List of Post Office Closings: Postal Branches Closing, Services Cut

Entrepreneurs, get your financing together and open that Mail Suite or whatever you want to call it. Cash-in on yet another government failure. Post Offices and postal branches are closing in a neighborhood near you.

Post Office Closings - Service Cut

To find a list of post office closings, you cannot go to the government, of course, because the site is overwhelmed. Snail mail is dead, they say. Blame is also placed on the "recession." The Internet sends and receives most of our daily correspondence. When we must actually mail something, a UPS or FedEx store gets our business. This is a great opportunity for privately-owned mail businesses to develop customer care and get the mail moving again because the U.S. Postal Service says they will also cut mail delivery from 6 days a week to 5 days a week. Cutting mail service while continually increasing postage - yes, that's our Government. You can check the government website to see if your post office is targeted - that is if the page will load. As usual, Big Brother's website is overwhelmed. After 27 minutes, the list of closing postal offices is still trying to load. Nevermind, just visit NewsnIdea.com. I assume it is not owned by the government. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of their information, of course, but along with the list you'll see, there is also a pdf available.

U.S., South Korea Cyber Attacks: North Korea Suspected

U.S. government and South Korean government websites have been "paralyzed" from a cyber attack, according to unnamed government sources.

Cyber Attacks - U.S. Treasury Department

In the U.S., the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department websites "were all down," over portions of the 4th of July holiday weekend and on into this week, according to government officials who refused to be identified. Some 12,000 South Korean computers were affected and 8,000 "overseas."

Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the agency's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a notice to federal departments and other partner organizations about the problems and "advised them of steps to take to help mitigate against such attacks."
The U.S., she said, sees attacks on its networks every day, and measures have been put in place to minimize the impact on federal Web sites.

Ben Rushlo is the director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, a monitoring company based in San Mateo, California. He said the Transportation Department site attack is a "massive outage."

...the Transportation Web site was "100 percent down" for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.
"This is very strange. You don't see this," he said. "Having something 100 percent down for a 24-hour-plus period is a pretty significant event."
He added that, "The fact that it lasted for so long and that it was so significant in its ability to bring the site down says something about the site's ability to fend off (an attack) or about the severity of the attack."

The attack is described as a "denial of service" attack, and is considered a "lengthy and sophisticated" attack. The cyber attacks on the South Korean government websites indicated they are also a "denial of service."

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies, said he doubts whether the impoverished North has the capability to knock down the Web sites.
But Hong Hyun-ik, an analyst at the Sejong Institute think tank, said the attack could have been done by either North Korea or China, saying he "heard North Korea has been working hard to hack into" South Korean networks.

Aids also speaking anonymously said they believe North Korea or their sympathizers were behind the attacks. Think about it folks: our government wants to put your medical records online. First there's the privacy issue, and second - what if your records are needed and we have a cyber attack. It's all in the same fruit basket - the government wants control of your private data and they can't even keep our U.S. Treasury safe.

ACLU Sues Over "Terrorism Suspect" Transfers

H/T to blog @ MoreWhat.com

The WashingtonPost.com reports that a Boeing Company subsidiary has flown "terrorism suspects," accompanied by CIA agents, to "secret overseas locations."

The ACLU is suing a Boeing subsidiary on behalf of three "terrorism suspects," no lawsuit against Boeing or the U.S. government, and the subsidiary is unnamed.

From The WashingtonPost.com:

The cases involve the alleged mistreatment of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen, in July 2002 and January 2004; ElkassimBritel, an Italian citizen, in May 2002; and Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian citizen, in December 2001,...

The ACLU says the suspects were apprehended under the U.S. government's "extraordinary rendition program...."

There's plenty of information published about these three men. Sifting through it will likely not yield much, as it all depends on who you believe.

The ACLU has had at least one previous failure at attempting to successfully sue due to the Extraordinary Rendition Program - this on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen born in Kuwait to Lebanese parents. El-Masri is reported to have relocated to Germany in 1985 and became a German citizen through marriage to a German woman, whom he divorced quickly and then married a Lebanese woman. If Wikipedia's reporting of the marriage and quick divorce, resulting in German citizenship, is correct, the ACLU ignored the first marriage, and reported only his marriage to a Lebanese woman - citizenship and two marriages within the period of one year. From the ACLU:

He became a German citizen in 1995, married in 1996 and has six young children.

It is believed that Khaled El-Masri's name may have been confused with Khalid al-Masri...or is it Khaled al-Masri? Indeed, international reporting on El-Masri's case seems to refer to El-Masri as al-Masri and then there's Khalid al-Masri referred to as Khaled Al-Masri. To further the conundrum, an online search for Khalid al-Masri links to GlobalSecurity.org profiling Khalid al-Masri as a recruiter for the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell based in Germany and led by Mohamed Atta - 9/11 hijacker of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Towers.

The question is, who isn't confused?

Some accounts of El-Masri's detention credit a German Intelligence Agent with secretly passing an El-Masri file to the U.S - however, these reports also seem to refer to the wrongly detained Khaled El-Masri as Khalid al-Masri. Then WorldPoliticsReview, in February 2007, reports Kahled Al-Masri Accused of Assault.... showing a photo of the person it seems is Khaled El-Masri, at least according to the ACLU. The article says:

...the headline had acquired a certain unintended irony as reports emerged that Masri himself had beaten up a social worker in his hometown of Neu-Ulm, leaving the man hospitalized for three days. The assault occurred on Monday, Jan. 29. According to a Feb. 2 report in the Südwest Presse newspaper, citing the local Neu-Ulm prosecutor's office: "Masri is supposed to have pulled the man by the hair and thrown him against a wall. Then he threw a table at him, punched him in the face and stomped on him."

This failed lawsuit... the ACLU's "landmark" lawsuit, was filed against George Tenet, former CIA Director, as well as the owners of a company providing private jet service to the CIA.

In May 2006 a U.S. Federal District Judge T. S. Ellis dismissed the ACLU lawsuit on El-Masri's behalf. The judge's decision was complicated by the fact that the U.S. seemingly acknowledged that El-Masri was mistakenly detained, but held that national security would be jeopardized by court proceedings.

In March 2007, The Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the 2006 dismissal. The ACLU is reported to be considering an appeal.

Back to the current lawsuit against a Boeing subsidiary and the concept of the Extraordinary Rendition Program:

A Google search brings up two ACLU links referring to the Extraordinary Rendition Program. The second link includes this teaser:

...Learn More About CIA Kidnapping..."

These are dire times. To say that life isn't fair, is I know, inadequate. But, then...life isn't fair. Perhaps it's inadequate to suggest asking the families of terrorism victims about things fair and unfair. Freedom isn't as simple as an ACLU lawsuit.

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