Now this time there couldn't have been a mistake. There could be no misunderstanding on this one. Our government couldn't have done something wrong on this one. For reference, this is the second part from yesterdays entry entry called Uncovering the Truth.
Please read Uncovering the Truth, Part One first before you read this one.
This is a story of one of the most sought after terrorists on the planet. John Ashcroft had once placed this person to the level of "the deadly seven". Meaning one of the seven most wanted people in the world.
Then on a Thursday evening on July 17, 2008 in a Bazizi Mosque in Ghazni, just south of Kabul, the men were coming out of their evening prayers. They paused when they saw someone cowering on the ground. They formed a circle around the person, who was holding two small bags at their side. Fearing that this person could be carrying a bomb, one man called the police.
Not long after this scene, a telephone rang at the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) in Washington more than 11,000 kilometers away. After the call someone crossed one of "the deadly seven" names off of the suspect list and wrote the word "arrested".
It took two weeks after some interrogation at the US Air Force Base in Bagram, Afghanistan before the prisoner was taken to New York. Now in a tracksuit, the now frail 90lb, 5'4" prisoner was escorted, on August 11, 2008, into US Federal Court in Manhattan in a wheel chair. The accused had two bullet wounds in the abdomen. In October the prisoner was taken to Carswell Psychiatric Center in Fort Worth, TX for psychological review.
Considered a genius and hunted by the CIA and the FBI, the prisoner is believed to be a key player in raising money for al-Qaida by collecting donations and smuggling diamonds. A feather in the cap for the Bush Administration? The prisoner was considered the most important catch in five years, according to John Kiriakou, a CIA terrorist hunter.
This is where things can get a bit odd, though. The prisoner has not been charged with collaborating or as an accomplice in terrorist attackes. The charge was attempted murder of U.S. soldiers and FBI agents, to whom were attacked with a weapon in Afghanistan. If convicted the prisoner could face up to 20 years in prison.
The chief planner of the 9-11 attackes, Khlid Sheikh Mohammed, was arrested on March 1, 2003, in Rawaplindi, Pakistan. He was the biggest catch at that time in the battle against al-Qaida. The CIA interrogated him at an secret location where, it is reported he revealed aspect of the inner world of internal terrorism.
It is also widely known that someone being interrogated will say nearly anything in order for these interrogations to stop. It is also noted that our government used waterboarding.
This interrogation prompted a series of arrests not long after. The CIA felt that any name that Mohammed mentioned was immediately and automatically an important al-Quida terrorist. This one of "the deadly seven" was one of those.
Elaine Whitfield Sharp is an attorney for the prestigious law firm of Sharp and Sharp. On their website it states, "We are trial attorneys who represent people. Our practice is dedicated to securing justice for people in state and federal courts. We do not represent big business, the government, or insurance companies."
She has represented the prisoner of this story since 2003. She is convinced that this person, who was a high-level classification prisoner and who spent five years in what is referred to as a "black site" in Bagram, the most notorious in the legal system, is being detained for political reasons and not for murder of soldiers or agents.
A number of other prisoners held at Bagram Air Base, the site of the most important US detainee camp in Afghanistan, say they heard a woman screaming. The woman was nicknamed the "gray lady of Bagram."
She reports that the allegations brought against the prisoner thus far are “proven wrong and unsubstantiated”. The FBI and the CIA have made no comment as to these claims.
Sharp claimed that “every time that US authorities accused Aafia of something, we showed it was false”.
Sharp states, “They accuse of brokering a diamond ring for giving the proceeds to al-Quida. They said the prisoner was in Liberia when this took place. We showed the prisoner was in Boston, running a play group with a sister of the prisoner. They talked of involved in the production of neuro-chemical to be used by terrorists in the US. We showed that the accused was not."
The U.S. authorities accused the prisoner of other crimes to which when Sharp asked for evidence, they never gave any.
There is also a media report, to which Sharp has rejected, of papers seized in Guantanamo Bay prison that state Aafia Siddiqui is married to Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, who is an alleged al-Quida facilitator who intended to blow up gas stations or poison water reservoirs in the United States. Sharp disputes any report that she is married to this man. There has been no evidence brought forward by the government agencies to substantiate this claim.
Sharp states emphatically that there has been no substantiated evidence and all of this has been concocted to paint her guilty by association.
For your reference, today's story and yesterday's story are of the same person. I specifically wrote them this way so to show how your mind can go to places by simple racial, religious or terrorist phrases. When those phrase are not included, as in yesterday, there might be more of a shadow of doubt due to how things might be worded.
Either way, will her truth ever be uncovered?
This, the 210th entry in bloggoland! Thanks for reading and coming back. I always enjoy the comments, emails and the banter!!
(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs
Showing posts with label MIT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MIT. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
Uncovering the Truth, Part I
Is it possible that there has been a mistake? Is there a possibility that there has been some misunderstanding? Is there a possibility that our government has done something wrong?
This is the story of a fair skinned woman, a mother of three children, born on March 2, 1972. She comes from an upper middle-class family and spent more than 10 years studying at elite universities in the United States. Her father was a surgeon, the mother is a housewife. At one time the family lived abroad in the British city of Manchester, and in Zambia. Her brother is an architect and lives in Houston. Her sister is a neurologist and has worked at one of the best hospitals in Boston. She studied biology on a scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a PhD in neuroscience at Brandeis University, where she was considered an outstanding scientist.
In 1992, as a sophomore at MIT, she received a Carroll L. Wilson Award for her research proposal "Islamization in Pakistan and its Effects on Women". As a junior, she received a $1,200 fellowship through MIT's LINKS program to help clean up Cambridge elementary school playgrounds. During her undergraduate career, she lived in McCormick Hall and worked at the MIT libraries. She graduated from MIT in 1995. In 1996, she wrote an article for the MIT Information Systems newsletter about the File Transfer Protocol and the then-emerging World Wide Web.
In 1999, while living in Boston, she and and her husband founded the nonprofit Institute of Research and Teaching. She went on to graduate study in Neuroscience at Brandeis University, receiving a Ph.D. degree in 2001 for her dissertation, entitled "Separating the Components of Imitation".
She was active with charities and a refugee center to which she raised money for Bosnian orphans.
On March 1, 2003, she sent an an email to her professor, Robert Sekuler, at Brandeis University outside Boston. She was looking for a job. "I would prefer to work in the United States," she wrote, noting that she was having difficulty finding work despite her educational background. A few days later, she disappeared. Early in the morning on the day of her disappearance, she left her parents' house, together with her three children. She took a taxi to the airport to catch a morning flight. She was planning to visit her uncle. Two of her children are reported missing.
The last thing she remembers, she says, was receiving an injection in her arm. She says that when she regained consciousness she was in a prison cell, which she believes was on a military base in Afghanistan, because she heard aircraft taking off and landing. She claims that she was held in solitary confinement for more than five years, and that it was always the same Americans who interrogated her, without masks or uniforms. For days, she says, they would play tape recordings of her children's terrified screams, and she claims that she was forced to write hundreds of pages about the construction of dirty bombs and attacks using viruses.
Her baby was taken away immediately, she says. They showed her a photograph of her seven-year-old, lying in a pool of blood. The only one of her children they occasionally showed her, she says, was Mariam, shown as a vague outline behind a pane of frosted glass.
On April 21, 2003, the NBC ran a story about her arrest on the evening news.
According to Human Rights Commissions, there are at least 52 secret prisons, just in the country of Pakistan, in which thousands of people are believed to have disappeared since the beginning of the war on terrorism.
The CIA denies that its agents had anything to do with her disappearance. Michael Scheuer, a member of a unit that pursued al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden (to which is still at large) from 1996 to 1999, says curtly: "We never arrested or imprisoned a woman. She is a liar."
There were never any weapons on mass destruction. That was a lie. The Bush Administration has stated that they never tortured or wrongfully imprisoned people, to which we have found numerous untruths to this as well.
But if it is true that a woman was tortured and disappeared into a secret dungeon, it would be a first in the post-September 11 world -- and yet another example of the decay of standards in America.
Will the truth ever be uncovered?
Thanks to:
Spiegle International
NY Times
NBC
This, the 209th entry in bloggoland! Thanks for reading and coming back. I always enjoy the comments, emails and the banter!!
(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs
This is the story of a fair skinned woman, a mother of three children, born on March 2, 1972. She comes from an upper middle-class family and spent more than 10 years studying at elite universities in the United States. Her father was a surgeon, the mother is a housewife. At one time the family lived abroad in the British city of Manchester, and in Zambia. Her brother is an architect and lives in Houston. Her sister is a neurologist and has worked at one of the best hospitals in Boston. She studied biology on a scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a PhD in neuroscience at Brandeis University, where she was considered an outstanding scientist.
In 1992, as a sophomore at MIT, she received a Carroll L. Wilson Award for her research proposal "Islamization in Pakistan and its Effects on Women". As a junior, she received a $1,200 fellowship through MIT's LINKS program to help clean up Cambridge elementary school playgrounds. During her undergraduate career, she lived in McCormick Hall and worked at the MIT libraries. She graduated from MIT in 1995. In 1996, she wrote an article for the MIT Information Systems newsletter about the File Transfer Protocol and the then-emerging World Wide Web.
In 1999, while living in Boston, she and and her husband founded the nonprofit Institute of Research and Teaching. She went on to graduate study in Neuroscience at Brandeis University, receiving a Ph.D. degree in 2001 for her dissertation, entitled "Separating the Components of Imitation".
She was active with charities and a refugee center to which she raised money for Bosnian orphans.
On March 1, 2003, she sent an an email to her professor, Robert Sekuler, at Brandeis University outside Boston. She was looking for a job. "I would prefer to work in the United States," she wrote, noting that she was having difficulty finding work despite her educational background. A few days later, she disappeared. Early in the morning on the day of her disappearance, she left her parents' house, together with her three children. She took a taxi to the airport to catch a morning flight. She was planning to visit her uncle. Two of her children are reported missing.
The last thing she remembers, she says, was receiving an injection in her arm. She says that when she regained consciousness she was in a prison cell, which she believes was on a military base in Afghanistan, because she heard aircraft taking off and landing. She claims that she was held in solitary confinement for more than five years, and that it was always the same Americans who interrogated her, without masks or uniforms. For days, she says, they would play tape recordings of her children's terrified screams, and she claims that she was forced to write hundreds of pages about the construction of dirty bombs and attacks using viruses.
Her baby was taken away immediately, she says. They showed her a photograph of her seven-year-old, lying in a pool of blood. The only one of her children they occasionally showed her, she says, was Mariam, shown as a vague outline behind a pane of frosted glass.
On April 21, 2003, the NBC ran a story about her arrest on the evening news.
According to Human Rights Commissions, there are at least 52 secret prisons, just in the country of Pakistan, in which thousands of people are believed to have disappeared since the beginning of the war on terrorism.
The CIA denies that its agents had anything to do with her disappearance. Michael Scheuer, a member of a unit that pursued al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden (to which is still at large) from 1996 to 1999, says curtly: "We never arrested or imprisoned a woman. She is a liar."
There were never any weapons on mass destruction. That was a lie. The Bush Administration has stated that they never tortured or wrongfully imprisoned people, to which we have found numerous untruths to this as well.
But if it is true that a woman was tortured and disappeared into a secret dungeon, it would be a first in the post-September 11 world -- and yet another example of the decay of standards in America.
Will the truth ever be uncovered?
Thanks to:
Spiegle International
NY Times
NBC
This, the 209th entry in bloggoland! Thanks for reading and coming back. I always enjoy the comments, emails and the banter!!
(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs
Thursday, October 9, 2008
It CERNtainly all comes full circle...
I CERNtainly find it all a bit interesting. You may have heard of the world's largest hadron particle physics laboratory or what is known in laymen terms as "The Big Collider". CERN Laboratories was founded in 1954. It was the first European collaboration of scientists from numerous countries. It is now a global scientific experiment, located on the borders or Switzerland and France, that has opened their experimental processes recently.
The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.
They sent a particle beam through the system to test it, about a month ago. Due to a few glitches then needed to shut down in order to fix a few magnetic switch issues. They will restart again soon. It simply takes a long time for the 27km tunnel that traverses underground through both countries to warm up to a room temperature for people to be enter it and fix the necessary problems, to then be re-cooled to a temperature of -271C or 1.9Kelvin. This is the temperature that helium becomes superfluid. This simply means that the gas flows with virtually no viscosity which allows for greater heat transfer for the hadron particles to fly at nearly the speed of light. The particle beam is shot through the circular tunnel and floats through the helium effortlessly to finally reach a destination of collision with another particle or solid surface.
What may not be known to many about the CERN organization is that the Internet was invented here. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web in 1990. This is where the www comes from in any internet address. The Web, as it is affectionately called, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. It made it easy and quite cost effective (basically free) for scientist throught the world to send information to eachother. CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather a focus for an extensive community that now includes about 60 countries and thousands of scientists. Although these scientists typically spend some time on the CERN site, they usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Good contact is clearly essential.
The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system. The first proposal for the World Wide Web was made at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and further refined by him and Robert Cailliau in 1990.
By the end of that year, prototype software for a basic system (BASIC) was already being demonstrated. To encourage its adoption, CERN developed a 'help service' and the now familiar Usenet newsgroups were provided. CERN provided a simple browser, which could be run on any system.
In 1991, an early WWW system was released to the high energy physics community via the CERN program library. It included the simple browser, web server software and a library, implementing the essential functions for developers to build their own software. This is known as open sourced software. A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. A little later it was made generally available via the Internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems. Hypertext, or the http of any internet address, is the computer language which overcomes the use of simple text. This is where multiple links and connections are established and other applications and video may be run on it.
The first web server in the United States came on-line in December 1991, once again in a pure research institute: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, very sophisticated. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the Internet for other developers to join in.
Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of their Mosaic browser, developed by the now famous Marc Andreessen. This was the precursor of the Netscape browser.
By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers, of which 2,000 were commercial, and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.
An essential point was that the Web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: ‘WebCore’. The goal of the project was an International Consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee officially left CERN at the end of 1994 to work on the Consortium from the MIT base. But with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, it was decided that further Web development was an activity beyond the Laboratory’s primary mission. A new home for basic Web work was needed.
In January 1995, the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability’.
By 2007 W3C, run jointly by MIT/LCS in the US, INRIA in France, and Keio University in Japan, had more than 430 member organizations from around the world.
Okay...why I went through this is to show the collaborative efforts that science has taken us to share knowledge and information...FREE!
I will be following this up tomorrow with PART TWO of my study of CERN, Marc Andreessen and their true effects on our global society.
(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs
The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.
They sent a particle beam through the system to test it, about a month ago. Due to a few glitches then needed to shut down in order to fix a few magnetic switch issues. They will restart again soon. It simply takes a long time for the 27km tunnel that traverses underground through both countries to warm up to a room temperature for people to be enter it and fix the necessary problems, to then be re-cooled to a temperature of -271C or 1.9Kelvin. This is the temperature that helium becomes superfluid. This simply means that the gas flows with virtually no viscosity which allows for greater heat transfer for the hadron particles to fly at nearly the speed of light. The particle beam is shot through the circular tunnel and floats through the helium effortlessly to finally reach a destination of collision with another particle or solid surface.
What may not be known to many about the CERN organization is that the Internet was invented here. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web in 1990. This is where the www comes from in any internet address. The Web, as it is affectionately called, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. It made it easy and quite cost effective (basically free) for scientist throught the world to send information to eachother. CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather a focus for an extensive community that now includes about 60 countries and thousands of scientists. Although these scientists typically spend some time on the CERN site, they usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Good contact is clearly essential.
The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system. The first proposal for the World Wide Web was made at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and further refined by him and Robert Cailliau in 1990.
By the end of that year, prototype software for a basic system (BASIC) was already being demonstrated. To encourage its adoption, CERN developed a 'help service' and the now familiar Usenet newsgroups were provided. CERN provided a simple browser, which could be run on any system.
In 1991, an early WWW system was released to the high energy physics community via the CERN program library. It included the simple browser, web server software and a library, implementing the essential functions for developers to build their own software. This is known as open sourced software. A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. A little later it was made generally available via the Internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems. Hypertext, or the http of any internet address, is the computer language which overcomes the use of simple text. This is where multiple links and connections are established and other applications and video may be run on it.
The first web server in the United States came on-line in December 1991, once again in a pure research institute: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, very sophisticated. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the Internet for other developers to join in.
Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of their Mosaic browser, developed by the now famous Marc Andreessen. This was the precursor of the Netscape browser.
By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers, of which 2,000 were commercial, and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.
An essential point was that the Web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: ‘WebCore’. The goal of the project was an International Consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee officially left CERN at the end of 1994 to work on the Consortium from the MIT base. But with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, it was decided that further Web development was an activity beyond the Laboratory’s primary mission. A new home for basic Web work was needed.
In January 1995, the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability’.
By 2007 W3C, run jointly by MIT/LCS in the US, INRIA in France, and Keio University in Japan, had more than 430 member organizations from around the world.
Okay...why I went through this is to show the collaborative efforts that science has taken us to share knowledge and information...FREE!
I will be following this up tomorrow with PART TWO of my study of CERN, Marc Andreessen and their true effects on our global society.
(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs
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