cryptogon.com

American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain.

They believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under the visa waiver programme is the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on American soil.

Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.

A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.

And a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama told The Sunday Telegraph that the CIA has stepped up its efforts in the last month after the Mumbai massacre laid bare the threat from Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the attacks, which has an extensive web of supporters in the UK.

The CIA has already spent 18 months developing a network of agents in Britain to combat al-Qaeda, unprecedented in size within the borders of such a close ally, according to intelligence sources in both London and Washington.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama, told The Sunday Telegraph: “The British Pakistani community is recognised as probably al-Qaeda’s best mechanism for launching an attack against North America.

“The American security establishment believes that danger continues and there’s very intimate cooperation between our security services to monitor that.” Mr Riedel, who served three presidents as a Middle East expert on the White House National Security Council, added: “President Obama’s national security team are well aware that this is a serious threat.”

The British official said: “The Americans run their own assets in the Pakistani community; they get their own intelligence. There’s close cooperation with MI5 but they don’t tell us the names of all their sources.

“Around 40 per cent of CIA activity on homeland threats is now in the UK. This is quite unprecedented.”

Explaining the increase in CIA activity over the past month, Mr Riedel added: “In the aftermath of the Mumbai attack the US and the UK intelligence services now have to regard Lashkar-e-Taiba as just as serious a threat to both of our countries as al-Qaeda. They have a much more extensive base among Pakistani Diaspora communities in the UK than al–Qaeda.”

Information gleaned by CIA spies in Britain has already helped thwart several terrorist attacks in the UK and was instrumental in locating Rashid Rauf, a British-born al-Qaeda operative implicated in a plot to explode airliners over the Atlantic, who was tracked down and killed in a US missile strike in November.

But some US intelligence officers are irritated that valuable manpower and resources have been diverted to the UK. One former intelligence officer who does contract work for the CIA dismissed Britain as a “swamp” of jihadis.

Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone does not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. “We don’t have anything approaching comprehensive coverage,” he said.

The dramatic escalation in CIA activity in the UK followed the exposure in August 2006 of Operation Overt, the alleged airline bomb plot.

The British intelligence official revealed that CIA chiefs sent more resources to the UK because they were not prepared to see American citizens die as a result of MI5’s inability to keep tabs on all suspects, even though the Security Service successfully uncovered the plot.

MI5 manpower will have doubled to 4,100 by 2011 but many in the US intelligence community do not think that is enough.

For their part, some British officials are queasy that information obtained by the CIA from British Pakistanis was used to help target Mr Rauf, a British citizen, whom they would have preferred to capture and bring to trial.

Sensitivities over the intelligence arrangement formed a key part of briefings given to Mr Obama, since they are central to what is often called “the most special part of the special relationship” and could complicate his dealings with Gordon Brown.

Tensions in transatlantic intelligence relations which were laid bare last week during the High Court battle over Binyam Mohamed, the British resident held in Guanatanamo Bay. British judges wanted to publish details of the torture administered to Mr Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, in US custody. But key paragraphs were blacked out after American officials threatened it could damage intelligence sharing between the two countries.

Intelligence experts said that a trusting intelligence relationship, in which one country does not publish intelligence data obtained by the other, is vital to both countries’ national security.

Patrick Mercer, chairman of the House of Commons counter-terrorism sub-committee, said: “The special relationship is a huge benefit to us. It clearly works to our advantage and helps keep the people of the UK and the US safe.

“There is no doubt that a great deal of valuable intelligence vital to British national security is procured by American agents from British sources.”

Mr Riedel added: “The partnership between the two intelligence communities is dynamic; it is one of great intimacy. We overuse the term special relationship, but this is an extraordinarily special relationship.

…

ABC News said Davis provided it with a print-out of her computerised client list, a copy of which she offered to prosecutors.

“They showed no interest. Some of these guys, I was invoicing on corporate credit cards,” she said.

The Daily Telegraph has learned that the 85-year-old former US secretary of state met President Dmitry Medvedev for secret negotiations in December. According to Western diplomats, during two days of talks the octogenarian courted Russian officials to win their support for Mr Obama’s initiative, which could see Russia and the United States each slashing their nuclear warheads to 1,000 warheads.

The decision to send Mr Kissinger to Moscow, taken by Mr Obama when he was still president-elect, is part of a plan to overcome probable Republican objections in Congress.

Mr Kissinger is believed to have won a verbal rather than written undertaking for the deal. Tom Graham, a senior associate at Kissinger Associates and a former member of the national security council in the White House, on Thursday confirmed that Mr Kissinger had met Mr Medvedev but denied that any negotiations had taken place and said he had not met with Mr Putin.

However, a diplomatic source said that Mr Kissinger held two days of talks with Mr Putin at his country house near Moscow.

While the details of the ambitious initiative are yet to be revealed, the proposal to return to the negotiating table after eight years of reluctance in Washington has been welcomed in Britain and elsewhere.

Mr Obama apparently chose Mr Kissinger for his consummate diplomatic skills and his popularity in Moscow, an affection earned by his open acknowledgment of Russia’s international resurgence.

Despite his pariah status with many Left-wingers in Mr Obama’s Democratic Party, the president forged relations with Mr Kissinger during his campaign.

In a monthly budget update, the CBO noted $284 billion in spending for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was enacted last October to help banks and other financial institutions.

Among the offices forced to close Friday were the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Consumer Affairs. The governor’s Office of Emergency Services also was dark as part of the cash-saving move ordered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Critical and revenue-generating agencies remained open, including fire stations, parks and employment centers that process unemployment insurance claims. California’s unemployment rate is 9.3 percent, a 15-year high.

At the state Department of Transportation, a handful of engineers showed up to work without pay because they didn’t want to get behind on projects they said were important to public safety.

Stan Slavin, an electrical engineer working on a traffic project in the San Francisco Bay area, said his partners at local agencies will be on the job so he was, too.

Until today it has been the work of activists, journalists and a handful of academics like Clive Norris of Sheffield University to warn of the dangers to our freedom and privacy posed by the database state. Now it is official. There could be no more authoritative judgment than this measured report, Surveillance Citizens and the State, produced by the Lord’s constitution committee. The report says that mass surveillance “risks undermining the fundamental relationship between the state and citizens, which is the cornerstone of democracy and good governance”.

It paints a picture of a governing class that has become obsessed with the collection of personal data. The public is “often unaware of the vast amount of information about them that is kept and exchanged between organisations” This will be greatly increased if Jack Straw’s coroners’ and justice bill is allowed to pass through the Commons, with Labour manipulating the parliamentary schedule so that the data-sharing proposals contained in it go largely unscrutinised.

Passage of the bill into law would repeal the federal regulation prohibiting raw milk and raw milk products for human consumption in interstate commerce. The regulation 21 CFR 1240.61 provides, in part, that “no person shall cause to be delivered into interstate commerce or shall sell, otherwise distribute, or hold for sale or other distribution after shipment in interstate commerce any milk or milk product in final package form for direct human consumption unless the product has been pasteurized….”

The bill would not force a state to legalize the sale of raw milk by producers within its boundaries nor would it force a state to allow the sale of raw milk from out-of-state producers in its retail stores. The bill would enable consumers to enter into transactions to obtain raw milk and raw milk products from other states without the transactions being in violation of federal law.

The former prime minister also said he believed the 21st century would be “poorer in spirit” and “meaner in ambition” if it was not “under the guardianship of faith in God.” He had been invited by President Obama to lead the prestigious US National Prayer Breakfast, a spectacular event in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton Hotel.