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Flow with whatever may happen
and let your mind be free;
Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.
This is the ultimate.

-Chuang Tsu

Another busy day at the White House: First Lady Michelle Obama hosted students from Bancroft High School in Washington, who helped her plant and water the brand-new White House garden. She and Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack spoke to the students about the healthy fruits and veggies that would grow there. “It’s all brain food,” Obama said. She cheered the kids for bringing good weather and then sent them (and the press) home with cookies.

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Flow with whatever may happen
and let your mind be free;
Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.
This is the ultimate.

-Chuang Tsu

Israeli Military Investigation Finds No Misconduct in Gaza War

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 30, 2009; 11:21 AM

JERUSALEM, March 30 — The Israeli military’s top lawyer on Monday closed an investigation into alleged misconduct during the recent three-week war in Gaza, concluding that charges made by graduates of a military preparation school were “based on hearsay” and had been “purposely exaggerated.”

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said that Brig. Gen. Avichai Mandelblit concluded there was no evidence to support the most serious charges, including alleged instances where civilians were shot without cause and soldiers unnecessarily destroyed or defaced property.

“Once the claims were checked, they were not supported by the facts,” the statement said.

Mandelblit was quoted in the release criticizing the soldiers who had made the allegations during a forum set up at the Rabin Military Preparation Center earlier this year.

“It is unfortunate that none of the speakers at the conference was careful to be accurate in the depiction of his claims, and even more so that they chose to present various incidents of a severe nature, despite not personally witnessing and knowing much about them,” Mandelblit said. “It seems that it will be difficult to evaluate the damage done to the image and morals of the IDF and its soldiers” as a result of the allegations.

The head of the center forwarded the allegations to military officials after the conference, and later published them in a newsletter distributed to the center’s alumni. The center is one of a number in Israel where future recruits can spend a year on a variety of educational or other projects before doing their mandatory military service.

The charges made at the Rabin center are part of ongoing controversy that has developed within Israel and internationally over the country’s 22-day Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Launched to quell rockets fired by Islamist groups from Gaza into Israeli towns and villages, the military operation involved hundreds of air strikes, mortar and artillery fire, and the movement of several thousand Israeli soldiers into Gaza.

Between 1,200 and 1,400 Palestinians were killed — the two sides differ in their estimates. Israel acknowledges there were at least 295 civilian deaths, though it says the bulk of those killed were fighters associated with the Islamist Hamas movement and other groups. Palestinian officials say the deaths were mostly civilian.

In the release today, the IDF said the charges raised at the Rabin center appeared to be secondhand versions of events that “were purposely exaggerated and made extreme, in order to make a point.”

For example, a soldier who relayed the alleged shooting of an elderly woman “was only repeating a rumor he had heard.”

The IDF statement said that an unrelated investigation had discovered a “similar incident” in which a woman “suspected as being a suicide bomber” advanced towards Israeli soldiers.

The soldiers “opened fire towards her after repeatedly trying to stop her from advancing,” the IDF release said.

The release did not say whether the woman was killed or whether she was carrying explosives. An official with the IDF said no further information was available.

Nursing home shooting

Carthage, N.C. — A gunman walked into a Moore County nursing home Sunday morning, fatally shooting eight people and injuring three others, including a police officer, Carthage Police Chief Chris McKenzie said.

The shooting happened around 10 a.m. at Pinelake Health and Rehab Center, 801 Pinehurst Ave., a 110-bed rehabilitation, nursing and Alzheimer’s care facility in Carthage.

McKenzie did not offer a motive for the crime or say what the suspect’s relationship to the facility might be. He said seven of the deceased were patients and one was an employee of the facility.

“The shooter entered the facility heavily armed and began shooting at people in wheelchairs,” Sen. Harris Blake, R-Moore told WRAL News.

While meeting with families Sunday at First Baptist Church, 108 McNeill St. in Carthage, Blake said he knew two patients at the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center. Neither person was injured, he said.

The police officer, who was the first to arrive at the scene, was shot in the leg, McKenzie said. The officer shot the gunman who was transported to the Moore Regional Hospital for treatment.

“It’s a horrible event in any size town, particularly though when you deal with a small town such as Carthage. It’s hard. This is my town, this is my small town. I was born and raised here. So yeah, I take it to heart a little bit. All you can do is move forward,” McKenzie said.

Multiple law enforcement agencies, including Carthage Police Department, Moore County Sheriff’s Office and State Bureau Investigation, are investigating.

Pinelake, which opened in 1993, recently got a five-star rating, the highest possible, from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the federal insurance programs.

Major Cyber Spy Network Uncovered

An electronic spy network, based mainly in China, has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world, Canadian researchers say.

They said the network had infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.

They included computers belonging to foreign ministries and embassies and those linked with the Dalai Lama – Tibet’s spiritual leader.

There is no conclusive evidence China’s government was behind it, researchers say. Beijing also denied involvement.

The report comes after a 10-month investigation by the Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), which comprises researchers from Ottawa-based think tank SecDev Group and the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies.

They were acting on a request from the Tibetan spiritual leader’s office to check whether the computers of his Tibetan exile network had been infiltrated.

Researchers found that ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan appear to had been targeted.

Hacked systems were also discovered in the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.

Compromised

The researchers said hackers were apparently able to take control of computers belonging to several foreign ministries and embassies across the world using malicious software, or malware.

“We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama,” investigator Greg Walton was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.

They say they believe the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on governments in Asia.

By installing malware on compromised computers, hackers were able to take control of them to send and receive classified data.

In this case, the software also gave hackers the ability to use audio and video recording devices to monitor the rooms the computers were in. But investigators said they did not know whether or not this element had been used.

According to the New York Times, the spying operation is the largest to have been uncovered in terms of the number of countries affected.

In an abstract for the report entitled The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement – posted on the IWM website – investigators said while such attacks were not new, these particularly stood out for their ability to collect “actionable intelligence for use by the police and security services of a repressive state, with potentially fatal consequences for those exposed”.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7970471.stm

Published: 2009/03/29 08:16:12 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Obama Outlines Afghan Strategy
He Pushes Stability and Regional Partnerships

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 28, 2009; A01

President Obama introduced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday with a threat assessment familiar from the Bush administration. “The terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks,” he said, are continuing to devise plots designed to “kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

Elements of the Obama plan to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda in Pakistan and vanquish its Taliban allies in Afghanistan also struck notes from the past. More U.S. troops, civilian officials and money will be needed, he said. Allies will be asked for additional help, and local forces will be trained to eventually take over the fight. Benchmarks will be set to measure progress.

But Obama sought to separate his approach from what he has described as years of unfocused, failed policy while President George W. Bush directed his attention and U.S. resources toward Iraq. Obama pledged to tighten U.S. focus on Pakistan and build a better “partnership” with its government and military. Beyond stepping up the ground fight against the Taliban, he said, he plans to target far more resources toward a narrower set of Afghan problems: government incompetence, opium cultivation and heroin trafficking, and a poorly equipped and trained army.

Bush spoke regularly of establishing a “flourishing democracy” in Afghanistan. But Obama, flanked during a White House speech by his top national security Cabinet members and advisers, made clear that his primary objective is to create a country stable and strong enough to prevent al-Qaeda from reoccupying Afghan territory.

“To succeed, we and our friends and allies must reverse the Taliban’s gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government. . . . Afghanistan has an elected government, but it is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people,” Obama said.

He indicated that the United States expects to continue to carry the bulk of the combat load and will seek other forms of assistance from allies, a departure from the Bush administration’s effort over the past two years to persuade NATO partners to send more combat troops to Afghanistan. “We seek not simply troops,” Obama said, “but rather clearly defined capabilities: supporting the Afghan elections” scheduled for August, “training Afghan security forces, and a greater civilian commitment to the Afghan people.”

Obama said that he would send 4,000 U.S. troops — beyond the additional 17,000 he authorized last month — to work as trainers and advisers to the Afghan army, and hundreds more civilian officials and diplomats to help improve governance and the country’s economy. When currently scheduled deployments are completed late this summer, U.S. troops in Afghanistan will total more than 60,000, twice as many as the non-U.S. NATO contingent.

While Bush rejected any contact with Afghan neighbor Iran, Obama said that he plans to bring together “all who should have a stake in the security of the region,” including Iran, Russia, China and India, as part of a new international contact group he said he will form with the United Nations.

Obama said events in Pakistan are “inextricably linked” to success in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, “needs our help in going after al-Qaeda,” whose leadership, along with a network of other insurgent groups, is located in the rugged mountains on the Afghan border. The Islamabad “government’s ability to destroy these safe havens is tied to its own strength and security,” Obama said. He pledged support for a new $7.5 billion aid package, new military equipment, and a constancy and concentration of effort.

But “after years of mixed results, we will not provide a blank check,” he said. “Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken — one way or the other — when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets.”

Although the administration has accelerated missile attacks from unmanned Predator aircraft on insurgent targets in western Pakistan, it is not believed to have resumed ground attacks by military Special Forces and CIA operatives. Bush authorized such missions last summer.

Other elements of Obama’s strategy have been tried before, but administration and intelligence officials think that the sharper U.S. focus on the region will give leaders renewed resolve as well as political cover for going after extremist groups. In the past, Pakistani leaders have been reluctant to support U.S.-backed counterterrorism efforts because of public opposition to what many Pakistanis consider Washington’s war.

Congressional reaction to the announcement was largely positive. “We’ve said for some time that we must refocus our resources on threats like al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) issued a statement saying: “I support the strategy the president unveiled today because it reflects the advice of our commanders on the ground.”

Obama said of the additional resources his policy will require: “I do not ask for this support lightly. These are challenging times, and resources are stretched. But the American people must understand that this is a down payment on our own future.”

Neither Obama, nor the senior officials who fanned out yesterday to brief reporters on the plan, provided cost details.

“This strategy is not intended to be a campaign plan or a straitjacket,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official who headed an intense 60-day White House policy review that led to Obama’s announcement. It was designed to be flexible, he said, and criteria outlined by Obama and others — levels of violence and casualties in Afghanistan, Pakistani attacks against insurgents and accounting for U.S. aid — would be used to determine whether course corrections were needed.

Afghanistan, Obama said, “will see no end to violence if insurgents move freely back and forth across the border” with Pakistan. But details on how the movement would be stopped, and how al-Qaeda and other groups would be rousted from their havens in Pakistan, were similarly scarce.

That is “the most daunting” problem, said Richard L. Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy to the region, because Pakistan is “a sovereign country and there is a red line . . . unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government over and over again: no foreign troops on our soil.”

“The short answer,” Riedel said, “is that the combination of aggressive military operations on the Afghan side, and working energetically with the Pakistani government to shut down these safe havens, creates the synergy which we hope will then lead to their destruction.”

Holbrooke and Riedel sought to sell the strategy to a small group of influential South Asia scholars and analysts, among them James Dobbins of the Rand Corp. and Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a White House meeting yesterday. The attendees reacted favorably to the Afghanistan recommendations, but several were deeply skeptical that the United States would be able to achieve its policy goals in Pakistan, according to one person who attended the meeting.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) similarly praised the Afghan elements of the policy and welcomed “the new focus on Pakistan.” But he said in a statement that he is “skeptical that the Pakistanis will secure their border” and warned against tying Afghanistan’s future “too tightly to Pakistan’s governmental decisions.”

Asked about the campaign against Afghan corruption, Holbrooke said, “We’re not going to lay out how we’re going to deal with it. To some extent, we don’t know yet.”

Staff writers Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Ann Scott Tyson and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

Remembering historian, Civil Rights activist John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin, one of the nation’s most prominent historians of life in the South and the African-American experience, died Wednesday in Durham, N.C. of heart failure.

Franklin’s voluminous writings cemented his reputation among academics, politicians and civil rights figures as an important historian and chronicler of American history. He was born and raised in an all-black community in Oklahoma and would witness numerous instances of racism in his lifetime. But Franklin would go on to break numerous color barriers during his career. He was the first black department chair at a mostly white institution and the first black president of the American Historical Association. Franklin was also part of the team of scholars who assisted Thurgood Marshall to win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed the “separate but equal” doctrine in the nation’s public schools.

Below is a videotaped address given by Franklin at the North Carolina NAACP meeting in Wilmington, N.C. in 2007. In it he discusses the issue of reparations for slavery, segregation and injustices such as the 1898 Wilmington race riots.

Franklin saw reparations not as a radical idea, but as part of the larger work for racial justice. In 2007, Franklin returned to Oklahoma to testify in a hearing urging Congress to pass legislation that would clear the way for survivors of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, one of the nation’s worst race riots, to sue for reparations.