The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- CIA acknowledges its mysterious Area 51 test site for first time
- Romanian princess among 18 charged in Oregon over cockfighting
- Under fire, U.S. spy agency defends surveillance programs as lawful
| CIA acknowledges its mysterious Area 51 test site for first time Posted: (Reuters) - National security scholars at George Washington University have some good news and bad news for UFO buffs - the U.S. government has finally confirmed the existence of Area 51 in Nevada, but it makes no mention of little green men or alien spaceships. The government acknowledged the existence of the mysterious aviation test site known as Area 51, a remote installation about 80 miles (130 km) northwest of Las Vegas, in a newly declassified CIA history of its U-2 spy plane program. After decades of extreme secrecy surrounding the site, stoking conspiracy theories about UFOs and experiments on alien spacecraft, the CIA lifted its veil on Area 51 in response to a public records request from George Washington University scholars in Washington, D.C. Publicly released online on Thursday by the university's National Security Archive, the 400-page CIA history contains the first deliberate official references to Area 51, also known as Groom Lake, as a site developed by the intelligence agency in the 1950s to test fly the high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane. Other top-secret aircraft were tested there later, including the supersonic reconnaissance A-12 aircraft, code-named OXCART, and the F-117 stealth ground-attack jet, said archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson, who asked for the CIA's U-2 history in 2005. A newly revised document restoring numerous references to Area 51 that had been redacted in earlier versions was furnished by the CIA a few weeks ago, he said. "It's the first time that there must have been a senior-level decision to acknowledge the term 'Area 51' and its specific location," he told Reuters on Friday. Chapter 2 of the CIA history recounts how Richard Bissell, the CIA officer then overseeing development of the U-2 plane by Lockheed, first spotted the site on an aerial scouting mission over Nevada in April 1955, accompanied by an Air Force officer and two others. The four men landed their plane near an old, abandoned air strip at the edge of a salt flat known as Groom Lake near the northeastern corner of the Nevada Test Site, the nuclear proving ground then controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission. IDEAL TEST SITE The group agreed that Groom Lake would "make an ideal site for testing the U-2 and training its pilots." Bissell subsequently asked the Atomic Energy Commission to add the area to its Nevada real estate holdings, the account says. "AEC Chairman Admiral Lewis Strauss readily agreed, and President Eisenhower also approved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51, to the Nevada Test Site," the document says. To make the barren new facility seem more appealing to its workers, managers of the U-2 program dubbed the facility "Paradise Ranch," which was later shortened to "the Ranch." Photos of the site and a newly declassified map outlining and labelling the location were also included in the document. Richelson said he could recall at least two previous government documents in which an incidental reference to Area 51 appeared, but he assumed those were inadvertent because they were devoid of any other details or context. The multiple detailed references to Area 51 in the latest CIA account - the document's index lists at least 12 mentions - show that they were deliberate, he said. The intelligence agency had little to say about the disclosure. "What readers of the CIA study will find is that CIA tests its U-2 and A-12 reconnaissance aircraft at the site in Nevada sometimes referred to as 'Area 51,'" CIA spokesman Edward Price said. "What readers won't find are any references to aliens or other conspiracy theories best left to the realm of science fiction." Among the more sensational pieces of UFO conspiracy lore linked to Area 51 is that the remains of a flying saucer that supposedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, were brought to the site for reverse engineering experiments that attempted to replicate the extraterrestrial spacecraft. Richelson said the CIA document makes no mention of any such theories. But he pointed to one passage that discusses the relationship between U-2s and unidentified flying objects "in the sense that people sighted U-2s in a time that they were very secretive and at very high altitude and didn't know what they were, and in that sense they were UFOs." |
| Romanian princess among 18 charged in Oregon over cockfighting Posted: PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) - A Romanian princess, the daughter of exiled former Romanian King Michael, appeared in a U.S. court on Friday with her American husband on charges related to cockfighting in rural Oregon, authorities said. Irina Walker, 60, was among 18 people charged with holding 10 cockfighting "derbies" in 2012 and 2013, according to the indictment filed in federal district court in Oregon. A woman reached by phone at the Romanian Embassy in Washington, D.C., who declined to be identified, said the mission had been informed that a daughter of King Michael had been arrested in Oregon. "She was born in Switzerland," the woman said. "We don't really have a lot of information on her." The exiled king, who was forced to abdicate in 1947 and then went into exile, said in a statement that he had learned of his daughter's arrest with "profound sadness." "His Majesty and the entire royal family hope that the American justice system and the courts of the state of Oregon will solve this case in the fairest and quickest way possible," the statement said, according to an NBC news website. Princess Irina is the third of five daughters of the Romanian king and is married to John Wesley Walker, a former Coos County sheriff's deputy, the Oregonian newspaper reported. She moved to Oregon in 1983 and married Walker in 2007, the paper reported. Of the 18 people charged in the case, six including the Walkers are charged with operating an illegal gambling business. All 18 are charged with conspiracy and violating the Animal Welfare Act by conducting unlawful animal fighting ventures on the 10 occasions. Calling cockfighting barbaric, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, Amanda Marshall, said in a statement that "cockfighting jeopardizes public health and safety and facilitates the commission of other criminal acts." Each of the 12 counts carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000. If convicted, the Walkers could also have to forfeit their ranch in Irrigon, Oregon, according to the Justice Department announcement. (Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh) |
| Under fire, U.S. spy agency defends surveillance programs as lawful Posted: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Under increasing pressure to justify electronic surveillance programs that at times capture communications of American citizens, the U.S. National Security Agency went to unusual lengths on Friday to insist its activities are lawful and any mistakes largely unintentional. In a sign of how much heat it has taken since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden started disclosing details of highly classified U.S. surveillance programs, the ultra-secretive intelligence agency held a rare conference call with reporters to counter public perceptions that NSA transgressions were wilful violations of rules against eavesdropping on Americans. The NSA's presentation was an attempt to calm the latest firestorm over documents disclosed by Snowden. The Washington Post late Thursday reported that the NSA had broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since 2008, citing an internal agency audit and other top secret documents. "These are not wilful violations, they are not malicious, these are not people trying to break the law," John DeLong, NSA director of compliance, told reporters. NSA employees know their actions are recorded and the agency's culture is to report any mistakes, he said, repeatedly stressing that "no one at NSA thinks a mistake is OK." Snowden, who was granted temporary asylum in Russia this month, gave information about secret NSA programs that collect phone, email and other communications to several media organizations, which published stories about them starting in June. His disclosures provoked an intense debate over privacy rights versus national security needs in the United States and several other countries, including Great Britain, Germany and Brazil. The uproar led to a series of rare public comments by normally publicity-shy NSA officials, who have written opinion pieces in the media and repeatedly said transparency was a positive development. "We're working on the release of more documents soon," DeLong said, without elaborating. WILLFUL VIOLATIONS 'EXTREMELY RARE' As DeLong explained that the NSA had rigorous internal measures to avoid, suppress and destroy intelligence inadvertently collected on Americans, leaders of both congressional intelligence committees issued statements strongly supporting NSA programs and the agency's efforts to comply with the law and regulations. "The committee has never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, said. Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described errors reported in the Post story as "human and technical," which he said were "unfortunately inevitable in any organization and especially in a highly technical and complicated system like NSA." But Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the reports of privacy violations by the NSA "incredibly troubling" and said he had ordered his staff to conduct a review. He said, however, "the information we have received so far does not show any intentional abuse or misuse of NSA's authorities." Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, said he planned to hold a hearing to examine reports of unauthorized surveillance by the NSA. "I remain concerned that we are still not getting straightforward answers from the NSA," he said. DeLong, who acknowledged that public debate was taking place in a "highly charged" atmosphere, said wilful violations were "extremely rare" and that mistakes can lead to the removal of database access for an NSA employee. DeLong said that NSA analysts make 20 million queries of intelligence databases on average each month, and that the number of mistakes are a tiny portion of legitimate queries. He gave an example of how one mistake was handled. In a case where NSA allegedly stored 3,000 records, apparently related to Americans and legal immigrants, longer than the rules allowed, the information was not misused and subsequently deleted, he said. "President Obama has long advocated greater transparency, stronger oversight and other reforms to give Americans confidence that our intelligence programs strike the right balance between protecting our national security and the privacy of our citizens," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. He said the White House would work with Congress on reforms "to further improve oversight and strengthen public confidence in these operations that are so critical to American national security." |
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