There is no denying that we live in a social media world. Every activity is tweeted or posted, photos are edited and shared, and private thoughts are broadcast for the world to see. Social media has changed the way we have relationships with friends and loved ones and the way we interact with employers and clients. The CIA had to put some serious thought into how social media can and will affect their ability to effectively gain new intelligence, and new employees. Continue reading
Dr. Ron Paul has been saying this for years, while most of the country sat in their stupor, claiming he was a kook, making fun of him, making fun of his supporters. Now as we sit back and watch this go around for the run to the President of the US, what do we see? A whole lot of Bernie Sanders supporters, who are basically claiming that the old Bernster deserves to be POTUS because of a few things he has in common with Ron Paul. What’s even worse? Bernie is calling for a very extreme form of socialism, and anyone with any sense at all knows that socialism needs to be implemented before full communism can take it’s form. Continue reading
The CIA has had a long history in Hollywood. During the 1950s, CIA asset Luigi G Luraschi used his position as head of censorship at Paramount Studios to bring film content in line with the Agency’s ideals. Scenes that portrayed the US in a bad light were cut; films such as High Noon (1952) were prevented from receiving certain industry awards; and well dressed ‘negroes’ were placed in lavish on-screen environments to suggest that the US didn’t have a race problem. In order to tame or otherwise subvert their content, the CIA also covertly assisted on the film adaptations of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) and Animal Farm (1955), as well as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1958). Continue reading
Truth About Paris ISIS Terrorist Attacks Hoax Revealed (Redsilverj)
Here is the real truth about the Paris attacks ISIS is helping the West get into Syria.. Continue reading
When it comes to governance, especially in the case of a democratic government, the voters get to choose trusted leaders to deal with all the affairs involved in running the country. This means that the population entrusts the country to a few people, who are supposed to be accountable to them, responsible in all their actions, innovative in problem solving and selfless when it comes to executing their duties in office. During the campaign period, the leaders in question always promise the voters heaven on earth, only for them to get to office and fall short on all their promises. This is the situation in all parts of the world, and it begs the question “what changes in an individual when he or she ascends to power?”
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On HBO’s Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver took up the unpleasant, and unfortunately mostly ignored, topic of torture in America done under the auspices of the CIA.
Noting that the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 6,700-page investigation of torture, with a 500-page version available to the public, Oliver sought to explain that Americans need to read the available version because they have been “dangerously misinformed” about torture.
Two years after Edward Snowden first leaked information about the National Security Agency’s illegal domestic spying programs, the once-cynical whistleblower is now striking a more optimistic tone about what he sees as a rising “post-terror” America.
In an op-ed published Thursday in The New York Times, whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden reflected on how circumstances have changed on the two-year anniversary of his first leaks. “Two years ago today, three journalists and I worked nervously in a Hong Kong hotel room, waiting to see how the world would react to the revelation that the National Security Agency had been making records of nearly every phone call in the United States. In the days that followed, those journalists and others published documents revealing that democratic governments had been monitoring the private activities of ordinary citizens who had done nothing wrong,” wrote Snowden in the opening of his retrospective.
Edward Snowden may finally be coming home.
A Russian lawyer for Snowden said on Tuesday the fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor who leaked details of the government’s mass surveillance programs was working with American and German lawyers to return home.
His biggest demand it seems is that he be given a fair trial when charged for his offenses.
INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’
(FreeBeacon) - The CIA “repeatedly blocked” the departure of a security team that was ready “within minutes” to respond to the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya that claimed the lives of four Americans, according to Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.) Continue reading
Complaining about the government is a key part of being American, the first amendment to the Constitution. But it seems like a bit of a trickier proposition these days, with the government listening to everything you say online. In the interest of preserving your freedoms and bolstering our fair nation, here is the full articulation of the deeply paranoid and complex life you must live in order to assure that the government leaves you alone. <!-more-> Continue reading
KABUL, Afghanistan — The C.I.A.’s station chief here met with President Hamid Karzai on Saturday, and the Afghan leader said he had been assured that the agency would continue dropping off stacks of cash at his office despite a storm of criticism that has erupted since the payments were disclosed.
Hamid Karzai – Caricature (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)
The C.I.A. money, Mr. Karzai told reporters, was “an easy source of petty cash,” and some of it was used to pay off members of the political elite, a group dominated by warlords.
The use of the C.I.A. cash for payoffs has prompted criticism from many Afghans and some American and European officials, who complain that the agency, in its quest to maintain access and influence at the presidential palace, financed what is essentially a presidential slush fund. The practice, the officials say, effectively undercut a pillar of the American war strategy: the building of a clean and credible Afghan government to wean popular support from the Taliban.
A Russian death squad killed two members of a CIA-backed Russian Jihad group operating in Dagestan in a raid earlier this morning that Russian intelligence has linked to Boston Bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
The assassinations are just the latest in a trail of blood being used to cover up the tracks implicating CIA involvement in the Boston Bombings.
Russian intelligence reports Shakrudin Askhabov, one of the two men assassinated by the hit squad, was an associate of the CIA-linked Abu Dujan terror cell.
The western corporate media is not reporting anything more than the talking points outlined in well-crafted government issued talking point memos.
But Russian intelligence and news agencies are telling an entirely different story reporting Askhabov was a key facilitator in recruiting and enlisting foreigners to take up against Russia.
The emerging narrative is Tamerlan was recruited into the organization by a William Plotnikov, a Jihadist known as the Canadian, which Tamerlan may have met through boxing circles.
Plotnikov in turn introduced Tamerlan to Shakrudin Askhabov, who is said to recruit Muslims into Jihad using Saudi Arabia’s relgious teaching and the through the CIA’s politcal propoaganda.
Abu Dujan, like Al Qaeda and numerous other Jihad groups, preach an extremist fundamentalist interpretation of Saudi Arabia’s Salafism which is propagated throughout the world through the nation’s vast oil wealth.
The Checnyan terrorist cell is uses by the CIA generated anti-Russian political propaganda and a direct result of overseas information operations funded by US foreign aid money to “promote democracy” in the region.
The CIA campaign by radicalize citizens in the region to take up the revolution through various means ranging from workshops encouraging citizens to develop, promote and assert their own independent national identity all the way to repeatedly leveraging Russian crimes committed against the locals decades ago while under communist rule such as the “mass deportation” and “genocide” committed during the World War II.
A quote from Russian President Vladmir Putin is very telling about the United States position on the terror cell:
MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin said the bombings prove that Boston is a Chechen separatist terrorist group. Two bombers Boston, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsaranev, indeed citizens of Chechen descent.
So far, Russia asked the United States (U.S.) to enter into the Chechen separatist terrorist group list. But the U.S. rejected it because he considered militant Chechen rebel group as usual.
“I feel insulted when a terrorist group called the West Country as a rebel group in Chechnya,” Putin said
[…]
Tamerlan was obsevered by Russian intelligence in 2012 meeting up with several members of the CIA-backed terror cell to wage Jihad against the Russia.
This clearly explains why Tamerlan was allowed to fly overseas despite warnings from Russian intelligence and being listed in US terror database and to American’s no-fly list.
According to the Russian media, Boston Bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev met with Askhabov during his visit to Russia from January to July of 2012.
The National Post quotes the well-respected Russian media news outlet Novaya Gazeta, which reported Tamerlan was also observed meeting with William Plotnikov, known as “The Canadian” and other Jihadists associated with the CIA-backed terror cell while in Russia.
It is unclear whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev, left, and William Plotnikov, right, met through boxing circles or only communicated online, but their life paths suggest such a meeting was possible.
The Post conjectures that Tamerlan was connected to Plotnikov placed in quarantine by the Jihadists waiting to be cleared to join the insurgency and after the Canadian and Tamerlan’s other contacts were killed he returned to America.
According to the Post, Tamerlan returned to America just two days after The Canadian was killed along with 6 other militants by Russian Security forces last July.
It is much more plausible that Tamerlan had already joined the CIA’s insurgency against the Russian’s and returned to America because his handlers had a much more sinister gunpowder treason plot they needed carried out.
It has also been revealed that Tamerlan’s Uncle was on the Feds payroll and linked to the CIA in his roles an oil company executive involved in a multibillion dollar money laundering scheme involving offshore shell companies and Russian crime bosses.
On the day of the bombings during the Boston Marathon, The Boston Globe tweeted “Officials: There will be a controlled explosion opposite the library within one minute as part of bomb squad activities.”
As of now, one apparent suspect has been killed and the other aprehended for an event officials were committing as well or knew was going to happen? Is it once again a coincidence that officials happened to be running drills of the exact same events that occur later in the day?
Before I get into this further, alternative media and others who are paying attention to what’s actually happening, are not the only one’s seeing the clear pattern and impossible coincidences the mainstream media seems to magically miss. Former Congresswomen Cynthia McKinney made several tweets on the day of the event, even she has suspicion about the coincidences that exist. Cynthia’s Tweets.
I cannot tell you precisely what happened because I do not know. All I am able to tell you is what I have been able to find in my own research and from what I am seeing here, it is all very similar to previous false flag attacks that have occurred in the past. When it came to 9/11, 7/7 London bombings, Sandy Hook shootings and others, the media was leaving out all details regarding very large and telling coincidences. What benefit would there be from leaving out the fact that there is the existence of identically mirrored drills being run at the exact same time as the “terrorist” incidents themselves? Not to mention the drills being run were remarkably identical to the incidents that ended up playing out. While the answer to this question might seem obvious to some, to others it simply is not being looked at.
Why is it that every time suspicious terrorist activity occurs in the United States, there is little to no degree of separation between government and three-letter agency- personnel and the suspected perpetrators? Across the street the CIA is doing one thing while “the terrorists” are doing the exact same thing, only for real. How many times does the same thing need to happen over and over again before we begin to see what is happening here?
We have to ask ourselves ‘who are the terrorists?’ We are always hearing of troubled kids or muslim radicals conducting these events yet there is never any solid evidence to link them to it. However, it is indisputable that the FBI is actively engaged in carrying out bomb plots in the United States, then halting them at the last minute to “catch the terrorists.” This has even been covered in the New York Times, and other publications.
Below is a video that examines what took place. It is a simple look into the events and timing of what happened.
The uncle of the two men who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, who struck the only grace note in an otherwise horrific week, worked as a “consultant” for the Agency for International Development (USAID) a U.S. Government Agency often used for cover by agents of the CIA, in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan during the “Wild West” days of the early 1990’s, when anything that wasn’t nailed down in that country was up for grabs.
“Uncle Ruslan” Tsarni of Montgomery Village Md., whose name was the top trending topic worldwide on Twitter last Friday for his plain-spoken condemnation of his two nephews, has had a checkered business career, that began well before he graduated (as Ruslan Z Tsarnaev) from Duke Law School in 1998.
Tsarni, a well-connected oil executive, is currently involved in an international criminal investigation into a Kazakh billionaire banker-turned-fugitive alleged to have absconded with $6 billion from Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank.
The story begins with The London Sunday Times on May 8, 2011, which reported the sale of the personal home of England’s Prince Andrew to billionaire Kazakh Oligarch Timur Kulibayev, who “controls that country’s oil industry and happens to be married to the daughter of its autocratic President Nursultan Nazarbayev.”
What does that have to do with “Uncle Ruslan?” Let’s take a look.
Headlined “Prince’s home in ‘laundered cash’ inquiry,” the story raised several red flags.
One was that the President-for-Life’s son-in-law had paid $5 million over the asking price to purchase Prince Andrew’s home, which raised eyebrows.
Red flags and eyebrows were raised still further, in these times of global near-depression, at the conspicuous oligarchic consumption (read: bad taste) exhibited when the Kazakh President-for-Life’s daughter-for-life Goga Ashkenazi celebrated her 30th birthday with a lavish party before the scandal hit.
Goga, who made her appearance in a Swarovski crystal-encrusted, backless lace dress, attended by Prince-for-Life Andrew, was entertained by fire-eaters, peacock-feathered stilt-walkers, and a girl swinging on a trapeze pouring vodka into ice sculptures shaped like naked male and female torsos.
There was even a woman suspended in a bird cage (true) who was there to direct guests tostrategically-placed vomitoriums (alas, not true) strewn about the mansion grounds.
But the biggest red flag, the one pertinent to murder in Boston, was Oligarch Kukibayev’s use of money laundered through a network of offshore companies to attempt to hide his purchase of Prince Andrew’s crib, which emerged during a legal battle between another billionaire Kazakh oligarch, Mukhtar Ablyazov, and BTA Bank, from which Kazakhstan claims Ablyazov embezzled a very cool $6 billion dollars.
And this is where “Uncle Ruslan” Tsarni comes in.
The purchase of the Prince’s estate was put together, according to prosecutors in Italy and Switzerland, by a group of oil executives who comprise “a network of personal and business relationships” allegedly used for “international corruption,” reported The London Telegraph.
Tsarni, called “a US lawyer who has had dealings in Kazakh business affairs,” by the Sunday Times, clearly appears to be a member of that network.
The Sunday Times reported, “A statement by Ruslan Zaindi Tsarni was given in the High Court in December, claiming that Kulibayev bought Sunninghill and properties in Mayfair with $96 million derived from a complex series of deals intended to disguise money laundering.”
“Tsarni alleged that the money came from the takeover of a western company, which had been used as a front to obtain oil contracts from the Kazakh state.”
The “western company” used to launder the money which the Sunday Times referred to is Big Sky Energy Corporation, where Ruslan Tsarni was a top executive.
Big Sky, which used to be known as China Energy Ventures Corp, is a now-bankrupt US oil company run by S.A. (Al) Sehsuvaroglu, a long-time executive of Halliburton, which had oil leases in Kakakhstan’s Caspian Basin.
Tsarni was Big Sky’s Corporate Secretary and Vice President for Business Development. He joined Big Sky in 2005.
A press release announcing his appointmentstated:
“Mr. Ruslan Tsarni, a U.S. citizen, has over 10 years of professional experience in oil and gas legislation and corporate law. Previously, Mr. Tsarni served as Corporate Counsel of Nelson Resources Limited Group as well as Managing Director of several of its operating subsidiaries.
“From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Tsarni worked as Head of Legal Affairs of Golden Eagle Partners LLC.
“From 1994 to 1996, Mr. Tsarni served as a consultant contracted by USAID for projects aimed to develop securities markets in Central Asia, where he trained corporate governance and corporate finance principals in state and private companies.”
According to a source who worked for many years as a journalist at Platts Oilgram News, a respected oil industry trade publication, good corporate governance was not a Big Sky priority.
“Nelson, Big Sky, Ablyazov, Kulibayev and the rest were all on my watch list for intelligence connections and pay-offs of various kinds at Platts,” stated the source, who requested anonymity.
The news corroborates other reports beginning to emerge about the family and its abundant connections.
Before the Tsarnaev family moved to the United States a decade ago, they lived in the northern Kyrgyz town of Tokmok, near the border with Kazakhstan, which is home of the country’s largest ethnic Chechen community.
The day after the massive manhunt in the Boston area that led to the death of Tamerlan and the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Radio Free Europe and Kyrgyz Service correspondent Timur Toktonaliev traveled to Tokmok.
From there, he reported that the extended Tsarnaev family is well-known there, even beyond their local community.
“It is not known if there was anything more than a personal connection,” the story reported, “but organized crime boss Aziz Batukaev, who is also an ethnic Chechen, lived next door to the Tsarnaevs. Batukaev grew up and lived in Tokmok, but is now in Chechnya.
Halliburton executives, suspected CIA assets, Chechnyan crime bosses, oligarchs stealing billions from banks and laundering money with seeming impunity, fire-eaters, peacock-feathered stilt-walkers, and a girl swinging on a trapeze pouring vodka into ice sculptures shaped like naked male and female torsos…
If there hadn’t been two of them, the investigation would already be pointing to a single misfit, a lone nut bomber.
http://www.madcowprod.com/2013/04/22/was-boston-bombers-uncle-ruslan-with-the-cia/
It’s easy to look back and see how we allowed the “Patriot” act to slip past us: we were emotional from the attacks on 9/11 and fearful and thereby willing to sacrifice the rights that make us American. We were convinced that it was a different time, a time when the Constitution needed reinterpretation. More than a decade later we still feel the effects of 9/11 everywhere: airport security has never been the same, war has consumed our lives, our military has become enormous, executive action has become an increasingly popular recourse; we have constantly been in a time of “great threat” since 9/11. Around 3000 died on that day and a subsequent 5000+ fighting abroad in the wars since. Perhaps the most terrorizing effect, however, is the credibility we have given to terrorism and the way that fear is now being exploited.
Last week in Boston, in a senseless and abhorrent act, terrorism struck again and 3 died and 170 or so were wounded (17 critical). In an all-out manhunt, the city was placed in martial law and we threw any rights to freedom out the window to catch the despicable individuals responsible. Upon apprehension, the one living suspect was not read his rights.
Real damage: 3 killed, 17 critically wounded, 150+ more wounded to some extent. This is what threw our country into a tailspin. Without getting into a passionate discussion on gun rights but to give this perspective, at the time of writing this blog 3,527 Americans (according to a NYT tracker) have been killed from gun violence since Newtown. More than a 1000% fatality difference (even more if you consider the time lapse between the last victim of terrorism on our soil), yet it was the terrorist act killing 3 that spun us into martial law and a common sense bill that could not get through the senate.
We have been tricked into believing that terrorism is our greatest threat; it is not. Terrorism relies on communication; it is a message that relies on us being scared of it and thus requires more credibility than it otherwise would warrant. It is emotional, yet irrational; it is not the biggest threat and not worth giving up the rights that we should be enjoying as Americans.
The real fear from terrorist acts, then, is not the damage in blood spilt, which when put in perspective is extraordinarily small in comparison to other real threats plaguing our streets, it is the fear generated from the blood spilt, or as FDR said, “The only thing to fear is fear itself.” We need to push back. We need to let terrorists know that they will not scare us, but not by massive police manhunts made for CNN to appease the mob calling for a head on a stick, or massive invasions of foreign countries, or massive restructuring of homeland security posts, or absolute desecration of the Constitution, but by sending the message that a terrorist is, by itself, a small person; it is a person that only wields the power that we give it. Terrorism, then, has to be a minuscule part of our lives, it only holds value if we give it value, but we must realize that we are more threatened by a car accident than a terrorist bomb. Terrorists are nothing more than criminals; they’re no more a war combatant than a crack dealer on the corner holding up a liquor store—the only difference is visibility and thus the credibility we give it.
The scary thing is the structure of our society now allows something like the Boston terrorists to warrant a shut down of the city with hardly any dissent. Rather than waiting a month, year, or decade to look in hindsight at all the rights we sacrificed when we were scared of the Boston bombing, we need to stop judging acts emotionally and judge them realistically. It was a terrible act that killed 3 people and wounded several more, but lets not sacrifice our way of life over this anymore than we would if it were a back alley shooting or stabbing that did not get anything more than a back page article in the local paper.
This is far more than theoretical; the debate whether we should respect the rights of the citizen SUSPECT is already raging. Senator Lindsey Graham suggests not, that this is a terrorist and the public safety exception applies—no need to Mirandize, go ahead and extract information by any means necessary. Again, to put this in perspective, Lindsey Graham was one of the senators that voted against expanding background checks, presumably fearing infringement of rights (without blatantly saying it was playing politics). So the lesson learned from what this senator has told us this week is that some amendments are binding, others are not, but we’ll leave that determination up to the government. The right to bear arms is not to be infringed upon (to include any gross distortion of the meaning of infringement) meanwhile American citizen’s 4th amendment rights can arbitrarily be taken away should we (read government with consensus approval) deem the actions extra gross. This determination of grossness, of course, is credibility. But what about the Aurora shooter? He is getting a trial, he is receiving due process and he killed 12 and injured 58. He even told authorities that his place was boobie trapped with explosives. But apparently that was not a terrorist attack, that wasn’t a Muslim, it wasn’t a bomb; it was a gun so it was not a public safety exception. But with a quarter of the fatalities Senator Graham believes that the public safety exception is applicable. But how many deaths and injuries have been incurred by terrorism since 9/11 on our soil? What about other crime? We do not live in a time of great threat, we just have been convinced we do—the threat is just as significant as it was before 9/11. These senseless acts will occur from time to time, they did long before 9/11 and will continue to long after; the power of a lunatic acting individually is that they can slip through the cracks—it will never be 100% stopped. Fortunately reality suggests that we do not live in a world littered with these lone lunatics—very rarely do they manifest.
The real fear from terrorism is the repercussions of our fears of terrorism. The threat of losing more liberties under the flag of terrorism is a much more real threat to us than blood spilt by terrorism. Not affording the suspects due process gives terrorism all the credibility it relies upon to be successful. It is visual, so if it is believed to be the greatest threat, it is successful. The person who committed these heinous acts of violence needs this notoriety to send their message and Senator Graham is suggesting we give them exactly what they want.
http://www.1800politics.com/terrorism-struck-again-but-gun-violence-remains-a-greater-threat/
Wayne Masden, former national security officer, claims he is “100 percent certain that 9/11 investigator and author Philip Marshall and his two children were killed in a black ops hit.” He said “the crime scene was illegally cleaned up by professionals.”
Conspiracy theories regarding Marshall’s death are at odds with the official account so far released.
The Calaveras County Sheriffs Department claimed “Philip Marshall killed his two teenage kids, his dog, and himself” according to 21st Century Wire, further noting “the police have no motive, no suicide note, and no indication that Marshall fit the profile of someone who murdered the two people closest to him.”
Toxicology and pathology reports are still pending the Santa Barbara Review reports, even though police have already labelled the three deaths as murder-suicide.
According to the EU Times, Marshall, who believed the reported account of the death of Osama bin Laden was a farce, was working on his fourth book which could be his death warrant.
(Guardian) -The New York Times and the Obama administration have created a disturbing collaborative pattern that asserted itself again on Sunday with the paper’s long article purporting to describe the events leading up to the execution by the CIA of US citizen Anwar Awlaki. Time and again, the Obama administration shrouds what it does with complete secrecy, and then uses that secrecy to avoid judicial review of its actions and/or compelled statutory disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. “Oh, we’re so sorry”, says the Obama DOJ, “but we cannot have courts deciding if what we did is legal, nor ordering us to disclose information under FOIA, because these programs are so very secret that any disclosure would seriously jeopardize national security”.
But then, senior Obama officials run to the New York Times by the dozens, demand (and receive) anonymity, and then spout all sorts of claims about these very same programs that are designed to justify what the US government has done and to glorify President Obama. The New York Times helpfully shields these officials - who are not blowing any whistles, but acting as government spokespeople - from being identified, and then mindlessly regurgitates their assertions as fact. It’s standard government stenography, administration press releases masquerading as in-depth news articles.
Sunday’s lengthy NYT article on the Awlaki killing by Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane is a classic case of this arrangement. It purports to provide “an account of what led to the Awlaki strike” that is “based on interviews with three dozen current and former legal and counterterrorism officials and outside experts”. But what it really does is simply summarize the unverified justifications of the very officials involved in the killing, most of whom are permitted to justify themselves while hiding behind anonymity. It devotes itself with particular fervor to defending the actions of former Obama OLC lawyers David Barron and Marty Lederman, who concocted the theories to authorize due-process-free assassinations of American citizens (those same Democratic lawyers were, needless to say, among the most vocal critics of the Bush administration’s War on Terror policies that denied due process and relied on rampant secrecy).
There are many points to make about all of this. To begin with, will the Obama administration - which has persecuted whistleblowers with an unprecedented fervor and frequency - launch a criminal investigation to determine the identity of the “three dozen current and former legal and counterterrorism officials” who spoke to the NYT about the classified Awlaki hit, or, as usual, are such punishments reserved for those who embarrass rather than glorify the president?
Moreover, why can Obama officials run to the NYT after the fact and make all sorts of claims about the mountains of evidence supposedly proving Awlaki’s guilt, but not have done the same thing in a court of law prior to killing him? As the NYT notes, when the ACLU sued on behalf of Awlaki’s father seeking to enjoin Obama from killing his son, the Obama DOJ invoked the “state secrets” privilege, insisting that the evidence against Awlaki was so secret that national security would be jeopardized if disclosed to the court: the very same alleged evidence that Obama officials are now spilling to the NYT. They also deliberately refused to indict him, which would have at least required showing some evidence to a court to justify the accusations against him and would have enabled him to turn himself in and defend himself if inclined to do so.
All of this highlights why it’s so odious to prosecute and convict people in a newspaper after you execute them, rather than in a court of law before you end their life. As but one example, the statements about Awlaki from attempted underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab on which the NYT heavily relies to assert Awlaki’s guilt would have been subjected to intense cross-examination to see if they were simply the results of Abdulmutallab giving the government what they wanted - namely, statements that incriminated someone they wanted to kill - in exchange for favors as part of his plea agreement. It’s so basic, though the NYT seems not to have heard, that statements made by accused criminals in exchange for favors as part of a plea bargain are among the most unreliable.
But that kind of critical scrutiny only happens in courtrooms, with due process. By contrast, asserted government evidence is simply mindlessly assumed to be true when it’s fed to journalists after the fact without anyone to contradict it or any process available to disprove it. As the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights jointly said yesterday about this NYT story:
“This is the latest in a series of one-sided, selective disclosures that prevent meaningful public debate and legal or even political accountability for the government’s killing program, including its use against citizens.
“Government officials have made serious allegations against Anwar al-Aulaqi, but allegations are not evidence, and the whole point of the Constitution’s due process clause is that a court must distinguish between the two. If the government has evidence that Al-Aulaqi posed an imminent threat at the time it killed him, it should present that evidence to a court.”
Indeed, while the NYT asserts as though it’s incontrovertible that he was “a senior operative in Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen“, Yemen experts such as Gregory Johnsen have long said the opposite: “We suspect a great deal about Anwar al-Awlaki, but we know very little, precious little when it comes to his operational role” and “Mendelsohn [said]: ‘(Awlaki) played an important role in a string of attacks in the West’. We just don’t know this, we suspect it but don’t know it.”
Beyond that, the DOJ officials whose conduct is defended by this story have long been important sources to the very NYT reporters writing this article (not just during the Obama years but also the Bush years), so it’s a typical case of journalists using anonymity to serve the agendas of their government sources. And it’s yet another case where journalistic anonymity is granted not to protect whistleblowers from recriminations by the powerful, but to protect government officials from accountability so they can justify government conduct. And, finally, Marcy Wheeler details several extremely dubious claims that were passed off as fact by this NYT article: here and here.
But I want to focus on one key point. What prompted my opposition from the start to the attempted killing of Awlaki was that it was very clear he was being targeted because of his anti-American sermons that were resonating among English-speaking Muslim youth (sermons which, whatever you think of them, are protected by the First Amendment), and not because he was a Terrorist operative. In other words, the US government was trying to murder one of its own citizens as punishment for his political and religious views that were critical of the government’s policies, and not because of any actual crimes or warfare.
The NYT addresses this concern directly with a long, convoluted explanation that the Obama administration refrained from targeting Awlaki when they thought he was only a “dangerous propagandist”, and decided to kill him only once they obtained proof that he was an actual Terrorist operative. The NYT says that this proof was obtained in “late January 2010” when Abdulmutallab cooperated with authorities and claimed Awlaki participated in his plot. In order to validate this explanation, the NYT claims that a December, 2009 drone strike in Yemen that was widely reported at the time to have targeted Awlaki - and which media outlets falsely reported killed him - was actually targeting others, and that Awlaki would merely have been oh-so-coincidental (and perfectly legal) “collateral damage”. Here is the NYT’s effort to insist that the Obama administration targeted Awlaki for death only once it obtained evidence in late January, 2010 that he was more than a mere propagandist:
“[Awlaki’s] eloquent, English-language exhortations to jihad turned up repeatedly on the computers of young plotters of violence arrested in Britain, Canada and the United States.
“By 2008, said Philip Mudd, then a top F.B.I. counterterrorism official, Mr. Awlaki ‘was cropping up as a radicalizer - not in just a few investigations, but in what seemed to be every investigation.’
“In November 2009, when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was charged with opening fire at Fort Hood in Texas and killing 13 people, Mr. Awlaki finally found the global fame he had long appeared to court. Investigators quickly discovered that the major had exchanged e-mails with Mr. Awlaki, though the cleric’s replies had been cautious and noncommittal. But four days after the shootings, the cleric removed any doubt about where he stood.
“‘Nidal Hassan is a hero’, he wrote on his widely read blog. ‘He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.’
“As chilling as the message was, it was still speech protected by the First Amendment. American intelligence agencies intensified their focus on Mr. Awlaki, intercepting communications that showed the cleric’s growing clout in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based affiliate of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.
“On Dec. 24, 2009, in the second American strike in Yemen in eight days, missiles hit a meeting of leaders of the affiliate group. News accounts said one target was Mr. Awlaki, who was falsely reported to have been killed.
“In fact, other top officials of the group were the strike’s specific targets, and Mr. Awlaki’s death would have been collateral damage - legally defensible as a death incidental to the military aim. As dangerous as Mr. Awlaki seemed, he was proved to be only an inciter; counterterrorism analysts did not yet have incontrovertible evidence that he was, in their language, “operational.”
“That would soon change. The next day, a 23-year-old Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried and failed to blow up an airliner as it approached Detroit. The would-be underwear bomber told FBI agents that after he went to Yemen and tracked down Mr. Awlaki, his online hero, the cleric had discussed ‘martyrdom and jihad’ with him, approved him for a suicide mission, helped him prepare a martyrdom video and directed him to detonate his bomb over United States territory, according to court documents.
“In his initial 50-minute interrogation on Dec. 25, 2009, before he stopped speaking for a month, Mr. Abdulmutallab said he had been sent by a terrorist named Abu Tarek, although intelligence agencies quickly found indications that Mr. Awlaki was probably involved. When Mr. Abdulmutallab resumed cooperating with interrogators in late January, an official said, he admitted that ‘Abu Tarek’ was Mr. Awlaki. With the Nigerian’s statements, American officials had witness confirmation that Mr. Awlaki was clearly a direct plotter, no longer just a dangerous propagandist.
“‘He had been on the radar all along, but it was Abdulmutallab’s testimony that really sealed it in my mind that this guy was dangerous and that we needed to go after him,’ said Dennis C. Blair, then director of national intelligence.”
So that tortured justification for what the Obama administration did, laundered through the NYT, is clear in its claims: (1) we were legally and constitutionally barred from trying to kill Awlaki when we thought he was just a propagandist; (2) the December, 2009 strike wasn’t really targeting him, despite what media outlets reported at the time, because we did not yet have evidence that he was a Terrorist plotter; and (3) we acquired that evidence only in late January, 2010, and only then did we start to target Awlaki for execution. Obviously, those claims are necessary to defend themselves from what would clearly be criminal behavior: trying to kill a US citizen because of the government’s dislike for his political and religious speech.
But the first journalist to report on the existence of Obama’s kill list and the inclusion of US citizens was the Washington Post’s Dana Priest. On January 26, 2010, this is what she wrote:
“As part of the operations [in Yemen], Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a US citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of US citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said . . .
“The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a US citizen joins al-Qaeda, ‘it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them’, a senior administration official said. ‘They are then part of the enemy.’
“Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called ‘High Value Targets’ and ‘High Value Individuals’, whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three US citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.”
According to Priest’s reporting back then, the Obama administration was trying to execute Awlaki as early as late 2009 - exactly when the Obama officials who spoke to the NYT admit that they had no evidence that he was anything other than a “propagandist” and this his targeted killing would therefore be unconstitutional and illegal. (That’s also a reminder that not only Awlaki, but at least two other still-unknown Americans, have been placed on Obama’s kill list). Priest then added that the cause of Awlaki’s being placed on the kill list were his “academic” discussions with Nidal Hasan: exactly what the NYT’s Obama-official-sources now say are protected free speech that could not be used to legally justify his killing:
“Intelligence officials say the New Mexico-born imam also has been linked to the Army psychiatrist who is accused of killing 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, Tex., although his communications with Maj. Nidal M. Hasan were largely academic in nature. Authorities say that Aulaqi is the most important native, English-speaking al-Qaeda figure and that he was in contact with the Nigerian accused of attempting to bomb a US airlner on Christmas Day.”
Whatever else is true, there is a serious potential contradiction between the self-justifying claims of the NYT’s sources (we waited until late January, 2010 when we acquired evidence of Awlaki’s involvement in plots before trying to kill him) and Priest’s reporting (the Obama administration began trying to kill Awlaki in 2009, before it had evidence that he had done anything beyond “inspiring” plots with his sermons). The reason this matters so much regardless of your views of Awlaki is obvious, and is certainly on the mind of the NYT’s government sources: it would be purely tyrannical, not to mention unconstitutional and criminal (murder), for the US government to try to kill one of its own citizens in order to stop his critical speech.
It’s possible that there is a distinction in this reporting between being targeted for killing by JSOC versus the CIA, although the NYT’s government sources are clear that any government targeted killing of Awlaki without proof of involvement in terrorist plots - based solely on his sermons - would be legally dubious, at best (indeed, on Democracy Now this morning, the NYT’s Scott Shane said: “they had in fact decided they could not target [US citizen] Samir Khan, because he was a propagandist, and not an actual plotter, but he was killed anyway”); when I asked Savage about this, he told me this morning via email that “the exact date that Awlaki went on ‘the list’ is one of several issues that we dug into at length, and while we were able to mosaic together some answers to some previously outstanding questions this one remains murky”). It’s also possible that Priest’s reporting was wrong and efforts to kill Awlaki only began in 2010 once the government acquired what it claims is evidence of his involvement in Terrorist plots. It’s also possible that the NYT’s sources are simply wrong, or worse, when claiming that abundant evidence exists to prove Awlaki’s involvement in such plots.
But all of this only underscores why governments of civilized nations don’t first execute people without charges or due process and seek after the fact to prosecute and convict them in a one-sided, non-adversarial process of newspaper leaks; these are exactly the kinds of questions that are resolved by adversarial judicial procedures, precisely the procedures the Obama administration made sure could never take place. It also underscores why responsible media outlets should do more than print these unverified government accusations as truth, especially about a matter as consequential as the government’s assassination of its own citizens. That the Obama administration and the New York Times did neither of those things in this case is quite revealing about the function they perform.
(WashingtonsBlog) -The government has absolutely shred the Bill of Rights in the last decade or so.
New CIA boss John Brennan endorses torture, assassination of unidentified strangers (including Americans) without due process, and spying on all Americans.
As such, it is fitting that Mr. Brennan specially requested that he be sworn in on a draft of the Constitution lacking the Bill of Rights.
A draft which doesn’t even begin with the famous preamble we all know and love:
We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America ….
But rather starts with:
We the People of the States of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina and Georgia, do ordain, declare and establish the following Constitution for the Government of Ourselves and our Posterity….
That has a very different tone from the final version of the Constitution. And again, this version has no Bill of Rights.
Here’s the actual draft Brennan swore in on, courtesy of the National Archives (click any image for larger view):
The handwriting is that of George Washington.
Washington was a brave leader (but a terrible general). More importantly, he was one man … and the whole idea of the Bill of Rights is that the people have inalienable rights – e.g. no deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process of law – which cannot be taken away by any leader … including the president or the head of the CIA.
Who’s Faking It? Pentagon
On November 22, 2012, the Los Angeles Times published an alarming piece of news entitled “Cyber Corps program trains spies for the digital age”. The “cyber-warriors” who are headed for organizations such as the CIA, NSC, FBI, the Pentagon and so on, are trained to stalk, “rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook [emphasis added]. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives.”
Not surprisingly, less than a month later, it was rumored that Iran ’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei had started a Facebook page. The style and content of the site ruled out its authenticity, but the State Department was amused. In spite of the potential for alarm, State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland jokingly expressed Washington ’s curiosity to see how many “likes’ Khamenei would receive. This is no joking matter. Any message on this page would be attributed to Khamenei with a potential for dangerous ramifications.
Barely a month later, on January 24, 2013, Guardian’s blaring headlines exposed fake blogs and Facebook pages made for BBC Persian’s Iranian journalists with claims that these were made in order to harass, intimidate, and discredit the journalists. These fake blogs, according to The Guardian charges, are not by the American Cyber Corps warriors, but are alleged to be the creation of the Iranian ‘Islamic cyber-activists’ in “what appears [emphasis added] to be an operation sponsored by the authorities”.
While truth is the fist casualty of war, journalists are also fair game thanks — in large part owing to the provisions of the Information Operations Road Map of 2003 (signed by the then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and pursued by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta). As part of the plan, “public affairs officers brief journalists”. In 2005 it came to light that the Pentagon paid the Lincoln Group (a private company) to plant ‘hundreds of stories’ in Iraqi papers in support of U.S. Policies. The plan also called for “a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, “miniaturized, scatterable public address systems”, wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet. “
In light of such wide spread propaganda, deception and digital warfare by the Pentagon, and with the recent Los Angeles Times revelations of the Cyber Corps training, truth become indistinguishable from falsehood and thus accepting or rejecting the authenticity of allegations by the Guardian becomes subjective, in spite of the reality of the victimhood of BBC journalists (ditto Radio Farda, VOA) whose reporting is not welcomed in Iran.
The broadcast of BBC Persian into Iran is problematic. Leaving aside the illegality of it (see article), BBC Persian which was launched in early 2009, receives significant funding from the United States . To many Iranians, no doubt including the Iranian government, BBC’s role was (and continues to be) a dark reminder of its past role in destroying Iran’s democracy in 1953 when, by its own admission, the BBC spearheaded Britain’s propaganda and broadcast the code which sparked the coup and the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh.
As if in a reenactment, the role of BBC Persian in the 2009 post-election unrest was significant. Claiming that BBC Persian Services was basing its reporting on “citizen journalists” and on the receiving end of “eight user generated communications per minute”, their own report indicates that some of the reporting was impossible to verify. Unlike BBC Persian (and VOA, Radio Farda, etc.), Wired Magazine did its homework fully. In its report aptly titled “Iran: Before You Have That Twitter-Gasm…” , it revealed that the “ U.S. media is projecting its own image of Iran into what is going here on the ground.” BBC Persian, true to its track record, and thanks to State Department funding, had a desire to trumpet in a new era in Iran ’s history – A historical change planned from without, with help from within. Unlike 1953, it failed.
Once again, with the Iranian elections on the horizon, indications are that the recent elections in the United States and Israel will not produce a break-through in the US-Iran relations, or the foreign policy agenda of the United States toward Iran — warfare by other means, including propaganda. Cognizant of this fact, either the Iranian government is bracing itself for a propaganda war by discrediting sites with a potential to propagate misinformation, which may explain duplicating the BBC (admittedly, a clever move), or, the American Cyber Corps has outdone itself with the ability to point the finger at Iran.
Either way, in launching its cyber warfare, the United States has crossed the Rubicon. Cyber warfare, much like germ warfare, is dangerous, relentless, and without boundaries. The casualties of such warfare will continue to rise – unstoppable.
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is a Public Diplomacy Scholar, independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the role of lobby groups.
By Shepard Ambellas
(TheIntelHub) -Intelligence operatives or globalist cronies? One thing is for sure, contrived media propaganda is in full swing for 2013.
Recently, rouge factions of our government and media have seemingly been following a terrorist version of a “False Flag” play-by-play manual aimed at disarming the American populace once and for all.
In fact CNN has recently been implicated in airing bunk footage of another “active-shooter” drill as the “LIVE BREAKING” feed of the Sandy Hook School shooting on the morning of December 14, 2012 the day of the reported shooting. But why would the media be involved?
For years the government has been pecking away at our constitutional rights as American citizens, trying to limit and impose more stringent limitations regarding firearm use and ownership. But never before have we seen this type of rhetoric and blatant attacks on our constitutional rights by media “icons” and the media establishment itself then in recent months following the Aurora theatre shooting in Colorado.
The media has always been a big part of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as it not only gathers intelligence information but serves as a propaganda mouth piece for various intelligence operations worldwide.
It is also well known now and openly admitted that Anderson Cooper and other predominant members of the media are indeed affiliated with the CIA.
Anderson Cooper
Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967) is an American journalist, author, and television personality. He is the primary anchor of the CNN news show Anderson Cooper 360°. The program is normally broadcast live from a New York City studio; however, Cooper often broadcasts live on location for breaking news stories. As of September 2011, he also serves as host of his own eponymous syndicated daytime talk show, Anderson Live, which will be cancelled at the end of the second season.[2] …
…. During college, Cooper spent two summers as an intern at the Central Intelligence Agency. Although he technically has no formal journalistic education, he opted to pursue a career in journalism rather than stay with the agency after school,[13] having been a self-proclaimed “news junkie” since he was “in utero.”[14] After his first correspondence work in the early 1990s, he took a break from reporting and lived in Vietnam for a year, during which time he studied the Vietnamese language at the University of Hanoi.[15] — Wikipedia
Other media icons such a Piers Morgan have possible intelligence ties and at the least are accepting of their master bribes. Morgan has formerly been implicated in a British hacking scandal essentially showing some connection to an intelligence operation as talk show hosts and actors typically are not hackers.
The Huffington Post reported:
Piers Morgan was not treated too kindly by the just-released Leveson Report, which called his testimony about phone hacking “utterly unpersuasive.”
The CNN host and former British tabloid editor gave testimony to the inquiry into the ethics of the British press back in December. There, he was confronted with past statements he had made about phone hacking, both in his book and in interviews. Other witnesses also testified that he told them how to hack into phones.
While Morgan has freely admitted to knowing about the practice, he has vociferously denied allegations that he condoned it at the Mirror, and no concrete evidence has ever been found tying him to hacking. The newspaper has, however, been sued by people who claim their phones were hacked during his editorship.
Lord Justice Leveson, who chaired the inquiry, devoted a small chunk of his voluminous report to Morgan’s testimony. He concentrated on a 2007 interview Morgan gave in which he called phone hacking an “investigative practice that everyone knows was going on at almost every paper in Fleet Street for years.” Morgan said he was “passing on rumors.”
This is alarming as a British National comes out the day of the Sandy Hook School shooting demanding that all Americans firearms should be taken away. This globalist sponsored propaganda was later countered by radio talk show host and filmmaker Alex Jones in what some would call a controversial interview on Piers Morgans CNN show.
Megyn Kelly
According to the Fox News official website, “Megyn Kelly currently anchors “America Live,” (1-3 p.m. ET), a daytime news program on Fox News Channel (FNC), which launched in February of 2010. She previously co-anchored “America’s Newsroom” with Bill Hemmer (9-11 a.m. ET) and appears weekly on “The O’Reilly Factor” in a segment entitled The Kelly File. Throughout her tenure with FNC, Kelly has covered breaking news and has reported live from numerous political events….
… During the 2007 Virginia Tech campus massacre, Kelly reported live from Blacksburg, Virginia. Additionally, she was in Huntington, Utah as rescue efforts were underway for six trapped miners.
Kelly notably covered the Duke University rape case involving three of the school’s lacrosse players. Reporting from Durham, North Carolina, she broke new details that would ultimately help exonerate the defendants.”
Recently Kelly made on-air remarks during a Fox News broadcast and referencing and essentially calling for the removal of constitutional rights (our freedom of speech) in response to the victims families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and their alleged feelings toward bloggers and internet news publications like theintelhub.com which continue to point out facts and points that the mainstream media still fails to cover regarding what is being dubbed the most deadly school shooting in U.S. history.
(Guardian) - Monday, President Obama nominated John Brennan – the architect of his secretive, deadly drone program – to head the CIA. Before he is confirmed, Brennan should publicly commit to getting the CIA out of the killing business.
With drone strikes in Pakistan accelerating since 2008, the CIA has transformed into a quasi-military force. But as a spy agency, the CIA’s instincts are to wage war the way it runs covert actions – in secret, and by its own rules. As it goes about its mission, the agency’s habit is to check the boxes, doing the minimum work necessary to achieve legal cover and political buy-in. The CIA selectively leaks details of its drone strikes to the press, so the public only ever learns of its successes, never its failures.
This sounds plausible and even palatable if the CIA is just a spy agency secretly running down terrorists once in a while, as in fictional television shows like Homeland. It is untenable, though, as the model of warfare it is fast becoming. More than 300 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen have killed about 3,000 people, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. If the CIA’s hunter-killer role becomes permanent, the US government will have no grounds for protest when other countries inevitably follow the CIA’s example of carrying out drone strike campaigns in any place, at any time, and without any official acknowledgement or need to publicly and legally justify its actions.
Knowing the dangerous precedent the CIA is setting, Obama has alluded to a “due process” for death decision-making. Details are few, but we know the process does not involve the courts or the public, and vests full discretion within the executive branch. Even if it met concerns about the legality of drone strikes, though, this kind of decision-making would be wrong for the CIA, which has a history of grabbing for all the power it can get while failing to rein in abusive agents.
Though it ill fits the CIA’s targeted killing program, the internal due process Obama described would somewhat match what military commands traditionally do on the battlefield. The difference is that in democracies, the public entrusts the military to wield lethal force only because it is subject to laws and the enforcing machinery of political oversight. The military has the responsibility of earning public approval for its actions overall, or it risks losing its mandate for war. Public disapproval of the war in Iraq, and dismay at continuing involvement in Afghanistan, led to the US troop drawdowns of the last few years.
This system of public approval and disapproval for military action is imperfect and sometimes fails, but it markedly contrasts with the oversight of the CIA’s secretive war-making. Although the Obama administration touts the drone campaign as a success, it is officially a state secret – giving the CIA a free pass on disclosing civilian casualties to courts or to Congress, except in closed sessions with a few members.
In this climate, polls show the American public broadly approves of a drone campaign of which it knows alarmingly little. In American media, the slick and sanitized image of a Predator drone suspended mid-air accompanies news stories on drone strikes that report “militants” killed. Precisely who these men were and how they were selected for execution are rarely mentioned.
The bodies of civilian dead are never pictured, even when these deaths are reported. Reports that drone strikes have killed more than 100 children have sullied the international reputation of the United States, and have led to UN calls for an investigation. Within the US, however, there is little if any public interest in debating the cost of drones on civilian lives.
In Monday’s nomination announcement, Obama complimented Brennan on recognizing the responsibility to be as “open and transparent as possible” about counterterrorism policies. Brennan himself pledged “full and open discourse” – though only with “appropriate elective representatives”. Despite these nods, it would be naive to expect the CIA, under Brennan, to engage fully with the American public about the drone program. The CIA is too accustomed to secrecy ever to let it go.
If Brennan and Obama were serious about transparency over killing, they would extract the CIA from the drone program altogether. America’s premier spy agency should no longer also be its chief assassin.
CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan tweets that a spokesperson for Clinton confirmed that the former First Lady has been taken to New York Presbyterian, and that the hospital will monitor her for the next 48 hours.
According to Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin, Clinton was scheduled to return to work this week following a three-week recovery from a stomach virus and concussion.
The illness was first reported December 10, when Clinton’s office announced that it was the reason the Secretary of State had canceled a scheduled trip to the Middle East. On December 15, Clinton’s doctors reported that she had also sustained a concussion after fainting from her illness.
Conservative pundits and bloggers have accused Clinton of faking the illness in order to avoid testifying in an open Congressional hearing about the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Clinton has said she will testify in front of both House and Senate committees when she returns to work.
(PakiTribune) - Defence Secretary Lt General (r) Asif Yaseen Malik on Friday said that the US is using the spy agencies of other countries against Pakistan.
Speaking to a select group of journalists at the Defence Ministry, the defence secretary said Pakistan had complete information about the CIA agents working in the country. He said Pakistan has been informed by the US regarding presence of the CIA agents.
He added that no country was allowed to work undercover in the country. “The CIA also uses the agencies of other countries.” He said the US and Britain are against the nuclear assets of Pakistan, adding that America is using agencies of other countries against the country.
General Asif said there is no formal agreement between CIA and the ISI for secret operation. He said 95 percent of the defence policy is made by the three defence services on the basis of mutual consultation. He added that negotiations were going on for the replacement of spy aircraft that were damaged in attacks on Mehran and Kamra bases.
Malik noted that after the case of Raymond Davis, the question of US agents was talk of the town in Pakistan and public wanted to know about it. The defence secretary said that compared to the past, the US tone with Pakistan has changed due to some dynamics. Pakistan developed ties with US on mutual interest basis, he said, adding that the country renewed its ties with the US after it restored NATO supplies suspended in November last year when NATO airstrike in Salala caused deaths of Pakistani soldiers.
Malik noted that the Pakistani and US officials have on several occasions said that irritants in the ties between the two countries have been minimised and they are developing on a positive trajectory. In response to a question, he said that the Defence Ministry had not received any order from the Law Ministry on former army chief Gen (r) Aslam Baig and former ISI DG Lt Gen (r) Asad Durrani in the Asghar Khan case.
Nevertheless, he said no objection could be raised if the civilian government takes action against them. The secretary clarified that there is no political cell in the ISI. To a question on operation in the North Waziristan, Malik said that Pakistan has the capacity to launch an operation in the area but doing so without sealing the Afghan border is not fruitful.
On the condition of the Pakistan International Airlines, he said that new airplanes were provided to the PIA and the government released 4-8 million dollars to it. Since September PIA has been earning profit and losses have been controlled, he further said. The debt against PIA was Rs 42 billion in 2008 but has now risen to Rs 152 billion, he said. “Government is working on a policy to get the PIA out of loss,” he said.
Mohseni-Ejei also noted that Iran Judiciary plans to issue separate indictments for a number of Israeli officials.
Since 2009, five Iranian nuclear scientists have become targets of Western-sponsored terrorist attacks, which have killed four of them.
Iran has also been under illegal US and European Union sanctions over its nuclear energy program, which aim to prevent other countries from buying Iranian oil or doing transaction with its central bank.
(End The Lie) -It is now being reported that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder secretly gave the U.S. government the authority to create and store dossiers on innocent Americans not suspected of committing any crime, without any debate or approval from lawmakers.
This is hardly surprising since Holder gave the same entity, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) the ability to store the personal information of Americans for up to five years, even without so much as a suspicion of the individual being involved in criminal activity of any kind.
Furthermore, this is the same Attorney General who claimed that secret reviews of classified evidence count as due process when deciding if the executive branch can assassinate Americans allegedly involved in terrorist activity.
While in days past, the NCTC could not store data compiled on U.S. citizens unless they were at least suspected of some terrorist activity or were otherwise relevant to an ongoing terrorism investigation, they not only can collect and store massive databases of private information but also “trawl through and analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior in order to uncover activity that could launch an investigation,” according to Wired’s Threat Level.
It just continues to get worse, if such a thing is even possible. Holder now instituted changes that allow databases filled with U.S. citizens’ private information to be shared with foreign governments for their analysis as well.
Of course, this is all done under the guise of fighting terrorism, something which is patently absurd given that Americans are included in the databases even when they do not have the most tenuous of links to terrorism.
According to one former senior White House official quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the new changes are “breathtaking in scope.” This did not, however, stop counterterrorism officials from attempting to downplay the seriousness of this new development, which was first reported by the Journal.
“The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes,” claimed Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
These types of claims are regularly made, but one must realize that they are likely without much merit seeing as the Obama administration didn’t even have formal drone guidelines while they were killing a 16-year-old American and countless others abroad with unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
Currently, the NCTC’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) database houses data on over 500,000 people either suspected of terrorist activity or links to terrorism which includes “friends and families of suspects, and is the basis for the FBI’s terrorist watchlist,” according to Threat Level.
However, the new rules will likely make this database even larger since the NCTC can now gather any and all information they claim is “reasonably believed” to contain “terrorism information.”
This could include – and if the government’s history is any indicator, likely will – personal information ranging from financial forms submitted by individuals attempting to get federally-backed mortgages to health records of individuals who sought out mental or physical healthcare at government-run medical facilities, such as Veterans Administration hospitals.
Similar proposals but forth by the Bush administration in the past were shot down after a great deal of outcry, but it seems that the Obama administration is somehow immune to this type of scrutiny and condemnation.
Threat Level cites the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program which, in 2002, “proposed to scrutinize both government and private databases, but public outrage killed the program in essence, though not in spirit.”
“Although Congress de-funded the program in 2003, the NSA continued to collect and sift through immense amounts of data about who Americans spoke with, where they traveled and how they spent their money,” Threat Level adds.
While the Federal Privacy Act prohibits government entities from sharing private data for any purpose other than that for which it was originally obtained, this is actually only in principle.
In reality, government agencies regularly avoid this restriction “by posting a notice in the Federal Register, providing justification for the data request. Such notices are rarely seen or contested, however,” according to Threat Level.
It seems that the justification being used in an attempt to make this slightly more palatable to the public is the 2009 case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, better known as the underwear bomber.
However, we now know that this case – like another underwear bombing plot earlier this year along with countless other cases – was intimately linked to the government itself.
While they claim that systems like that now implemented in the NCTC are necessary because “Abdulmutallab wasn’t on the FBI watchlist, but the NCTC had received tips about him, and yet failed to search other government databases to connect dots that might have helped prevent him from boarding the plane,” we now know that his father made several calls about his son, all of which were apparently ignored.
Furthermore, eyewitness testimony presented in court and in media reports (see TV news report on the subject here) by practicing lawyer Kurt Haskell makes the entire government narrative look dubious at best.
As Haskell stated in court, “I became further saddened from this case, when Patrick Kennedy of the State Department during Congressional hearings, admitted that Umar was a known terrorist, was being followed, and the U.S. allowed him into the U.S. so that it could catch Umar’s accomplices.”
It just got worse when Haskell noted, “Michael Leiter of the National Counter terrorism Center admitted during these same hearings that intentionally letting terrorists into the U.S. was a frequent practice of the U.S. Government.”
So, is this something that should be remedied by giving the government even more power over the private information of Americans? I see no reason to believe that would help anything at all.
The NCTC claims that their counterterrorism activities were hindered because they “couldn’t look through the databases trolling for general ‘patterns,’” according to the Journal.
While former Department of Homeland Security Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan attempted to defend the rights of Americans by arguing that the new rules were a “sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” according to the ABA Journal.
This led to the conclusion that, as Threat Level put it, “every interaction a citizen would have with the government in the future would be ruled by the underlying question, is that person a terrorist?” Callahan ended up losing her battle and subsequently left her position after which she entered private practice.
So are these new powers necessary or justifiable? I seriously doubt it. Let us know what you think in the comments section of this post.
At the time her injury was publicized, it was speculated Clinton may not be well enough to testify this week in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack. The Associated Press has confirmed she will not testify this week as Chairman John Kerry issued a statement.
Originally, Clinton had been scheduled to appear on Thurs., Dec. 20, however, now it is being reported senior officials will appear in her place.
“Senator Kerry was relieved to hear that the secretary is on the mend, but he insisted that given her condition, she could not and should not appear on Thursday as previously planned, and that the nation’s best interests are served by the report and hearings proceeding as scheduled with senior officials appearing in her place,” said Jodi Seth, a spokeswoman for Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.).
According to the Huffington Post, Tom Nides and Bill Burns are the individuals that will testify in her place.
A statement was issued earlier today by Philippe Reines, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, which said:
While suffering from a stomach virus, Secretary Clinton became dehydrated and fainted, sustaining a concussion. She has been recovering at home and will continue to be monitored regularly by her doctors. At their recommendation, she will continue to work from home next week, staying in regular contact with Department and other officials. She is looking forward to being back in the office soon.
Clinton is currently in the process of stepping down from her position in the Obama Administration and will not continue on as Secretary of State. Sen. John Kerry is currently looking like the most probable individual to become the next U.S. Secretary of State.
