegedly told his attorney that he would not be prosecuted in connection with the bombing because he was a “protected witness.”

Moore could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

…

The machine is beautiful as it wakes up — nerve cells flicker on the screen in soft pastel tones, electrical charges flash through a maze of synapses. The brain, just after being switched on, seems a little sleepy, but gentle bursts of current bring it fully to life.

This unprecedented piece of hardware consists of about 10,000 computer chips that act like real nerve cells. To simulate a natural brain, part of the cerebral cortex of young rats was painstakingly replicated in the computer, cell by cell, together with the branched tree-like structure of the synapses.

…

The newborn “Blue Brain” surprised the designers with its willfulness from the very first day. It had hardly been fed electrical impulses before strange patterns began to appear on the screen with the lightning-like flashes produced by cells that scientists recognize from actual thought processes. Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. “It happened entirely on its own,” says Markram. “Spontaneously.”

…

Skeptics wonder what the purpose is of painstakingly replicating things when scientists have so little understanding of their purpose and function. Indeed, no one will know, within the foreseeable future, what exactly happens in the circuits of the replicated brain — except that whatever it is, it looks seductively authentic to an outside observer.

Perhaps the only ones who could have known are the scores of rats that carry on a shadow-like existence in this supercomputer. Researchers opened thousands of rat skulls over the years, removed their brains, and cut them into thin slices, which they kept alive. Then they directed tiny sensors at the individual neurons. They listened to the cells firing neurons, and intercepted the responses coming from the adjacent cells.

The brain slices were exposed to a variety of electrical impulses. The impulses reflected the stimuli that may have been received by the laboratory rats’ brains when the animals smelled cheese or were startled by a shape. The cells reacted — just as they did when the rats were still alive — by sending electrical charges through the neuroplexus. The researchers’ measuring devices recorded all signals until the brain slices expired.