Source: CIA Suicide Bomber Invited on Base

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Bomber who Killed 7 CIA Employees at Afghan Base Was Apparently Being Courted as an Informant

(CBS/AP) Last updated at 6:47 p.m. EST

The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees and wounded six more at a remote outpost in southeastern Afghanistan had been invited onto the base and had not been searched, two former U.S. officials have told The Associated Press.

A former senior intelligence official says the man was being courted as an informant and that it was the first time he had been brought inside the camp.

The official says a senior and experienced CIA debriefer came from Kabul for the meeting, suggesting that the purpose of the session was to gain intelligence.

The former intelligence officials and another former official with knowledge of the attack spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The Central Intelligence Agency would not confirm the details, and said it was still gathering evidence.

"It's far too early to draw conclusions about something that happened just yesterday," said spokesman George Little.

A separate U.S. official suggested the bomber may have set off the explosives as he was about to be searched.

The bombing was expected to deal a major psychological blow to the spy agency, if not its ability to collect valuable intelligence on Taliban and al Qaeda forces operating along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan. Officials credit the base with providing some of the intelligence which has enabled CIA drone strikes to eliminate much of al Qaeda's top leadership, reports CBS News correspondent David Marin.

The New York Times reports that the victims were responsible for collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Afghanistan

Martin reports Afghan soldiers and civilians are present at almost every American outpost since one of the chief principals of the U.S. strategy is to partner with the Afghans. According to Christine Fair of Georgetown University, some of them may actually be working for the Taliban.

"They have really become a vehicle of infiltration for the Taliban," Fair said. "This is most certainly a vulnerability in our strategy going forward in trying to hand over security to the Afghans," said Fair; "If we don't really have a way of figuring out who we can trust."

CIA Director Leon Panetta said in a message to agency staff that the casualties sustained in Wednesday's strike at Forward Operating Base Chapman were the result of a terrorist attack.

Initial reports indicated that eight American civilians had been killed. There was no explanation for the discrepancy in Panetta's message, which was released by the CIA in an unusual step a day after one of the deadliest attacks on the Central Intelligence Agency in its history.

"Those who fell yesterday were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism," Panetta said. "We owe them our deepest gratitude, and we pledge to them and their families that we will never cease fighting for the cause to which they dedicated their lives - a safer America."

"Yesterday's tragedy reminds us that the men and women of the CIA put their lives at risk every day to protect this nation," he said. "Throughout our history, the reality is that those who make a real difference often face real danger."

No further information about the victims would be released," the CIA director said, "due to the sensitivity of their mission and other ongoing operations."

President Barack Obama said the killed CIA employees come from a "long line of patriots" whose courageous service has helped to thwart terrorist plots and save lives.

In a letter to CIA employees released by the agency, Mr. Obama said the U.S. would not be able to maintain its freedom and security without their service. He also noted that the spy agency has been tested "as never before" since the Sept. 11 attacks.


© MMIX, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

General insists Hmong head home voluntarily

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Govt says deportation 'is for their own good'
* Published: 29/12/2009 at 12:00 AM

The Huay Nam Khao camp in Phetchabun has closed its doors after it was cleared Monday of nearly 4,000 ethnic Hmong.

Just over 100 Hmong were left Monday night awaiting deportation to Laos, said the Royal Thai Armed Force Headquarters' deputy chief of joint staff, Worapong Sanganetra.

Gen Worapong insisted all the Hmong had left for Laos voluntarily.

The deportations began at 4am.

About 110 trucks and buses joined together in convoys to carry the ethnic Hmong across the border to Laos.

The first vehicles arrived at the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge in Nong Khai about 5pm, while the last was expected to have arrived about 3am today, officials involved in the operation said.

Thailand and Laos will hold a joint press conference on the operation this morning at Paksan town in Laos.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said the deportations had gone smoothly and there had been no resistance from the Hmong.

People pray before they are sent back to Laos.

He stressed the need to send them all back to Laos given the peaceful situation along the Thai-Laos border.

The prime minister said that if the US wanted to offer the Hmong third-country resettlement, it could contact Laos directly.

Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya said the government was confident Laos would keep its word to improve the Hmong's quality of life.

He rejected human rights groups' claims the deportation would do them more harm than good.

Thailand had not sent the Hmong to jail but set them on a path to a better life before they can be resettled in a third country, Mr Kasit said.

Rights groups and some countries have voiced concern that the Hmong could be persecuted after their return to Laos.

"Why not have trust in Laos?" Mr Kasit asked.

"Western countries do not trust in the cooperation between Thailand and Laos and between the peoples of the two countries.

"Don't look down on us.

"The Lao government has no intention whatsoever to kill its people."

The minister said it had been proved the 3,000 Hmong who had previously been deported to Laos now had a better life.He said Thailand was ready to provide financial support to improve the lives of the Hmong.

Tug Grounded on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound

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Steve Brawn

Story Created: Dec 24, 2009 at 4:04 PM AKST

Story Updated: Dec 24, 2009 at 4:04 PM AKST

Cleanup has begun after a 136-foot tug doing an ice survey in Prince William Sound grounded on Bligh Reef - the same reef that played a big part in the Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster in 1989.

The tug's fuel tanks contain an estimated 33,500 gallons, and some amount of that fuel has been spilled but the amount is not yet known.

The Coast Guard says the tugboat's crew deployed 200-feet of fuel containment booms around the vessel after clearing the reef and continuing to deeper waters Wednesday evening.

The Coast Guard says a fuel sheen has been observed that is about 3 miles long and 30 yards wide that drifted away from the vessel. There is no sheen visible around the tug.

The Coast Guard says an oil response vessel has arrived and is skimming the water near the diesel sheen.

A Fish Oil Story

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By PAUL GREENBERG
Published: December 15, 2009

“WHAT’S the deal with fish oil?”

If you are someone who catches and eats a lot of fish, as I am, you get adept at answering questions about which fish are safe, which are sustainable and which should be avoided altogether. But when this fish oil question arrived in my inbox recently, I was stumped. I knew that concerns about overfishing had prompted many consumers to choose supplements as a guilt-free way of getting their omega-3 fatty acids, which studies show lower triglycerides and the risk of heart attack. But I had never looked into the fish behind the oil and whether it was fit, morally or environmentally speaking, to be consumed.

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”

The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food chain.

Nearly every fish a fish eater likes to eat eats menhaden. Bluefin tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they have come from menhaden.

But menhaden are entering the final losing phases of a century-and-a-half fight for survival that began when humans started turning huge schools into fertilizer and lamp oil. Once petroleum-based oils replaced menhaden oil in lamps, trillions of menhaden were ground into feed for hogs, chickens and pets. Today, hundreds of billions of pounds of them are converted into lipstick, salmon feed, paint, “buttery spread,” salad dressing and, yes, some of those omega-3 supplements you have been forcing on your children. All of these products can be made with more environmentally benign substitutes, but menhaden are still used in great (though declining) numbers because they can be caught and processed cheaply.

For the last decade, one company, Omega Protein of Houston, has been catching 90 percent of the nation’s menhaden. The perniciousness of menhaden removals has been widely enough recognized that 13 of the 15 Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters. But the company’s toehold in North Carolina and Virginia (where it has its largest processing plant), and its continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year.

For fish guys like me, this egregious privatization of what is essentially a public resource is shocking. But even if you are not interested in fish, there is an important reason for concern about menhaden’s decline.

Quite simply, menhaden keep the water clean. The muddy brown color of the Long Island Sound and the growing dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay are the direct result of inadequate water filtration — a job that was once carried out by menhaden. An adult menhaden can rid four to six gallons of water of algae in a minute. Imagine then the water-cleaning capacity of the half-billion menhaden we “reduce” into oil every year.

So what is the seeker of omega-3 supplements to do? Bruce Franklin points out that there are 75 commercial products — including fish-oil pills made from fish discards — that don’t contribute directly to the depletion of a fishery. Flax oil also fits the bill and uses no fish at all.

But I’ve come to realize that, as with many issues surrounding fish, more powerful fulcrums than consumer choice need to be put in motion to fix things. President Obama and the Congressional leadership have repeatedly stressed their commitment to wresting the wealth of the nation from the hands of a few. A demonstration of this commitment would be to ban the fishing of menhaden in federal waters. The Virginia Legislature could enact a similar moratorium in the Chesapeake Bay (the largest menhaden nursery in the world).

The menhaden is a small fish that in its multitudes plays such a big role in our economy and environment that its fate shouldn’t be effectively controlled by a single company and its bottles of fish oil supplements. If our government is serious about standing up for the little guy, it should start by giving a little, but crucial, fish a fair deal.

Paul Greenberg is the author of the forthcoming “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.”
» A version of this article appeared in print on December 16, 2009, on page A43 of the New York edition.

Viruses That Leave Victims Red in the Facebook

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By BRAD STONE
Published: December 13, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — It used to be that computer viruses attacked only your hard drive. Now they attack your dignity.

Jodi Chapman clicked on a Twitter message last month to take an online intelligence test, causing her own account to be hijacked.

Matt Marquess’s Twitter account sent out messages for days.

Malicious programs are rampaging through Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, spreading themselves by taking over people’s accounts and sending out messages to all of their friends and followers. The result is that people are inadvertently telling their co-workers and loved ones how to raise their I.Q.’s or make money instantly, or urging them to watch an awesome new video in which they star.

“I wonder what people are thinking of me right now?” said Matt Marquess, an employee at a public relations firm in San Francisco whose Twitter account was recently hijacked, showering his followers with messages that appeared to offer a $500 gift card to Victoria’s Secret.

Mr. Marquess was clueless about the offers until a professional acquaintance asked him about them via e-mail. Confused, he logged in to his account and noticed he had been promoting lingerie for five days.

“No one had said anything to me,” he said. “I thought, how long have I been Twittering about underwear?”

The humiliation sown by these attacks is just collateral damage. In most cases, the perpetrators are hoping to profit from the referral fees they get for directing people to sketchy e-commerce sites.

In other words, even the crooks are on social networks now — because millions of tightly connected potential victims are just waiting for them there.

Often the victims lose control of their accounts after clicking on a link “sent” by a friend. In other cases, the bad guys apparently scan for accounts with easily guessable passwords. (Mr. Marquess gamely concedes that his password at the time was “abc123.”)

After discovering their accounts have been seized, victims typically renounce the unauthorized messages publicly, apologizing for inadvertently bombarding their friends. These messages — one might call them Tweets of shame — convey a distinct mix of guilt, regret and embarrassment.

“I have been hacked; taking evasive maneuvers. Much apology, my friends,” wrote Rocky Barbanica, a producer for Rackspace Hosting, an Internet storage firm, in one such note.

Mr. Barbanica sent that out last month after realizing he had sent messages to 250 Twitter followers with a link and the sentence, “Are you in this picture?” If they clicked, their Twitter accounts were similarly commandeered.

“I took it personally, which I shouldn’t have, but that’s the natural feeling. It’s insulting,” he said.

Earlier malicious programs could also cause a similar measure of embarrassment if they spread themselves through a person’s e-mail address book.

But those messages, traveling from computer to computer, were more likely to be stopped by antivirus or firewall software. On the Web, such measures offer little protection. (Although they are popularly referred to as viruses or worms, the new forms of Web-based malicious programs do not technically fall into those categories, as they are not self-contained programs.)

Getting tangled up in a virus on a social network is also more painfully, and instantaneously, public. “Once it’s delivered to everyone in three seconds, the cat is out of the bag,” said Chet Wisniewski of Sophos, a Web security firm. “When people got viruses on their computers, or fell for scams at home, they were generally the only ones that knew about it and they cleaned it up themselves. It wasn’t broadcast to the whole world.”

Social networks have become prime targets of such programs’ creators for good reason, security experts say. People implicitly trust the messages they receive from friends, and are inclined to overlook the fact that, say, their cousin from Ohio is extremely unlikely to have caught them on a hidden webcam.

Sophos says that 21 percent of Web users report that they have been a target of malicious programs on social networks. Kaspersky Labs, a Russian security firm, says that on some days, one in 500 links on Twitter point to bad sites that can infect an inadequately protected computer with typical viruses that jam hard drives. Kaspersky says many more links are purely spam, frequently leading to dating sites that pay referral fees for traffic.

A worm that spread around Facebook recently featured a photo of a sparsely dressed woman and offered a link to “see more.” Adi Av, a computer developer in Ashkelon, Israel, encountered the image on the Facebook page of a friend he considered to be a reliable source of amusing Internet content.

A couple of clicks later, the image was posted on Mr. Av’s Facebook profile and sent to the “news feed” of his 350 friends.

“It’s an honest mistake,” he said. “The main embarrassment was from the possibility of other people getting into the same trouble from my profile page.”

Others confess to experiencing a more serious discomfiture.

“You feel like a total idiot,” said Jodi Chapman, who last month unwisely clicked on a Twitter message from a fellow vegan, suggesting that she take an online intelligence test.

Ms. Chapman, who sells environmentally friendly gifts with her husband, uses her Twitter account to communicate with thousands of her company’s customers. The hijacking “filled me with a sense of panic,” she said. “I was so worried that I had somehow tainted our company name by asking people to check their I.Q. scores.”

Social networking attacks do not spare the experts. Two weeks ago, Lee Rainey, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research group, accidentally sent messages to dozens of his Twitter followers with a link and the line, “Hi, is this you? LOL.” He said a few people actually clicked.

“I’m worried that people will think I communicate this way,” Mr. Rainey said. “ ‘LOL,’ as my children would tell you, is not the style that I want to engage the world with.”
A version of this article appeared in print on December 14, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.