Mon May 27, 2013
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/05/27/305627/death-of-fbi-agents-creates-controversy/
Two well-trained Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents who were involved in the killing of a Boston bombing suspect have suspiciously died.
The FBI said in a statement that 41-year-old Christopher Lorek and 40-year-old Stephen Shaw were killed on May 17 as they fell out of a helicopter into water during a training mission off the coast of Virginia Beach.
US officials have blamed bad weather for the tragedy but some have questioned the credibility of the official account, considering it a cover-up.
They say the agents’ death adds to the suspicious death of a friend of the Boston bombing suspect, Ibragim Todashev, who was killed in his own apartment by an FBI agent.
Lorek and Shaw were part of the bureau's Critical Incident Response Group and were both members of the team investigating the Boston Marathon bombings in mid-April.
“You could always take it as one of an endless group of coincidences. We have so many [of them], when you look at the Boston investigation that these two individuals were involved in, everything had the stamp of CIA and FBI on it, from the first steps,” Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, told Press TV.
“What we have in the US is that we don’t report, we don’t have the least free press here. There are powerful dissident elements within our military, intelligence services and government that are under the control of... I’ll call them organized crime on a worldwide basis. If you refer to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of narcotics and trillions of dollars worth of financial crimes, it is simply organized crime, it is the understatement of all time,” he added.
The incident has reminded many of the dramatic death of top US commandos in Afghanistan, who lost their lives three months after their involvement in the alleged killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011.
On August 6, 2011, the helicopter of the Navy SEAL Team VI was shot down in Afghanistan.
The families of Navy SEAL members have blamed the government for the tragedy, saying the shooting down of the helicopter and the subsequent cover-up was planned by the government.
They said that US President Barack Obama turned the SEALs group into a Taliban target after the administration revealed they had conducted the bin Laden raid.
The families also claimed Taliban militants had received leaked information from the US government regarding the landing site of the commandos’ helicopter.
Moreover, the SEAL Team VI members were reportedly flown to the landing site with a Vietnam-era Chinook helicopter rather than with their customary Special Forces choppers.
“There is absolutely nothing that is credible about that; this is not a mission they would have been on, this is not a helicopter they would have been on,” Duff pointed out.
Showing posts with label CIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CIA. Show all posts
Friday, May 31, 2013
FBI Spiked Chechen Jihadi Investigation
Palast reports from Kazakhstan
Greg Palast from Vice.com
Friday, 3. May 2013
[Astana, Kazakhstan] Following the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, I received documents marked “SECRET” from the files of the FBI’s Washington field office. The information in those files will make you sick.
When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, I grabbed those FBI files – and a plane for Kazakhstan, bullying cameraman Rocco D into joining me. [Rocco, no fool, won’t let me print his full name.]
After we landed, word came that two Kazakh teens, friends of the bombers, had been arrested by Boston police and, yesterday, charged with hiding evidence of the bombers’ guilt.
Here in Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital, televisions everywhere run endless loops of the bombs going off at the Boston Marathon, the screams, the blood, the victims... and the questions.
And first question: How do a couple of wholesome Call-of-Duty-playing American kids get the idea they should murder and mangle their neighbors to avenge the Muslims of Chechnya—whom the victims probably couldn’t find on a map?
The second question: How did America’s trillion-dollar intelligence apparatchiks wave off warnings from Russia about one of the bomber’s connections to the Chechen militants?
The answer regarding the intelligence failure is, to paraphrase the famous journalist Yogi Berra: it’s amazing what you don’t see when you don’t look.
And that’s related to the how young Muslim-Americans came to kill other young Americans over Chechnya.
According to the secret memo, long before the Boston bombing, even before the September 11 attack, the FBI shut down an investigation of a group that ran a summer camp in Florida for America’s Muslim teenagers.
No, we shouldn’t be spying on Islamic campers. However, besides the usual swimming and soccer, these youngsters were encouraged to join the Chechen jihad. The kiddies were treated to videos praising Chechen bombers (who seized a school and hospital then killed their hostages). The group also produced an educational film praising, “that compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden”.
Hey, it was a family affair. Camp Jihad was run by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), whose operation just outside Washington DC was directed in the US by a man the FBI called “ABL” – Abdullah Binladden, Osama’s brother.
When the Kazakh friends of the Boston bombers were arrested, I went back to that “SECRET” memo. It fell into my hands in November 2001, just two months after that “compassionate young man” Osama killed thousands in my office building (I once worked at the World Trade Center).
Why would my own government spike an investigation that might have saved lives in New York in 2001 [and in Boston in 2013]?
My producer at BBC Television called the FBI. They did not deny the authenticity of the secret documents. Well, then, if the US government has evidence someone may be illegally recruiting killers for Chechnya (as well as the Bosnia war), why in the world would you shut down the investigation and hide the findings?
The official answer was even more chilling than the secret memo itself. The spokesman told us at BBC:
"There are lots of things only the intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know."?
Well, what else are we not supposed to know?
We got the answer on November 9, 2001, when I received a call at BBC's Newsnight desk in London from a US intelligence agent via a “clean” phone. The spook confirmed that, beginning as early as 1995, the CIA and other US spy agencies were told to stand down from investigating the bin Laden family in both the US and in France.
Several insiders repeated the same story: US agencies turned a blind eye to the bin Laden-terrorist-Chechen-jihad connection out of fear of exposing the US government’s half-assed—and half-illegal—support for these terrorists.
Our government gave ABL a pass (and safe passage back to Saudi Arabia) because Presidents Clinton and Bush were more than happy that our Saudi allies were sending jihadis to Afghanistan, then, via WAMY, helping Muslims to fight in Bosnia then, later, giving the Russians grief in Chechnya.
The problem is that terrorists are like pigeons – they come home to roost. As Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who provided crucial help to our investigation, told me, “It would be unseemly if [someone] were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA… What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.”
It’s utterly unlikely the young Boston bombers were on the CIA payroll, but it’s more than likely the elder brother’s connections here in Central Asia could be traced back to US-protected killers of years past.
The sleight-of-hand to keep public eyes off the US juicing Chechen terror is almost fun to watch. There’s surprisingly little official scrutiny of the media’s new heart-throb, Ruslan Tsarni, the bombers’ uncle. The Washington Post, praising Uncle Ruslan’s “I LOVE AMERICA” schtick, noted,
“[Ruslan’s] performance will be sewn into the rotation of TV news from here on out. Later, on MSNBC, Tom Ridge spoke highly of the message of ‘promise and hope’ sent by Tsarni.”
I would venture to guess that this was not the first time Mr. Ridge, first director of the US Department of Homeland Security, had heard Ruslan’s messages given Ruslan’s founding the Congress of Chechen International Organizations and his lucrative work here in Kazakhstan as a USAID contractor and oil industry lawyer.
There is zero—and I mean zero—evidence that Uncle Ruslan or the CIA hired these two sad-ass kids in Boston to blow up their neighbors. The point here is that the FBI is too concerned about making sure that “no one else ought to know” about our government plays footsie with terrorists—and too unconcerned about the blow-back that blows up in Boston.
Greg Palast investigated terror attacks on the US for BBC TV.
Readers can download Bush Family Fortunes, Palast’s BBC documentary, without charge, at www.gregpalast.com/bffdownload/
Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.
Greg Palast from Vice.com
Friday, 3. May 2013
[Astana, Kazakhstan] Following the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, I received documents marked “SECRET” from the files of the FBI’s Washington field office. The information in those files will make you sick.
When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, I grabbed those FBI files – and a plane for Kazakhstan, bullying cameraman Rocco D into joining me. [Rocco, no fool, won’t let me print his full name.]
After we landed, word came that two Kazakh teens, friends of the bombers, had been arrested by Boston police and, yesterday, charged with hiding evidence of the bombers’ guilt.
Here in Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital, televisions everywhere run endless loops of the bombs going off at the Boston Marathon, the screams, the blood, the victims... and the questions.
And first question: How do a couple of wholesome Call-of-Duty-playing American kids get the idea they should murder and mangle their neighbors to avenge the Muslims of Chechnya—whom the victims probably couldn’t find on a map?
The second question: How did America’s trillion-dollar intelligence apparatchiks wave off warnings from Russia about one of the bomber’s connections to the Chechen militants?
The answer regarding the intelligence failure is, to paraphrase the famous journalist Yogi Berra: it’s amazing what you don’t see when you don’t look.
And that’s related to the how young Muslim-Americans came to kill other young Americans over Chechnya.
According to the secret memo, long before the Boston bombing, even before the September 11 attack, the FBI shut down an investigation of a group that ran a summer camp in Florida for America’s Muslim teenagers.
No, we shouldn’t be spying on Islamic campers. However, besides the usual swimming and soccer, these youngsters were encouraged to join the Chechen jihad. The kiddies were treated to videos praising Chechen bombers (who seized a school and hospital then killed their hostages). The group also produced an educational film praising, “that compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden”.
Hey, it was a family affair. Camp Jihad was run by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), whose operation just outside Washington DC was directed in the US by a man the FBI called “ABL” – Abdullah Binladden, Osama’s brother.
When the Kazakh friends of the Boston bombers were arrested, I went back to that “SECRET” memo. It fell into my hands in November 2001, just two months after that “compassionate young man” Osama killed thousands in my office building (I once worked at the World Trade Center).
Why would my own government spike an investigation that might have saved lives in New York in 2001 [and in Boston in 2013]?
My producer at BBC Television called the FBI. They did not deny the authenticity of the secret documents. Well, then, if the US government has evidence someone may be illegally recruiting killers for Chechnya (as well as the Bosnia war), why in the world would you shut down the investigation and hide the findings?
The official answer was even more chilling than the secret memo itself. The spokesman told us at BBC:
"There are lots of things only the intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know."?
Well, what else are we not supposed to know?
We got the answer on November 9, 2001, when I received a call at BBC's Newsnight desk in London from a US intelligence agent via a “clean” phone. The spook confirmed that, beginning as early as 1995, the CIA and other US spy agencies were told to stand down from investigating the bin Laden family in both the US and in France.
Several insiders repeated the same story: US agencies turned a blind eye to the bin Laden-terrorist-Chechen-jihad connection out of fear of exposing the US government’s half-assed—and half-illegal—support for these terrorists.
Our government gave ABL a pass (and safe passage back to Saudi Arabia) because Presidents Clinton and Bush were more than happy that our Saudi allies were sending jihadis to Afghanistan, then, via WAMY, helping Muslims to fight in Bosnia then, later, giving the Russians grief in Chechnya.
The problem is that terrorists are like pigeons – they come home to roost. As Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who provided crucial help to our investigation, told me, “It would be unseemly if [someone] were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA… What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.”
It’s utterly unlikely the young Boston bombers were on the CIA payroll, but it’s more than likely the elder brother’s connections here in Central Asia could be traced back to US-protected killers of years past.
The sleight-of-hand to keep public eyes off the US juicing Chechen terror is almost fun to watch. There’s surprisingly little official scrutiny of the media’s new heart-throb, Ruslan Tsarni, the bombers’ uncle. The Washington Post, praising Uncle Ruslan’s “I LOVE AMERICA” schtick, noted,
“[Ruslan’s] performance will be sewn into the rotation of TV news from here on out. Later, on MSNBC, Tom Ridge spoke highly of the message of ‘promise and hope’ sent by Tsarni.”
I would venture to guess that this was not the first time Mr. Ridge, first director of the US Department of Homeland Security, had heard Ruslan’s messages given Ruslan’s founding the Congress of Chechen International Organizations and his lucrative work here in Kazakhstan as a USAID contractor and oil industry lawyer.
There is zero—and I mean zero—evidence that Uncle Ruslan or the CIA hired these two sad-ass kids in Boston to blow up their neighbors. The point here is that the FBI is too concerned about making sure that “no one else ought to know” about our government plays footsie with terrorists—and too unconcerned about the blow-back that blows up in Boston.
Greg Palast investigated terror attacks on the US for BBC TV.
Readers can download Bush Family Fortunes, Palast’s BBC documentary, without charge, at www.gregpalast.com/bffdownload/
Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.
Was Boston Bombers ‘Uncle Ruslan’ with the CIA?
Posted on April 22, 2013 by Daniel Hopsicker
http://www.madcowprod.com/2013/04/22/was-boston-bombers-uncle-ruslan-with-the-cia/
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.
"Can't tell your Oligarchs without a scorecard"
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 to strategically-placed vomitoriums (alas, not true) strewn about the mansion grounds.
Enter "Uncle Ruslan"
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.”
A Big Big Sky's the Limit
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 appointment stated:
“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.
Big Sky was on somebody's watch list
“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.
A "connected" family?
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.
Those of you who read the stories published here know their value better than I can describe.
The investigative reporting on the impact of drug money on US political life and our economy found here are taboo subjects in the mainstream media. Without your help the effort cannot continue.
Order our books and documentaries, and donate what you can!
About Daniel Hopsicker
Daniel Hopsicker is an investigative journalist dubious about the self-serving assertion of U.S. officials that there are no American Drug Lords.
http://www.madcowprod.com/2013/04/22/was-boston-bombers-uncle-ruslan-with-the-cia/
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.
"Can't tell your Oligarchs without a scorecard"
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 to strategically-placed vomitoriums (alas, not true) strewn about the mansion grounds.
Enter "Uncle Ruslan"
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.”
A Big Big Sky's the Limit
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 appointment stated:
“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.
Big Sky was on somebody's watch list
“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.
A "connected" family?
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.
Those of you who read the stories published here know their value better than I can describe.
The investigative reporting on the impact of drug money on US political life and our economy found here are taboo subjects in the mainstream media. Without your help the effort cannot continue.
Order our books and documentaries, and donate what you can!
About Daniel Hopsicker
Daniel Hopsicker is an investigative journalist dubious about the self-serving assertion of U.S. officials that there are no American Drug Lords.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
James Holmes, and how the CIA hid the MKULTRA mind-control program
James Holmes, and how the CIA hid the MKULTRA mind-control program
Jon Rappoport
March 20, 2013
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/james-holmes-and-how-the-cia-hid-their-mkultra-mind-control-program/
Back in the early 1990s, I interviewed John Marks, author of Search for the Manchurian Candidate. This was the book that exposed the existence of the infamous CIA MKULTRA program.
I bring up this interview now, because James Holmes may well be on the receiving end of MKULTRA, as his lawyers try to navigate an insanity plea in the Aurora massacre case.
Holmes will be given “truth drugs” to “refresh his memory” about his state of mind at the time of the killings. If that sounds absurd, it is. I wrote a piece the other day detailing how such drugs are often given to produce extreme terror in patients. In other words, the drugs don’t elicit the truth. They’re used as threats to force the patient/suspect to confess to whatever his torturers want him to confess to.
John Marks related the following facts to me. He had filed many Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to the CIA for documents relating to their mind-control program. He got nothing back.
Finally, as if to play a joke on him, someone at the CIA sent Marks 10 boxes of financial and accounting records. The attitude was, “Here, see what you can do with this.”
I’ve seen some of those records. They’re very boring reading.
But Marks went through them, and lo and behold, he found he could piece together MKULTRA projects, based on the funding data.
Eventually, he assembled enough information to begin naming names. He conducted interviews. The shape of MKULTRA swam into view. And so he wrote his book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate.
He told me that three important books had been written about MKULTRA, and they all stemmed from those 10 boxes of CIA financial records. There was his own book; Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart; and The Mind Manipulators by Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton.
Marks continued to press the CIA for more MKULTRA information. He explained to me what then happened. A CIA official told him the following: in 1962, after ten years of mind-control experiments, the whole program had been shifted over to another internal CIA department, the Office of Research and Development (ORD).
The ORD had a hundred boxes of information on their MKULTRA work, and there was no way under the sun, Marks was told, that he was ever going to get his hands on any of that. It was over. It didn’t matter how many FOIA requests Marks filed. He was done. The door was shut. Goodbye.
The CIA went darker than it ever had before. No leaks of any kind would be permitted.
In case there is any doubt about it, the idea of relying on the CIA to admit what it has done in the mind-control area, what it is doing, and what it will do should be put to bed by John Mark’s statements. The CIA always has been, and will continue to be, a rogue agency beyond the reach of the law.
Since it is the agency with the most experience using “truth drugs,” when James Holmes is put on ice at a Colorado mental hospital, to go through what the judge has permitted—a “narcoanalytic review” to test Holmes’ state of mind—it’s probable that CIA people will be on hand to advise.
The Colorado in-house psychiatrists know nothing about the use of truth drugs. They especially don’t know how to employ those drugs to produce just enough terror in the patient to get him to admit to Anything.
To give you an idea of how far the CIA, the US military, and its allied academics will go in MKULTRA “research,” here is what I wrote in 1995 about several human experiments. My information was based on the three key books I mentioned above, as well as Martin Lee’s classic, Acid Dreams:
“Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University, as early as 1955, working for the Army, gave patients LSD while he had electrodes implanted deep inside their brains.”
“In the mid-1950’s, Paul Hoch, M.D., a man who would become Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York, then a laborer in the field for the CIA, gave a ‘pseudoneurotic schizophrenic’ patient mescaline. The patient had a not-unfamiliar heaven-and-hell journey on the compound. But Hoch followed this up with a transorbital leucotomy [aka lobotomy]… Hoch also gave a patient LSD, and a local anesthetic, and then proceeded to remove pieces of cerebral cortex, asking at various moments whether the patient’s perceptions were changing.”
People need to understand how the history of mind control and psychiatry are interwoven, and how the madmen and murderers within these “professions” are content to use torture “in the name of science.”
One of the two bonuses in THE MATRIX REVEALED is my complete 18-lesson course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS. This is a new way to teach logic, the subject that has been missing from schools for decades.
From a current naturalnews article by Dr. Peter Breggin (“Never again! The real history of psychiatry”) we get insight into one aspect of that history:
“[Before World War 2, in America], organized psychiatry had been sterilizing tens of thousands of Americans. For a time in California, you couldn’t be discharged from a state hospital unless you were sterilized. In Virginia the retarded were targeted. American advocates of sterilization went to Berlin to help the Nazis plan their sterilization program. These Americans reassured the Germans that they would meet no opposition from America in sterilizing their mentally and physically ‘unfit’ citizens.
“While the murder of mental patients was going full swing in Germany, knowledgeable American psychiatrists and neurologists didn’t want to be left out. In 1942, the American Psychiatric Association held a debate about whether to sterilize or to murder low IQ ‘retarded’ children when they reached the age of five. Those were the only two alternatives in the debate: sterilization or death.
“After the debate, the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association published an editorial in which it chose sides in favor of murder (‘Euthanasia’ in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1942, volume 99, pp. 141-143). It said psychiatrists would have to muster their psychological skills to keep parents from feeling guilty about agreeing to have their children killed.”
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Chavez: Another CIA assassination victim?
Dr. Kevin Barrett
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/03/06/292131/was-hugo-chavez-murdered-by-the-cia
The Venezuelan president himself, before he died yesterday, wondered aloud whether the US government - or the banksters who own it - gave him, and its other leading Latin American enemies, cancer.
A little over a year ago, Chavez went on Venezuelan national radio and said: “I don’t know but… it is very odd that we have seen Lugo affected by cancer, Dilma when she was a candidate, me, going into an election year, not long ago Lula and now Cristina… It is very hard to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some leaders in Latin America. It’s at the very least strange, very strange.”
Strange indeed… so strange that if you think Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Paraguayan Fernando Lugo, and former Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - Latin America’s top anti-US empire leaders - all just happened to contract cancer around the same time by sheer chance, you must be some kind of crazy coincidence theorist.
Am I 100% certain that the CIA killed Hugo Chavez? Absolutely not.
It could have been non-governmental assassins working for the bankers.
But any way you slice it, the masters of the US empire are undoubtedly responsible for giving Chavez and other Latin American leaders cancer. How do we know that? Just examine the Empire’s track record.
Fidel Castro’s bodyguard, Fabian Escalante, estimates that the CIA attempted to kill the Cuban president an astonishing 638 times. The CIA’s methods included exploding cigars, biological warfare agents painted on Castro’s diving suit, deadly pills, toxic bacteria in coffee, an exploding speaker’s podium, snipers, poison-wielding female friends, and explosive underwater sea shells.
The CIA’s assassination attempts against Castro were like a Tom and Jerry cartoon, with the CIA as the murderously inept cat, and the Cuban president as a clever and very lucky mouse. Some might even argue that Castro’s survival, in the face of 638 assassination attempts by the world’s greatest power, is evidence that El Presidente’s communist atheism was incorrect, and that God, or at least a guardian angel, must have been watching over “Infidel Castro” all along.
Theology aside, the CIA’s endless attempts on Castro’s life provide ample evidence that US authorities will stop at nothing in their efforts to murder their Latin American enemies.
John Perkins, in his bestselling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, supplies more evidence that the bankers that own the US government routinely murder heads of state, using private assassins as well as CIA killers.
Perkins, during his career as an “economic hit man,” gained first-hand knowledge about how the big international bankers maintain their empire in Latin America and elsewhere. Perkins’ job was to visit leaders of foreign countries and convince them to accept loans that could never be paid back. Why? The bankers want to force these nations into debt slavery. When the country goes bankrupt, the bankers seize the nation’s natural resources and establish complete control over its government and economy.
Perkins would meet with a targeted nation’s leader and say: “I have a fist-full of hundred dollar bills in one hand, and a bullet in the other. Which do you want?” If the leader accepted the loans, thereby enslaving his country, he got the payoff. If he angrily chased Perkins out of his office, the bankers would call in the “asteroids” to assassinate the uncooperative head of state.
The “asteroids” are the world’s most expensive and accomplished professional killers. They work on contract - sometimes to the CIA, sometimes to the bankers, and sometimes to wealthy private individuals. And though their specialty is causing plane crashes, they are capable of killing people, including heads of state, in any number of ways.
This isn’t just speculation. John Perkins actually knows some of these CIA-linked professional killers personally. And he has testified about their murders of Latin American leaders. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is dedicated to Perkins’ murdered friends Gen. Torrijos of Panama and President Jaime Roldos of Ecuador. Both were killed by CIA-linked “asteroids” in engineered plane crashes.
Do CIA-linked killers sometimes induce cancer in their victims? Apparently they do. One notable victim: Jack Ruby (née Jack Rubenstein), a mobster who was himself a professional killer, and whose last hit was the choreographed murder of JFK-assassination patsy Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department. Ruby begged to be taken to Washington to tell the real story of the JFK murder, but instead died in prison, of a sudden and mysterious cancer, before he could reveal what he knew.
Have the CIA-bankster “asteroids” ever tried to kill Latin American leaders with cancer? The answer is an unequivocal “yes.”
Edward Haslam’s book Dr. Mary’s Monkey proves what JFK assassination prosecutor Jim Garrison had earlier alleged: Child-molesting CIA agent David Ferrie, one of President Kennedy’s killers, had experimented extensively with cancer-causing viruses for the CIA in his huge home laboratory. The purpose: To give Fidel Castro and other Latin American leaders cancer. (Ferrie himself was killed by the CIA shortly before he was scheduled to testify in court about his role in the JFK assassination.)
To summarize: We know that the bankers who own the US government routinely try to kill any Latin American leader who refuses to be their puppet. We know that they have mounted thousands of assassination attempts against Latin American leaders, including more than 600 against Castro alone. We know that they have been experimenting with cancer viruses, and killing people with cancer, since the 1960s.
So if you think Hugo Chavez died a natural death, I am afraid that you are terminally naïve.
Scoundrels Pillory Chavez Before He's Buried
Media Scoundrels Pillory Chavez Before He's Buried
By Stephen Lendman
His passing made no difference. Media scoundrels don't quit. They spent 14 years vilifying him. They did it unfairly. They haven't stopped.
They're called scoundrels for good reason. They violate fundamental journalistic ethics. They lie for power. They turn truth on its head.
They substitute managed news misinformation. They support wealth, power, privilege and dominance. They're in bed with wrong over right.
They spurn rule of law principles and democratic values. They're well paid to do so. They betray readers and viewers. They do so unconscionably. They don't give a damn, and it shows.
Why anyone follows them they'll have to explain. Tune them out. Ignore their publications. Choose reliable alternative sources.
Get informed. Stay that way. Why settle for manipulated rubbish. Real news, information and analysis is readily available. Use it daily. Know what matters most.
On March 5, Chavez passed. An era went with him. Venezuelans owe him much. They won't forget.
He transformed an oligarch-run nation into a model participatory democracy. America's sham one pales by comparison. Venezuelans get the real thing and much more.
They deplore what used to be. They won't tolerate going back. Chavismo lives! Bolivarianism is policy. Venezuelans won't let it die. It's too important to preserve. Not according to media scoundrels.
On March 5, The New York Times claimed Venezuela today is "bitterly divided." It's "in the grip of a political crisis." It grew "more acute" in recent weeks.
Times writer William Neuman lied. He's paid to do so. Venezuelans overwhelmingly support Chavismo. His death changes nothing.
Dallas Morning News editor Sharon Grigs headlined "Chavez's death: Now Venezuela can reclaim its lost democracy." She wouldn't recognize the real thing if it bit her on the rump.
The Washington Post did no better. It called Chavez "polarizing." An "institutional crisis" exists.
Other media scoundrels piled on. They pillory what deserves praise. Chavez institutionalized what won't change. Venezuelans won't tolerate their ugly past. They'll challenge dark forces to prevent it.
The Washington Times said "Chavistas' mourn dictator." White House/Capitol Hill reaction ranged from "cautious optimism" to "good riddance."
Obama vilified Chavez often. He scorned him unconscionably. He lied repeatedly. He's a serial liar.
He now says America "reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interests in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government."
He doesn't give a damn about ordinary Venezuelans. He never did and doesn't now.
Washington tolerates no independent leaders. Chavez was marked for removal. CIA rogues likely killed him. Perhaps he was poisoned or exposed to cancer causing elements.
Israel used polonium to murder Arafat. Perhaps something similar caused Chavez's death. It wouldn't be the first time America assassinated a foreign leader. It won't be the last. Its rap sheet includes many.
BBC said "Iconic Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez dies." He leaves behind an "economic muddle."
He achieved impressive economic growth and prosperity. Britain's government pales by comparison. It's lawless, corrupt, dysfunctional, and hugely unequal. BBC's its propaganda mouthpiece. Don't expect it to explain.
Media scoundrels attacked Chavez. They did so before he's buried. His state funeral is Friday. Have they no shame? They don't now and never did.
Murdoch's the worst of a bad bunch. His world reflects demagoguery, propaganda, predatory capitalism, warmongering and sleaze.
Journalist Mike Royko's (1932 - 1997) assessment bears repeating. "(N)o self-respecting fish would (want to) be wrapped in a Murdoch paper."
"His goal (isn't) journalism." It's bottom line priorities. It's "vast power, political power." He wields it unscrupulously. He's a world class predator.
He uses deception, intimidation, and bullying. He does so to get his way. He hires likeminded scoundrels. Do it his way or work elsewhere.
No middle ground is permissible. No independent journalists get hired. Truth tellers need not apply. No honest brokers wanted. No telling it like it is.
On March 5, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal headlined "Hugo Chavez: The lesson is to beware the rule of charismatic demagogues."
In December 1998, Venezuelans elected him. A dark era ended. Chavez made things "worse," said the Journal. It lied saying so.
"By 1998, the the Soviet Union was a memory, Latin American countries from Mexico to Chile were successfully adopting free-market policies, and Chavez's friend and role model - Cuba's Fidel Castro - was a discredited dinosaur."
Castro's a model leader. He transformed Cuba responsibly. He did so from police state harshness/casino/brothel corruption into an equitable socialist state.
He was Chavez's mentor and friend. Chavez called him his father and role model. They bonded. They stayed close until until his death.
Not according to WSJThink. "Chavez showed that it's possible to run against the tides of history, at least for a while, and at least if you happen to get lucky with an oil revenue bonanza."
Chavez used Venezuela's oil wealth "to purchase political support of Venezuela's poor, the army and a loyal nouveau riche."
"It also allowed him to become a classic petro-dictator."
"In 1999 he revised the Venezuelan constitution to give him expanded powers."
"He used a constitutional assembly under his control to appoint a chavista Supreme Court."
"He stripped independent TV and radio stations of their licenses and intimidated reporters with draconian libel laws."
Fact check
Murdoch lies need challenging. They're over-the-top and unconscionable.
Chavez used Venezuela's oil wealth responsibly. Everyone benefitted. Populism replaced neoliberal harshness.
Bolivarianism prioritizes vital needs. Living standards improved remarkably. Disadvantaged Venezuelans benefitted most.
Child mortality fell from 20 per 1,000 to 13. Unemployment dropped from 14.5% to 6.4%.
Income inequality is Latin America's lowest. Poverty was cut in half. Extreme poverty fell over 70%. Economic growth in 2011 was 4.8%. In 2012, it was 5.6%. Forecasts estimate 6% in 2013.
Hundreds of thousands of new homes were built. Commerce grew 9.2%. Communications advanced 7.2%. Manufacturing increased 2.1%. Oil sector production increased.
Growth created jobs. Millions got free healthcare and education. They did so for the first time. Pension eligibility tripled.
Pre-Chavez years were disastrous." From 1980 - 1998, per capita income fell. Chavez turned disaster into success. Venezuela's future looks promising. Give Chavez the credit he deserves.
Corporate owners dominate Venezuela's media. Censorship doesn't exist. Short of advocating sedition or treason, they're free to publish or air what they wish. They take full advantage. They vilify populist reform. They pilloried Chavez for institutionalizing it.
"Though elections were held on schedule, (Chavez) made sure to tilt the playing field….Public workers risked being fired if they voted against him. It was the sort of election only Jimmy Carter could bless."
Fact check
Carter Center representatives monitor Venezuelan elections. Jimmy Carter calls its process "the best in the world." He does for good reason. It's open, free and fair.
It shames America's sham process. Duopoly power runs things. Republicans and Democrats replicate each other. They're two sides of the same coin.
They're beholden to monied interests. They sold their souls for power.
People have no say. Voters get the best democracy money can buy. Neoliberal harshness, permanent wars, and police state repression follow.
Venezuelan democracy is genuine. Voters need no persuasion. Chavez instituted the real thing. Venezuelans want it no other way.
Expect what he began to continue. It's hardwired to stay. It's part of Venezuelan culture. It won't fade and die.
The Journal claims life for Venezuela's "bec(ame) worse." It lied saying so. It's never been better in generations.
"Chavez made his mark on the world stage by forging alliances with Bashar Assad in Syria and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, giving sanctuary to Colombia's narco-terrorist FARC movement, providing the Castro regime with free oil, and inveighing loudly against the United States."
"He succeeded in spawning political imitators in Ecuador and Bolivia."
Chavez governed responsibly. He allied with other independent leaders. He prioritized right over wrong. Journal editors can't tolerate his success. He represented the threat of a good example.
Venezuelans "have to fight to reclaim the democracy they once enjoyed….Let's hope Venezuelans seize the chance to bury the tragic legacy of Chavismo alongside its author's corpse."
Chavismo lives. Bolivarianism delivered democracy. Venezuelans got what they never had. They mourn their great loss.
They want Chavez buried alongside Bolivar. He's in Venezuela’s Panteon Nacional (Temple of all the Gods). It lies on Caracas' northern edge.
Its central nave is dedicated to Bolivar. It's adorned with his bronze sarcophagus and paintings reflecting his life. In 1883, an impressive crystal chandelier was installed. It was done on the centennial of his birth.
Expect Chavez be interned there. He belongs nowhere else. Both leaders stood tall. They supported what's right. Venezuelans won't ever forget.
America never had anyone like them. Its deplorable government reflects it. Today it's worse than ever.
It's corporatist, soulless, lawless, belligerent, and repressive. It's a hair's breath from tyranny. Don't explain media scoundrels to explain.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled "Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity."
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
http://www.dailycensored.com/media-scoundrels-pillory-chavez-before-hes-buried/
Monday, March 4, 2013
CIA Emails Reveal Winners and Losers
CIA Emails Reveal Winners and Losers of National Security Access
Full Article:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/08/cia-emails-reveal-winners-and-losers-national-security-access/56297/
Excerpt:
For everyone who didn't get special access to information about the Osama bin Laden raid, today was a little bit discouraging as new e-mails revealed CIA officials gushing over Hollywood filmakers at the expense of trained reporters and documentarians.
The filmmakers given top notch access have been known for months: Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the team behind the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker and the upcoming film on the mission to kill bin Laden Zero Dark Thirty. But we never got to see who was vying with them for access to details on the bin Laden raid, a group that includes former New York Times reporter Howard Blum, the History Channel and The BBC. Typically, details about deliberations over who wins and who loses in the competitive game of CIA access remains a secret, but thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, those conversations became public today.
From the outset, CIA, White House, and Pentagon officials began discussing the various Osama bin Laden projects with a slight degree of favoritism toward Bigelow and Boal's film. But pretty quickly the Oscar-winning pair blew away the competition and a highly-cordial subject-filmmaker relationship ensued.
Naomi Wolf Notes:
The Mark Boal/Kathryn Bigelow post is a propos. Am I the only one who is noticing that, if the Senate investigation finds that Boal and Bigelow were given classified info -- and I can tell you from my own interviews with the detainees' lawyers, the torture methods of detainees are CLASSIFIED -- then they are potentially guilty of exactly what Assange and Manning are accused of? In other words, if Assange is unable to leave the Ecuadorean embassy -- because he disclosed classified information -- and Manning is in solitary, stripped naked and denied his glasses -- because he released classified information -- then why are Bigelow and Boal -- if they disclosed classified information -- not facing the same threats of prosecution? Conversely, if we are being consistent (and of course best to NOT prosecute people for this 'crime', which was not prosecuted for decades before Obama went crazy with prosecutions) we keep Bigelow and Boal -- and Assange and Manning -- out of jail/away from threats of prosecution.
If classified info turns out to have been involved, then there is no real legal difference between Zero Dark Thirty and Wikileaks -- especially if the filmmakers keep insisting on 'authenticity' and 'true events'.
Unless the only difference between who is in prison in solitary, and who gets to go in nice clothes to film screenings, is whether the classified info exposes the US government to criticism, or else flatters its narrative.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Brennan chosen by Barack Obama as CIA head
John Brennan chosen by Barack Obama as new CIA head
The mastermind of Barack Obama's secret drone war was chosen on Monday to lead the CIA and "relentlessly" extend its controversial campaign against al-Qaeda into the president's second term.
Jon Swaine, Washington
07 Jan 2013
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9786434/John-Brennan-chosen-by-Barack-Obama-as-new-CIA-head.html
John Brennan, Mr Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, was nominated as the intelligence agency's next director two months after David Petraeus resigned over an extramarital affair with his biographer.
He has played a key role in expanding a programme of air strikes by unmanned drones on suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, which has killed more than 2,000 people.
Accepting the nomination in a speech at the White House, Mr Brennan, 57, said: "I will make it my mission to ensure the CIA has the tools it needs to keep our country safe."
He paid tribute to CIA successes that would never be known outside the "hallowed halls of Langley and the White House". Many human rights campaigners say that the drone campaign is illegal.
Mr Obama said Mr Brennan would "remain relentless" in pursuing al-Qaeda.
Praising him as a tireless public servant who obsesses about US security, he added: "I'm not sure he has slept in four years".
White House colleagues have described him as "a priest whose blessing has become indispensable" to the president in their selection of targets for drone strikes from a so-called "kill list".
A career spy who served as CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, Mr Brennan was also accused of being complicit in the agency's torture of terror suspects under former president George W. Bush.
Controversy over his involvement in the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" is believed to have prevented Mr Obama from nominating Mr Brennan to lead the CIA after his 2008 election win.
He promised to ensure the work of the CIA "always reflects the liberties, the freedoms, and the values that we all hold dear".
Mr Obama also confirmed his nomination of Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator whose foreign policy stances have attracted criticism from former colleagues, as his next defence secretary.
If confirmed by the Senate, the 66-year-old would be the first combat veteran of the Vietnam War, and the first veteran of enlisted rank, to head the defence department.
Hailing him as an "American patriot" who "bears the scars and the shrapnel of battles fought in our name", Mr Obama said: "Chuck knows that war is not an abstraction".
The selection of Mr Hagel, who once criticised intimidation of US politicians by "the Jewish lobby" has been sharply criticised as an insult to Israel that could jeopardise a key alliance.
Mr Obama on Monday praised Mr Hagel's "willingness to speak his mind", stating that he "understands that America stands strongest when we stand with allies and with friends".
Lindsey Graham, a Republican Senator for South Carolina, has said Mr Hagel "would be the most antagonistic secretary of defence towards the state of Israel in our nation's history".
Mr Hagel has also been criticised for opposing additional unilateral sanctions on Iran and for urging Israel's government to engage in direct talks with Hamas, the militant Islamic group.
He pledged yesterday to give Mr Obama his "honest and most informed counsel".
Both nominees must be confirmed in votes by the US Senate, where Mr Obama's Democrats hold a majority. So far Ted Cruz, a Texas senator, has promised to vote against Mr Hagel's appointment.
Coming soon after the selection of Senator John Kerry to replace Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State, the nominations also prompted accusations that Mr Obama had failed to make his Cabinet diverse.
Tim Miller, a Republican spokesman, said Mr Obama's promotion of "three old white guys" who backed the war in Iraq made a mockery of his re-election campaign slogan, which he restyled as "Forward-ish".
Mr Brennan was also blamed for a series of erroneous briefings to the media following the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, which angered the then-defence secretary Robert Gates.
After Mr Brennan said bin Laden had been killed while using one of his wives as a shield, officials later said that this was untrue.
A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty
A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty's apology for torture
By peddling the lie that CIA detentions led to Bin Laden's killing, you have become a Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture
Naomi Wolf
Friday 4 January 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/letter-kathryn-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty
The Hurt Locker was a beautiful, brave film; many young women in film were inspired as they watched you become the first woman ever to win an Oscar for directing. But with Zero Dark Thirty, you have attained a different kind of distinction.
Your film Zero Dark Thirty is a huge hit here. But in falsely justifying, in scene after scene, the torture of detainees in "the global war on terror", Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously-shot, two-hour ad for keeping intelligence agents who committed crimes against Guantánamo prisoners out of jail. It makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other people based on their race – something that has historical precedent.
Your film claims, in many scenes, that CIA torture was redeemed by the "information" it "secured", information that, according to your script, led to Bin Laden's capture. This narrative is a form of manufacture of innocence to mask a great crime: what your script blithely calls "the detainee program".
What led to this amoral compromising of your film-making?
Could some of the seduction be financing? It is very hard to get a film without a pro-military message, such as The Hurt Locker, funded and financed. But according to sources in the film industry, the more pro-military your message is, the more kinds of help you currently can get: from personnel, to sets, to technology – a point I made in my argument about the recent militarized Katy Perry video.
It seems implausible that scenes such as those involving two top-secret, futuristic helicopters could be made without Pentagon help, for example. If the film received that kind of undisclosed, in-kind support from the defense department, then that would free up million of dollars for the gigantic ad campaign that a film like this needs to compete to win audience.
This also sets a dangerous precedent: we can be sure, with the "propaganda amendment" of the 2013 NDAA, just signed into law by the president, that the future will hold much more overt corruption of Hollywood and the rest of US pop culture. This amendment legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.
Then, there is the James Frey factor. You claim that your film is "based on real events", and in interviews, you insist that it is a mixture of fact and fiction, "part documentary". "Real", "true", and even "documentary", are big and important words. By claiming such terms, you generate media and sales traction – on a mendacious basis. There are filmmakers who work very hard to produce films that are actually "based on real events": they are called documentarians. Alex Gibney, in Taxi to the Dark Side, and Rory Kennedy, in Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, have both produced true and sourceable documentary films about what your script blithely calls "the detainee program" – that is, the regime of torture to generate false confessions at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib – which your script claims led straight to Bin Laden.
Fine, fellow reporter: produce your sources. Provide your evidence that torture produced lifesaving – or any – worthwhile intelligence.
But you can't present evidence for this claim. Because it does not exist.
Five decades of research, cited in the 2008 documentary The End of America, confirm that torture does not work. Robert Fisk provides another summary of that categorical conclusion. And this 2011 account from Human Rights First rebuts the very premise of Zero Dark Thirty.
Your actors complain about detainees' representation by lawyers – suggesting that these do-gooders in suits endanger the rest of us. I have been to see your "detainee program" firsthand. The prisoners, whom your film describes as being "lawyered up", meet with those lawyers in rooms that are wired for sound; yet, those lawyers can't tell the world what happened to their clients – because the descriptions of the very torture these men endured are classified.
I have seen the room where the military tribunal takes the "testimony" from people swept up in a program that gave $5,000 bounties to desperately poor Afghanis to incentivize their turning-in innocent neighbors. The chairs have shackles to the floor, and are placed in twos, so that one prisoner can be threatened to make him falsely condemn the second.
I have seen the expensive video system in the courtroom where – though Guantánamo spokesmen have told the world's press since its opening that witnesses' accounts are brought in "whenever reasonable" – the monitor on the system has never been turned on once: a monitor that could actually let someone in Pakistan testify to say, "hey, that is the wrong guy". (By the way, you left out the scene where the CIA dude sodomizes the wrong guy: Khaled el-Masri, "the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a similar name to a militant named Khaled al-Masri.")
In a time of darkness in America, you are being feted by Hollywood, and hailed by major media. But to me, the path your career has now taken reminds of no one so much as that other female film pioneer who became, eventually, an apologist for evil: Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will, which glorified Nazi military power, was a massive hit in Germany. Riefenstahl was the first female film director to be hailed worldwide.
It may seem extreme to make comparison with this other great, but profoundly compromised film-maker, but there are real echoes. When Riefenstahl began to glamorize the National Socialists, in the early 1930s, the Nazis' worst atrocities had not yet begun; yet abusive detention camps had already been opened to house political dissidents beyond the rule of law – the equivalent of today's Guantánamo, Bagram base, and other unnameable CIA "black sites". And Riefenstahl was lionised by the German elites and acclaimed for her propaganda on behalf of Hitler's regime.
But the world changed. The ugliness of what she did could not, over time, be hidden. Americans, too, will wake up and see through Zero Dark Thirty's apologia for the regime's standard lies that this brutality is somehow necessary. When that happens, the same community that now applauds you will recoil.
Like Riefenstahl, you are a great artist. But now you will be remembered forever as torture's handmaiden.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
ZERO CONSCIENCE IN “ZERO DARK THIRTY”
Jane Mayer
December 14, 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/torture-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty.html
At the same time that the European Court of Human Rights has issued a historic ruling condemning the C.I.A.’s treatment of a terror suspect during the Bush years as “torture,” a Hollywood movie about the agency’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, “Zero Dark Thirty”—whose creators say that they didn’t want to “judge” the interrogation program—appears headed for Oscar nominations. Can torture really be turned into morally neutral entertainment?
“Zero Dark Thirty,” which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration’s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.’s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces. The C.I.A.’s actions convulsed the national-security community, leading to a crisis of conscience inside the top ranks of the U.S. government. The debate echoed the moral seriousness of the political dilemma once posed by slavery, a subject that is brilliantly evoked in Steven Spielberg’s new film, “Lincoln”; by contrast, the director of “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow, milks the U.S. torture program for drama while sidestepping the political and ethical debate that it provoked. In her hands, the hunt for bin Laden is essentially a police procedural, devoid of moral context. If she were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.
After some critics called Bigelow a torture apologist, she defended the fairness and historical accuracy of her movie. “The film doesn’t have an agenda, and it doesn’t judge. I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience,” she told my New Yorker colleague Dexter Filkins, who interviewed her for a Talk of the Town piece. At a Los Angeles press junket, the film’s screenwriter, Mark Boal, complained that critics were “mischaracterizing” the torture sequences: “I understand that those scenes are graphic and unsparing and unsentimental. But I think that what the film does over the course of two hours is show the complexity of the debate.” His point was that because the film shows multiple approaches to intelligence gathering, of which torture is only one tactic, and because the torture isn’t shown as always producing correct or instant leads, it offers a nuanced answer to the question of whether torture works.
But whether torture “worked” was far from the most important question about its use. I’ve seen the film and, as much as I admired Bigelow’s Oscar-winning picture “The Hurt Locker,” I think that this time, by ignoring the full weight of the dark history of torture, her work falls disturbingly short. To begin with, despite Boal’s contentions, “Zero Dark Thirty” does not capture the complexity of the debate about America’s brutal detention program. It doesn’t include a single scene in which torture is questioned, even though the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue—again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the F.B.I., the military, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. itself, which eventually abandoned waterboarding because it feared, correctly, that the act constituted a war crime. None of this ethical drama seems to interest Bigelow.
To establish a baseline of moral awareness, she shows her heroine—a C.I.A. counterterrorism officer called Maya, played by Jessica Chastain—delicately wincing as she hands the more muscled interrogators a pitcher of water with which to waterboard a detainee. Maya is also shown standing mutely by when the detainee is strung up by ropes, stripped naked, and forced to crawl in a dog collar. In reality, when the C.I.A. first subjected a detainee to incarceration in a coffin-size “confinement box,” as is shown in the movie, an F.B.I. agent present at the scene threw a fit, warned the C.I.A. contractor proposing the plan that it was illegal, counterproductive, and reprehensible. The fight went all the way to the top of the Bush Administration. Bigelow airbrushes out this showdown, as she does virtually the entire debate during the Bush years about the treatment of detainees.
The lone anti-torture voice shown in the film is a split-second news clip of President Barack Obama, taken from a “60 Minutes” interview, in which he condemns torture. It flashes on a television screen that’s in the background of a scene set in Pakistan; the movie’s terrorist-hunters, who are holding a meeting, barely look up, letting Obama’s pronouncement pass without comment. “By this point in the film,” as the CNN national-security analyst Peter Bergen wrote recently, “the audience has already seen that the C.I.A. has employed coercive interrogation techniques on an al Qaeda detainee that produced a key lead in the hunt for bin Laden. In the film, Obama’s opposition to torture comes off as wrongheaded and prissy.”
Bigelow has portrayed herself as a reluctant truth-teller. She recently described the film’s torture scenes as “difficult to shoot.” She said, “I wish it was not part of our history. But it was.”
Yet what is so unsettling about “Zero Dark Thirty” is not that it tells this difficult history but, rather, that it distorts it. In addition to excising the moral debate that raged over the interrogation program during the Bush years, the film also seems to accept almost without question that the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” played a key role in enabling the agency to identify the courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden. But this claim has been debunked, repeatedly, by reliable sources with access to the facts. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent first reported, shortly after bin Laden was killed, Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., sent a letter to Arizona Senator John McCain, clearly stating that “we first learned about ‘the facilitator / courier’s nom de guerre’ from a detainee not in the C.I.A.’s custody.” Panetta wrote that “no detainee in C.I.A. custody revealed the facilitator / courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts.”
The Senators Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have undermined the film’s version of events further still. “The original lead information had no connection to C.I.A. detainees,” they wrote in their own letter, revealed by the Post last year. Feinstein and Levin noted that a third detainee in C.I.A. custody did provide information on the courier, but, importantly, they stressed that “he did so the day before he was interrogated by the C.I.A. using their coercive interrogation techniques.” In other words, contrary to the plotline of “Zero Dark Thirty,” and contrary to self-serving accounts of C.I.A. officers implicated in the interrogation program, senators with access to the record say that torture did not produce the leads that led to finding and killing bin Laden.
Top senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have amplified that position in additional interviews this week. Speaking with the Huffington Post, Feinstein said of the movie’s narrative, “Based on what I know, I don’t believe it is true.” Republicans, too, criticized the movie’s plot. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. I know for a fact, not because of this report—my own knowledge—that waterboarding, torture, does not lead to reliable information … in any case—not this specific case—in any case,” said John McCain, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who was himself tortured during the Vietnam War. The Huffington Post also quoted South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, another Republican member of the Armed Services Committee, saying, “I would argue that it’s not waterboarding that led to bin Laden’s demise. It was a lot of good intelligence-gathering from the Obama and Bush administrations, continuity of effort, holding people at Gitmo, putting the puzzle together over a long period of time—not torture.”
As Scott Shane wrote in the Times on Thursday, so little is publicly known about the C.I.A.’s erstwhile interrogation program that it is nearly impossible for outsiders to assess the facts with total confidence. But for the past three years, Democratic staffers at the Senate Intelligence Committee have been compiling six thousand pages of records related to the secret program, and in doing so they have found little to celebrate. It is hard to understand, then, why the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” so confidently credit the program.
In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding, “Zero Dark Thirty” endorses torture in several other subtle ways. At one point, the film’s chief C.I.A. interrogator claims, without being challenged, that “everyone breaks in the end,” adding, “it’s biology.” Maybe that’s what they think in Hollywood, but experts on the history of torture disagree. Indeed, many prisoners have been tortured to death without ever revealing secrets, while many others—including some of those who were brutalized during the Bush years—have fabricated disinformation while being tortured. Some of the disinformation provided under duress during those years, in fact, helped to lead the U.S. into the war in Iraq under false premises.
At another point in the film, an elderly detainee explains that he wants to coöperate with the U.S. because he “doesn’t want to be tortured again.” The clear implication is that brutalization brings breakthroughs. Other ways of getting intelligence, such as bribing sources with expensive race cars, are shown to work, too. But while those scenes last only a few minutes, the torture scenes seem to go on and on.
The filmmakers subtly put their thumb on the pro-torture scale, as Emily Bazelon put it, in another scene, too. A C.I.A. officer complains that there is no way for him to corroborate a lead on bin Laden’s whereabouts now that the detainees in Guantánamo all have lawyers. The suggestion is that if they are given due process rather than black eyes, there will be no way to get the necessary evidence. This is a canard, given that virtually all suspects in the American criminal-justice system have lawyers, yet their cases proceed smoothly and fairly every day.
Bigelow has stressed that she had “no agenda” when she made “Zero Dark Thirty.” Unsurprisingly, though, those who have defended the brutalization of detainees have already begun embracing the film as evidence that they are right. Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of MSNBC’s show “Morning Joe,” said recently that the film’s narrative, “whether you find it repugnant or not,” shows that the C.I.A. program was effective and “led to the couriers, that led, eventually, years later, to the killing of Osama bin Laden.” My guess is that this is just the beginning, and that by the time millions of Americans have seen this movie, they will believe that, as Frank Bruni put it in a recent Times column, “No waterboarding, no bin Laden.”
Perhaps it’s unfair to expect the entertainment industry to convey history accurately. Clearly, the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” are storytellers who really know how to make a thriller. And it’s true that there are no rules when it comes to fiction. As Boal, the screenwriter, has protested in recent interviews, “It’s a movie, not a documentary.” But in the very first minutes of “Zero Dark Thirty,” before its narrative begins to unspool, the audience is told that the story it is about to see is “based on first-hand accounts of actual events.” If there is an expectation of accuracy, it is set up by the filmmakers themselves. It seems they want it both ways: they want the thrill that comes from revealing what happened behind the scenes as history was being made and the creative license of fiction, which frees them from the responsibility to stick to the truth.
Knowing the real facts—the ones that led the European Court of Human Rights to condemn America for torture this week—I had trouble enjoying the movie. I’ve interviewed Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen whose suit the E.C.H.R. adjudicated. He turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, an innocent car salesman whom the C.I.A. kidnapped and held in a black-site prison for four months, and who was “severely beaten, sodomized, shackled, and hooded.” What Masri lived through was so harrowing that, when I had a cup of coffee with him, a few years ago, he couldn’t describe it to me without crying. Maybe I care too much about all of this to enjoy it with popcorn. But maybe the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” should care a little bit more.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Petraeus: Murdoch wanted to bankroll campaign
David Petraeus claimed Rupert Murdoch wanted to bankroll his presidential campaign
Jon Swaine, Washington
04 Dec 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9722256/David-Petraeus-claimed-Rupert-Murdoch-wanted-to-bankroll-his-presidential-campaign.html
David Petraeus was urged to run for the US presidency by one of Rupert Murdoch's American lieutenants and told that the media tycoon would bankroll his campaign, it has emerged.
The former CIA director, who resigned last month after having an extramarital affair with his biographer, declined in order to protect his personal life. "My wife would divorce me," he said. "And I love my wife".
Mr Petraeus learned while commanding US forces in Afghanistan last year that Roger Ailes, the chairman of Mr Murdoch's Fox television network, wanted him to challenge President Barack Obama.
Mr Ailes, a key Republican powerbroker who worked for Richard Nixon, told Mr Petraeus that he should reject the job of CIA director – from which he resigned last month – and campaign for the White House.
"I thought the Republican field needed to be shaken up and Petraeus might be a good candidate," Mr Ailes told Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington Post reporter, who disclosed news of the talks.
Mr Ailes passed his message to Mr Petraeus through an emissary sent to interview him in Kabul 18 months ago for Fox News, Mr Murdoch's American news channel, which is beloved by US conservatives.
"I've got something to say to you directly from Roger Ailes," Kathleen McFarland, a national security analyst for the channel, told Mr Petraeus.
"He loves you and everyone at Fox loves you.
"He says that if you're offered chairman [of the joint chiefs of staff], take it," Ms McFarland continued. "But if you're offered anything else, don't take it, resign in six months and run for president".
Mr Petraeus was at the time the subject of fevered speculation among Republicans, who believed that he could return to the US as a respected war hero able to defeat Mr Obama in last month's election. The President's decision to make him CIA director was seen by some analysts as an attempt to sideline a potential political rival.
In their discussion, Ms McFarland added that Mr Ailes could resign from his role as Fox News chief to run a Petraeus 2012 presidential campaign. "Tell him if I ever ran," Mr Petraeus said, laughing, "but I won't, but if I ever ran, I'd take him up on his offer," adding: "He said he would quit Fox and bankroll it."
Challenged over whether Mr Ailes, who is paid about $20 million (£12 million) a year, would be wealthy enough to fund the campaign, Mr Petraeus said: "Maybe I'm confusing that with Rupert," adding: "Rupert's after me as well." Spokesmen for Mr Murdoch declined to comment.
Declaring "I love Roger, he's a brilliant guy", Mr Petraeus politely demurred and said he needed to focus on his home life after stepping down from commanding troops at war.
"It's never going to happen," he said. "My wife would divorce me. And I love my wife".
Referring to his home in Virginia, he added: "We have a beautiful house with his-and-hers bathrooms, believe it or not. I just want to live in it. I've never spent a night in it".
Mr and Mrs Petraeus, who have been married for 37 years, have retreated to their home to repair their relationship after he admitted having an affair with Paula Broadwell, who wrote his biography. The affair did not begin until some time after his comments to Ms McFarland.
Mr Petraeus resigned after it emerged the FBI was investigating the affair as part of an inquiry sparked by a complaint about threatening emails allegedly sent to a female friend of Mr Petraeus by Mrs Broadwell.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Done in by the PATRIOT Act
The Grand Irony of the Petraeus Sex Scandal
Dave Lindorff
Mon, 11/12/2012
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1424
There is a delicious irony to the story of the crash-and-burn career of Four-Star General and later (at least briefly) CIA Director David Petraeus.
The man who was elevated to the ethereal ranks of a General Eisenhower or Robert E. Lee by swooning corporate myth makers like the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin, the Washington Post’s David Iglesias, and the NY Times’ Michael Gordon, was never really that brilliant. It wasn’t his “surge” after all that quieted things down (temporarily) in Iraq; rather it was a deal to pay off the insurgents with cash to stand down until the US could gracefully pull out without the departing troops having to be shoot their way down to Kuwait in full retreat. As for his allegedly “brilliant” counterinsurgency policy of “winning hearts and minds,” we have already seen how well that has worked in Iraq, which is now basically a client state of Iran, and the writing is already on the wall in Afghanistan, where the US is almost universally loathed, with US forces spending most of their time looking out for Afghan soldiers who might turn their guns on their supposed ally and “mentor” American troops.
For a real measure of Gen. Petraeus, go to Admiral William Fallon -- that rare military leader who had the guts to tell President Bush and Cheney he would not allow an attack on Iran “on his watch,” thereby quite possibly saving us all from being at war with Iran years ago. Fallon, who at the time in 2007 was head of Centcom, the military command region covering the entire Middle East, once reportedly called, Petraeus, who was being put in charge of the Iraq theater, an “ass-licking little chicken-shit” -- to his face.
Anyhow, what makes the epic collapse of this consummate political general’s career so exquisite is that it was the post-9-11 spying capabilities of the FBI that allowed its agents to slip unannounced into the email of the General’s paramour, Paula Broadwell (a name that could have been selected by Ian Fleming!), and possibly into the general’s own email too, there to find the evidence, allegedly in the form of X-rated letters, of a covert adulterous relationship underway.
We now know that the FBI was alerted to this breach of decorum (if the illicit romance began while Petraeus was on active duty in Afghanistan, he could be prosecuted under the same rules that have led to the prosecution of many lower ranking offers: bringing ill-repute upon the military) and lack of judgement on the part of the head of the nation’s spooks, by a second woman, Jill Kelley, who was a volunteer military liaison and family friend of the Petraeus clan. Kelley’s closeness to Petraeus allegedly caused the jealous Broadwell to allegedly send threatening emails to her imagined rival, including one that told her to “stay away from my guy!”
It seems likely Kelley, in asking the FBI to put a halt to the threatening emails, would have been quick to point out that Broadwell was having an affair with Petraeus. In any event, once the FBI successfully go the telecom company she was using to allow them into Broadwell’s email, that would have been clear, and it would have been easy work to move on to the general’s own cache of love letters (in which he may have been referred to by Broadwell by what she told The Daily Show's John Stewart was his childhood nickname: "Peaches").
The CIA chief was thus done in by the Patriot Act and other assorted violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, all backed by Gen. Petraeus and his political promoters in Congress and the White House, as well as in the corporate media.
Of course, while we can enjoy this payback, and speculate on how it must be giving the shivers to many a philandering White House staffer and member of Congress, it should also be a warning to us all that the FBI, the CIA, and the myriad other intelligence agencies littering the US landscape, these days have virtually limitless ability to monitor our every email message, tweet and phone call.
Maybe we should invite the now humbled Petreaeus to become the poster child for a renewed battle to restore the Bill of Rights.
General Petraeus: “The Spy Who Loved Him”
Jon Rappoport
It's absurd to think the FBI just found out about CIA Director Petraeus' affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer. The timing is too convenient.
The FBI knew about the affair some time ago and, under strict orders, kept their mouths shut until just after Election Day. If they hadn't, the scandal would have blown up during Obama's campaign run.
During the period the FBI knew about Petraeus' affair, they also knew he was completely vulnerable to blackmail. In FBI and CIA circles, to have done nothing about it is considered treasonous. Putting a gag on these FBI people had to been done by the White House.
The latest word is that Petraeus will not testify before Congress about what really happened in Benghazi. He "may be called" on the carpet at a future time, which could mean never.
His absence will help conceal details of the Chris Stevens murder and the build-up of US-sponsored terrorists in the Benghazi sector of Libya.
In fact, Petraeus' initial statements to Congress, behind closed doors on September 14, led legislators to believe that absurd film trailer was the cause of the "uprising" at the house where Stevens was attacked and killed. Was the General's ridiculous declaration made under orders from the White House, who had the blackmail goods on him?
Then, finally, on October 26th, Petraeus, perhaps fed up at how he was being used by the White House to provide cover for the president, stated: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need [in Bengazi]. Claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate."
In this whole scenario, we would be looking at a potential case of double blackmail. First by the White House, who knew of the affair sometime ago, and second, by whoever might have wrung CIA and military secrets out of Petraeus because they knew about his affair with Broadwell.
What does that make Paula Broadwell. In intelligence parlance, she would be a classic "honey trap."
By circumstance, by accident, or on purpose?
She has a long military background. A graduate of West Point, she directed counter-terrorism studies at Tufts University. She worked with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. She is no innocent.
She very well knew that, during the time of their extended affair, Petraeus was vulnerable to any number of blackmail vectors. This did not make her waver.
She knew this wasn't just some fling with a lieutenant colonel or even a run-of-the-mill general. Petraeus was head of all forces in the Afghanistan war. Then he was CIA director.
There are a lot of ways to write a biography that don't involve sleeping with the subject and opening him up to blackmail at a very high level.
People from both sides of the aisle in Washington are expressing deep sorrow that an American hero had to resign. What nonsense. They're building cover for Petraeus. They're intentionally avoiding the question of what compromises he may have agreed to during his peak military service and intelligence directorship.
In Afghanistan, Petraeus was Obama's choice to replace Stanley McChrystal, the general who blew his career during a Rolling Stone interview in which his men took pot shots at the president.
It is quite fair to ask whether Petraeus served as Obama's man in Afghanistan under the unspoken but implied threat that, if there were any kerfuffles, any deviations, any criticisms of the White House Afghan policy, Petraeus' affair would become public knowledge.
Despite claims by a friend that the affair with Broadwell began after Petraeus assumed leadership of the CIA, there is a strong possibility it started earlier, when Broadwell was "embedded" with the general in Afghanistan.
Was Paula Broadwell covertly working for the White House during her affair with Petraeus? Was she working for somebody else? Did she start out as an agent? Was she drawn into becoming one because she, too, as a married woman, was open to blackmail?
The public and the mainstream press, playing the part of "oh isn't this too bad but of course nothing really serious or weird or compromising could have happened here," doesn't want to know how the spy game is actually played. They'd rather watch Jeopardy and pop Zoloft.
"Two people, both married, couldn't resist a great passion. It happens. All of us make mistakes. We understand. Even great men can succumb. And she was obviously smitten. What a shame."
Yeah. Sure.
Petraeus, the man, is now a legitimate target for serious questions. If he entered into the affair, knowing full well the blackmail it opened him up to, what is he all about? Where have his loyalties resided?
Some starry-eyed people will think asking about this is "impolite," because, after all, "the man is an American hero." Nonsense.
Then we have questions about Petraeus' potential political career. The press went after him with all sorts of questions about what he might do in the 2012 election. The idea was out there. Could he run for president against Obama? Could he become the next Eisenhower?
If he had decided to make the move, he would have had a formidable number of supporters. But he adamantly said no. Was this a genuine expression of disinterest, or was Petraeus already compromised and under the thumb of the White House?
"All right, David, you're gone from Afghanistan now. You've retired from the Army. The hero returns. Don't get any ideas about running for president. You know what we know about you. By the way, the director of Central Intelligence is open. How would you like that job?"
"Oh no," people say. "This kind of thing would never happen."
Really? What kind of world do you think Washington is? The Peace Corp with martini lunches? The Unitarian Church with occasional brandies and cigars?
Remember Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's famous remark when she was asked about the devastation the US was wreaking in Iraq through its economic sanctions?
May 12, 1996, 60 Minutes. Lesley Stahl says: "We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price---we think the price is worth it."
Now that's the real world of Washington, once the PR people get out of the way.
Blackmail of a famous general, a director of the CIA? That's nothing.
A famous general falling under the power of blackmail? A general who knows some of the deep dark secrets about Dope Inc., the trillion-dollar opium growing operation in Afghanistan, a general whose troops have helped to restore the planting of the poppies there? A general who knows about the longed-for oil pipeline running through Afghanistan and the various persons whom it will benefit?
Could Petraeus have been a target for all manner of blackmail mounted by numerous parties?
Is the Pope Catholic?
The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Our Pitilessly Intoxicating Drones
Andy Lee Roth
ProjectCensored.org
The initial US response to the deadly attack on the nation's Libyan embassy includes deploying spies, Marines, and drones. Current reports indicate that US drones operating in Libyan airspace will be limited to surveillance. But the decision to deploy them in this highly volatile situation ought to force American citizens to reflect on a somber anniversary. It warns against believing that drones provide a costless way to curb our terrorist enemies.
Americans should remember September 30, 2011, the day that drones unleashed by the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) targeted American citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi, killing him and at least three other people, including a second US citizen, Samir Khan. Al-Aulaqi had been on CIA and JSOC "kill lists" since late 2009 or early 2010, and the target of previous drone strikes. Although US officials alleged that Khan was not a target in the September 2011 strike, they contended that he too played an active role in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A subsequent US drone strike in Yemen on October 14, 2011, killed seven people, including Al-Aulaqi's 16-year old son, Abdulrahman, also an American citizen.
Their deaths were part of an ongoing, systematic program of US drone strikes against suspected terrorists in countries outside the context of armed conflict. The US has conducted targeted killings in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia since 2002, though this campaign intensified dramatically in 2009 after President Obama took office.
The anniversary of Anwar Al-Aulaqi's death underscores two interrelated and intractable problems with our reliance on drones. Internationally, drones intensify our enemies' resolve because drones, no less than the suicide bombers and roadside devices that Americans have come to dread, are instruments of terror and lawless death. Domestically, drone strikes against US citizens on foreign soil usurp even the pretense of legal due process.
Force, Simone Weil once observed, is pitilessly intoxicating to those who possess it. So it is not surprising that neither the American public nor their leaders have sought an informed public debate about the use of drones for targeted killings. Does their deployment make good sense in terms of national security? Is the nation’s drone-based response to terrorism even legal under the US constitution and international law?
By invoking vague, shifting legal standards and asserting secrecy in the name of national security, government officials, including President Obama himself, have effectively situated the drone campaign on the periphery of public concern. With few exceptions, the corporate media have followed officials' leads.
Government officials seldom provide the public with evidence that targeted individuals posed specific and imminent threats, except for the assertion that they were "on the list." This was true in Al-Aulaqi's case. Government officials, including Obama's counterterrorism chief Michael Leiter, compared al-Aulaqi to Osama bin Laden. Just as exaggerated descriptions of bin Laden as a "terrorist mastermind" oversimplified the complexity of Islamist terrorist networks, so comparisons of Al-Aulaqi to bin Laden overemphasized al-Aulaqi's importance to Al Qaeda and his threat to US security. The corporate media dutifully conveyed these official views while describing Al-Aulaqi as an "alleged" or "suspected" terrorist.
By and large, the American public seems to have accepted the government's argument of guilt by assertion and rhetorical association: A February 2012 opinion poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News found that 83 percent of Americans approved of drone strikes against terrorists overseas, including 65 percent who approved even when "those suspected terrorists are American citizens living in other countries."
Neither President Obama nor Republican challenger Mitt Romney has shown any inclination to make targeted killings a campaign issue. Overshadowed by the hoopla of the Democratic National Convention, President Obama conducted a brief, formal interview with CNN's Jessica Yellin in which he acknowledged that drones are "one tool we use" in order "to keep the American people safe." Obama affirmed that targets must be "authorized by our laws" and pose threats that are "serious and not speculative." In response to Yellin's question, "Are the standards different when the target is an American?" Obama avowed that American citizens "are subject to the protections of the constitution and due process." Neither Yellin nor Obama mentioned Al-Aulaqi, and Yellin chose not pursue the contradiction between the President's claim and the facts regarding September 30, 2011.
A combination of divided oversight and economic conflicts of interest have kept Congress from effectively holding the White House, the CIA, or JSOC accountable. As the Washington Post's Greg Miller has reported, congressional lawmakers "receive scant information about the administration's drone program," and executive claims of secrecy typically muzzle them from discussing the little information they do receive. Meanwhile, drone manufacturers—including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Atomics—lobby Congress for increasingly lucrative federal contracts through industry organizations such as AUVSI, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. AUVSI lobbyists and similar industry groups meet willing sponsors in Congress: The House of Representatives has its own drone caucus with over fifty bipartisan members. Divided oversight and corporate lobbying combine to render Congress ineffective in challenging the White House, CIA, and JSOC on drones.
In June 2012, a sharply worded letter to President Obama from Rep. Dennis Kucinich and 25 additional members of Congress questioned the authority for so-called "signature" strikes, characterizing drones as "faceless ambassadors" that cause both civilian deaths and "powerful and enduring anti-American sentiment." Corporate media all but ignored this congressional rebuke, thus contributing to a counter-democratic dynamic in which the American public is unaware of developing Congressional opposition, while a majority in Congress will not take a position against targeted killing until their constituents demand that they do so.
Due to the persistence of civil rights groups, the courts may be the first branch of government to hold the illegal drone campaign's commanders accountable. A July 2012 lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union names Defense Secretary and former CIA Director Leon Panetta, Commander of US Special Operations Command William McRaven, JSOC Commander Joseph Votel, and CIA Director David Petraeus as defendants in the deaths of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi. Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta argues that the targeted killing of Anwar Al-Aulaqi was not "a last resort to protect against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury" and is therefore a violation of both the US Constitution and international human rights law. It also charges that the defendants failed in their obligations, under the Constitution and international law, "to take measures to prevent harm to Samir Khan, Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, and other bystanders."
As present, the government's global drone campaign operates with minimal transparency, accountability, or oversight. The lawsuit could force the defendants to reveal the process used to determine that Al-Aulaqi must die and the evidence for that decision. If Rep. Kucinich is right—drone strikes pose significant threats to national security because they promote widespread, powerful anti-American sentiment—then the court's decision in Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta could do more to protect the US and its citizens than was accomplished by the targeted killing of Al-Aulaqi and other alleged terrorists. The case could sober the American public enough to reckon with the reality that, although drones seem a costless substitute for boots on the ground, our intoxication with them threatens our national security and our most cherished values.
Andy Lee Roth, PhD, is associate director of Project Censored and co-editor of Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution, which includes the study on which this analysis is based.
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Tuesday, May 15, 2012
JFK's mistress was assassinated by the CIA?
Book claims JFK's mistress was assassinated by the CIA 'because she knew too much about his assassination'
19 April 2012
Full Article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2132334/JFKs-mistress-Mary-Pinchot-assassinated-CIA-knew-much.html
The suspicious death of one of President John F. Kennedy's mistresses just months after his death has sparked numerous conspiracy theories.
The latest version posits that socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer, a beautiful divorcee who was close friends with the Kennedys and is widely known for having a lengthy affair with the playboy President, was shot in a cover-up operation by the CIA.
A new book alleges that, in her preoccupation with her lover's assassination and ensuing personal investigation, she may have gotten so close to the 'truth' that the CIA found her to be a threat.
As a result, agency operatives staged a shooting to make it look like she died due to a sexual assault that turned violent.
Whether or not the theory is true, there are a number of questionable components to the story of the months leading up to her death on October 12, 1964.
Her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, was a CIA agent himself and the couple were card-carrying members of Georgetown's starry social set, which included then-Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline.
The couples became close friends, along with Mary's sister Antoinette (who went by Tony) and her husband Ben Bradlee, who was a bureau chief for Newsweek but later went on to be the managing editor of The Washington Post.
Another couple that they spent time with was Mary's Vassar classmate Cicely d'Autremont and her husband James Angleton, who was the chief of the counter surveillance for the CIA.
A book by Peter Janney, called Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision of World Peace, the author claims that the the socialite would often bring marijuana and LSD to her trysts with the President.
During their conversations while on these hallucinogens, Ms Pinchot Meyer reportedly tried to appeal to Mr Kennedy's pacifist nature and urged him to seek peaceful solutions to such worldwide crises like the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis.
At the time, LSD was not illegal, and many, including Harvard professor Timothy Leary, advocated its use because they believed it helped people expand their knowledge base.
Mr Janney's book is not the first to draw conclusions between Ms Pinchot Meyer's friendship with Mr Leary and her intentions with her relationship with Mr Kennedy.
He goes on to say that she was later murdered by the CIA, who he believes organized the assassination of the President in an effort to stop him from preventing violent escalation that they wanted in the Cold War...
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