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A leaked phone conversation between Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, has exposed the anti-democratic and colonialist character of the Obama administration’s intervention in the former Soviet republic. The discussion between the two officials includes a detailed review of which right-wing opposition figures Washington is working to install in office, and how it is using the United Nations to rubber-stamp the operation. While Germany and other European powers have worked closely with the Obama administration in promoting the violent protests against President Viktor Yanukovych, the leaked phone call reveals tensions between the imperialist powers. At one point Nuland tells Pyatt, “Fuck the EU.”

Nuland continues: “Yats [Yatsenyuk] is the guy that who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.” Pyatt later warns Nuland that “Klitschko has been the top dog” within the opposition, and that she will need to “move fast on all this stuff” and speak with the UDAR leader as part of their “personality management” of the opposition leadership. The utter criminality of Washington’s drive to install a pliant regime in Kiev sharply emerges in Nuland and Pyatt’s discussion of Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the neo-fascist All-Ukrainian Union (Svoboda) party. Nuland describes Tyahnybok as one of the “big three” within the opposition leadership. The State Department operative goes on to tell Pyatt that “what [Yatsenyuk] needs [after he is installed in office] is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside—he needs to be talking to them four times a week.” These remarks confirm that there is no confusion whatsoever within the Obama administration that it is working in partnership with fascist movements in Ukraine.

Tyahnybok is the leader of the Svoboda party, which was initially called the Social-National Party of Ukraine and featured a neo-Nazi logo. In 2004, Tyahnybok praised right-wing Ukrainian partisans in World War II, who, he declared, “did not fear, but took up their automatic rifles, going into the woods to fight Muscovites, Germans, Jewry and other filth.” He added that Ukraine still had to be liberated from a “Moscow-Jewish mafia.” In 2005, Tyahnybok signed an open letter to Ukrainian leaders demanding a halt to the “criminal activities” of “organised Jewry,” which, he declared, was attempting to commit “genocide” against the Ukrainian people. This is one of the “big three” figures with whom the Obama administration is working to install a client regime in Ukraine. Yesterday, Nuland met with several opposition figures, among them Oleh Tyahnybok. No details of the discussion have been made public, but Ambassador Pyatt released via Twitter a photo of a smiling Nuland posing next to the pro-Nazi leader and his colleagues.

The list of those caught up in the global surveillance net cast by the National Security Agency and its overseas partners, from social media users to foreign heads of state, now includes another entry: American lawyers. A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance. Related Coverage Text: Document Describes Eavesdropping on American Law FirmFEB. 15, 2014 The government of Indonesia had retained the law firm for help in trade talks, according to the February 2013 document. It reports that the N.S.A.’s Australian counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate, notified the agency that it was conducting surveillance of the talks, including communications between Indonesian officials and the American law firm, and offered to share the information.

The Australians told officials at an N.S.A. liaison office in Canberra, Australia, that “information covered by attorney-client privilege may be included” in the intelligence gathering, according to the document, a monthly bulletin from the Canberra office. The law firm was not identified, but Mayer Brown, a Chicago-based firm with a global practice, was then advising the Indonesian government on trade issues. On behalf of the Australians, the liaison officials asked the N.S.A. general counsel’s office for guidance about the spying. The bulletin notes only that the counsel’s office “provided clear guidance” and that the Australian agency “has been able to continue to cover the talks, providing highly useful intelligence for interested US customers.” The N.S.A. declined to answer questions about the reported surveillance, including whether information involving the American law firm was shared with United States trade officials or negotiators.

Most attorney-client conversations do not get special protections under American law from N.S.A. eavesdropping. Amid growing concerns about surveillance and hacking, the American Bar Association in 2012 revised its ethics rules to explicitly require lawyers to “make reasonable efforts” to protect confidential information from unauthorized disclosure to outsiders.Last year, the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, rebuffed a legal challenge to a 2008 law allowing warrantless wiretapping that was brought in part by lawyers with foreign clients they believed were likely targets of N.S.A. monitoring. The lawyers contended that the law raised risks that required them to take costly measures, like traveling overseas to meet clients, to protect sensitive communications. But the Supreme Court dismissed their fears as “speculative.”The N.S.A. is prohibited from targeting Americans, including businesses, law firms and other organizations based in the United States, for surveillance without warrants, and intelligence officials have repeatedly said the N.S.A. does not use the spy services of its partners in the so-called Five Eyes alliance — Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand — to skirt the law.

The US is strongly pushing the Ukraine EU integration just as it had been behind the 2004 failed “Orange Revolution” to split Ukraine from Russia in a  bid to isolate and weaken Russia. Now Ukrainians have found evidence of direct involvement of the Belgrade US-financed training group, CANVAS behind the carefully-orchestrated Kiev protests. A copy of the pamphlet that was given out to opposition protestors in Kiev has been obtained. It is a word-for-word and picture-for-picture translation of the pamphlet used by US-financed Canvas organizers in the 2011 Cairo Tahrir Square protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak and opened the door to the US-backed Muslim Brotherhood.[1] The photo below is a side-by-side comparison:

Canvas, formerly Otpor, received significant money from the US State Department in 2000 to stage the first successful Color Revolution against Slobodan Milosovic in then-Yugoslavia. Since then they have been transformed into a full-time “revolution consultancy” for the US, posing as a Serbian grass-root group backing “democracy.” [2]

The recent protests in Ukraine have the stench of a foreign-orchestrated attempt to destabilize the government of Viktor Yanukovych after he walked away from signing an EU Association Agreement that would have driven a deep wedge between Russia and Ukraine. Glamor-star boxer-turned political guru, Vitaly Klitschko, has been meeting with the US State Department and is close to Angela Merkel’s CDU political machine in Germany.

An legitimately-elected (said by all international monitors) Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovich, has been driven from office, forced to flee as a war criminal after more than three months of violent protest and terrorist killings by so-called opposition. His “crime” according to protest leaders was that he rejected an EU offer of a vaguely-defined associate EU membership that offered little to Ukraine in favor of a concrete deal with Russia that gave immediate €15 billion debt relief and a huge reduction in Russian gas import prices. Washington at that point went into high gear and the result today is catastrophe. A secretive neo-nazi military organization reported linked to NATO played a decisive role in targeted sniper attacks and violence that led to the collapse of the elected government.

Snipers began shooting into the crowd on February 22 in Maidan or Independence Square. Panic ensued and riot police retreated in panic according to eyewitnesses. The opposition leader Vitali Klitschko withdrew from the deal, no reason given. Yanukovich fled Kiev.[3] The question unanswered until now is who deployed the snipers? According to veteran US intelligence sources, the snipers came from an ultra-right-wing military organization known as Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).

Strange Ukraine ‘Nationalists’ The leader of UNA-UNSO, Andriy Shkil, ten years ago became an adviser to Julia Tymoshenko. UNA-UNSO, during the US-instigated 2003-2004 “Orange Revolution”, backed pro-NATO candidate Viktor Yushchenko against his pro-Russian opponent, Yanukovich. UNA-UNSO members provided security for the supporters of Yushchenko and Julia Tymoshenko on Independence Square in Kiev in 2003-4.[4] UNA-UNSO is also reported to have close ties to the German National Democratic Party (NDP). [5] Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 the crack-para-military UNA-UNSO members have been behind every revolt against Russian influence. The one connecting thread in their violent campaigns is always anti-Russia. The organization, according to veteran US intelligence sources, is part of a secret NATO “GLADIO” organization, and not a Ukraine nationalist group as portrayed in western media. [6] According to these sources, UNA-UNSO have been involved (confirmed officially) in the Lithuanian events in the Winter of 1991, the Soviet Coup d’etat in Summer 1991, the war for the Pridnister Republic 1992, the anti-Moscow Abkhazia War 1993, the Chechen War, the US-organized Kosovo Campaign Against the Serbs, and the August 8 2008 war in Georgia. According to these reports, UNA-UNSO para-military have been involved in every NATO dirty war in the post-cold war period, always fighting on behalf of NATO. “These people are the dangerous mercenaries used all over the world to fight NATO’s dirty war, and to frame Russia because this group pretends to be Russian special forces. THESE ARE THE BAD GUYS, forget about the window dressing nationalists, these are the men behind the sniper rifles,” these sources insist. [7]

Since the end of the Cold War the United States has been surrounding Russia, building one base after another, ceaselessly looking for new ones, including in Ukraine; one missile site after another, with Moscow in range; NATO has grabbed one former Soviet Republic after another. The White House, and the unquestioning American mainstream media, have assured us that such operations have nothing to do with Russia. And Russia has been told the same, much to Moscow’s continuous skepticism. “Look,” said Russian president Vladimir Putin about NATO some years ago, “is this is a military organization? Yes, it’s military. … Is it moving towards our border? It’s moving towards our border. Why?” The Holy Triumvirate would love to rip Ukraine from the Moscow bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russia’s border. (In case you were wondering what prompted the Russian military action.) Kiev’s membership in the EU would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neo-conservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family; but no price is too great to pay to for being part of glorious Europe and the West!

The Ukrainian insurgents and their Western-power supporters didn’t care who their Ukrainian allies were in carrying out their coup against President Viktor Yanukovych last month … thugs who set policemen on fire head to toe … all manner of extreme right-wingers, including Chechnyan Islamic militants … a deputy of the ultra-right Svoboda Party, part of the new government, who threatens to rebuild Ukraine’s nukes in three to six months. … the snipers firing on the protestors who apparently were not what they appeared to be – A bugged phone conversation between Urmas Paet, the Estonian foreign minister, and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, reveals Paet saying: “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.” … neo-Nazi protestors in Kiev who have openly denounced Jews, hoisting a banner honoring Stepan Bandera, the infamous Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the German Nazis during World War II and whose militias participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on February 24 that Ukrainian Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman advised “Kiev’s Jews to leave the city and even the country.” Edward Dolinsky, head of an umbrella organization of Ukrainian Jews, described the situation for Ukrainian Jews as “dire” and requested Israel’s help. All in all a questionable gang of allies for a dubious cause; reminiscent of the Kosovo Liberation Army thugs Washington put into power for an earlier regime change, and has kept in power since 1999.

The now-famous recorded phone conversation between top US State Department official Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to the Ukraine, wherein they discuss which Ukrainians would be to Washington’s liking in a new government, and which not, is an example of this regime-change mentality. Nuland’s choice, Arseniy Yatseniuk, emerged as interim prime minister. The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washington’s foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change. The NED website lists 65 projects that it has supported financially in recent years in Ukraine. The descriptions NED gives to the projects don’t reveal the fact that generally their programs impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy, and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform, and growth; and the merits of foreign investment in their economy are emphasized. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Tony Blair and George Bush exchanged voluminous correspondence prior to the start of military operations in Iraq. Now, the UK is moving to declassify details of the talks for an inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the conflict, British media reported. The release, set for the upcoming year, is expected to include more than 100 documents, described as a collection of notes, records of 200 minutes of ministerial level talks, telephone conversations and private meetings between the British prime minister and American president, The Independent reported. This will give the green light for the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry to publish an account of the conflict, where much attention will be given to decisions made by then Prime Minister Tony Blair. Indeed, the files could play a major part in determining Blair’s historical legacy, which critics say has been stained by the Iraq War. Blair has been criticized for failing to challenge then-US President George W. Bush on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, specifically chemical and biological weapons, which a Joint Intelligence Committee report said in September 2002 “could be ready for firing in 45 minutes.”

A senior government official predicted the results of the inquiry will not do Blair any favors: "In the new year it seems the Chilcot inquiry is going to be published. Everyone will be assuming: bad hair day for Tony Blair and Jack Straw." Straw served as Blair’s secretary of state.

There has been some speculation, however, as to how effective the Iraq Inquiry can hope to be in determining the British government’s - not to mention Tony Blair’s - position on jumping on board George W. Bush’s Iraq war bandwagon. UK officials said their “intention is to be as open as possible,” yet the final decision on what will be released will be made by cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, the same individual who fought against publication of the Blair-Bush correspondence in the first place.

Q: Right. I read in Peter Jenkins’ analysis of your book that Israel has fabricated certain documents, including the information said to have been retrieved from a laptop computer in Iran in 2004, as you mentioned earlier, and the fabricated, fake data helped keep Iran’s nuclear controversy alive. Would you please elaborate more on Israel’s involvement in providing the U.S. and the IAEA with the false and groundless data and how they complicated Iran’s nuclear dossier? A: Well, I think that evidence that Israel was fabricating these documents that the IAEA received in 2005 as well as later documents turned over to the IAEA directly by Israel in 2008 and 2009, according to Mohamed ElBaradei, is very strong, and there are several indicators that it was an Israeli job. One is that we know the Mujahedin-e-Khalq turned these documents over to German intelligence; that’s where they came from. A former German intelligence official gave me a detailed account of that in an interview I did with him last year for my book. So, that’s the first indication that it was an Israeli job, because the MEK, we know, has been used by Israel to provide the intelligence they didn’t want to be known as coming from Israel on more than one occasion. And of course the MEK has let its name to testimony to support the Israeli point of view on accusations of Iranian terrorism, specifically in the case of the Buenos Aires bombing of the AMIA community center in 1994. That’s one indicator. The second indicator is that we know the Israelis had a program in Mossad to influence the foreign governments and news media on Iran and that office sometimes basically claimed that there were documents that come from inside Iran that they would share with the governments and the press. So they had a special office for operations against Iran. So, I’m quite convinced that Israel was behind these documents.

Here’s what Feinstein described Tuesday morning: At some time after the committee staff identified and reviewed the Internal Panetta Review documents, access to the vast majority of them was removed by the CIA. We believe this happened in 2010 but we have no way of knowing the specifics. Nor do we know why the documents were removed. The staff was focused on reviewing the tens of thousands of new documents that continued to arrive on a regular basis. […] Shortly [after Udall’s comments], on January 15, 2014, CIA Director Brennan requested an emergency meeting to inform me and Vice Chairman Chambliss that without prior notification or approval, CIA personnel had conducted a “search”—that was John Brennan’s word—of the committee computers at the offsite facility. This search involved not only a search of documents provided to the committee by the CIA, but also a search of the ”stand alone” and “walled-off” committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications. According to Brennan, the computer search was conducted in response to indications that some members of the committee staff might already have had access to the Internal Panetta Review. The CIA did not ask the committee or its staff if the committee had access to the Internal Review, or how we obtained it. Instead, the CIA just went and searched the committee’s computers.

If what Feinstein alleges is true, it essentially amounts to a constitutional crisis. And she said as much during her speech, describing “a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community.” “I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function,” Feinstein said. “Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

There’s also the issue of intimidation. The media reports that have been bubbling up recently around this issue have suggested that Senate investigators illegally obtained the Panetta review—some even raised the specter of hacking by the Senate investigators. The CIA went so far as to file a crime report with the Department of Justice, accusing Senate staffers of illegally obtaining the Panetta review. Tuesday morning, Feinstein strenuously denied the review was illegally obtained, and asserted it was included in the 6.2 million files turned over by the CIA and describing at length why Senate lawyers felt it was a lawful document for the committee to possess. And, in a remarkable statement, Feinstein accused the CIA of intimidation by filing the crime report. “[T]here is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime. I view the acting general counsel’s referral [to DoJ] as a potential effort to intimidate this staff—and I am not taking it lightly.” Feinstein went on to note one fairly amazing fact. The (acting) general counsel she referred to, who filed the complaint with DoJ, was a lawyer in the CIA’s counterterrorism center beginning in 2004. That means he was directly involved in legal justifications for the torture program. “And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff,” she noted gravely. “The same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers—including the acting general counsel himself—provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.”

NEW YORK -- Convicted hacker Jeremy Hammond was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison for stealing internal emails from the global intelligence firm Stratfor.

Hammond, 28, has a lengthy criminal record for his protests both online and off against targets like the 2004 Republican National Convention and pro-Iraq War activists. But stealing Stratfor files as part of the online hacking collective Anonymous gave him a new level of notoriety. In May, he pleaded guilty to one conspiracy charge for hacking the Texas-based private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor. The security breach resulted in the theft of employee emails and account information for approximately 860,000 Stratfor subscribers and clients, including information from 60,000 credit cards. Although Hammond did not use the credit cards himself, he urged supporters to use them to make donations to charities. The resulting fraudulent charges led to headaches for nonprofits and for the private individuals who had their phone numbers and email addresses exposed. The government charges originally added up to 30 years in prison, but Hammond took a plea deal for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal anti-hacking law also used to prosecute internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz. He admitted to hacking several other websites, including the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Special Forces Gear, the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, and the sheriff's office in Jefferson County, Ala.

Nearly 5 million emails obtained in the Stratfor hack were turned over to WikiLeaks by Hammond and published as the “Global Intelligence Files.” They revealed domestic spying on activists, including Occupy Wall Street. The resulting media publicity led some, including 4,000 online petition backers and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, to hail him as a whistleblower. But to the federal government, he was little more than a common thief. “While he billed himself as fighting for an anarchist cause, in reality, Jeremy Hammond caused personal and financial chaos for individuals whose identities and money he took and for companies whose businesses he decided he didn’t like," United States Attorney Preet Bharara said in a May statement. On Friday, Hammond, who has been in detention for 20 months, struck back. While apologizing to the innocent people who had their personal information exposed as a result of his leaks, he lashed out at the FBI, and Hector Xavier Monsegur, an informant widely known by his online name "Sabu." For months, Hammond claimed, Sabu guided him as he hacked the Stratfor website and thousands more around the world.

Since 2001, armed Predator drones have been used by the CIA in many foreign nations to attack individuals on the ground. There's a new revelation about them, too: In some cases, the NSA helped the CIA find targets by locking onto their powered-off mobile phones. Even when phones have their batteries removed, it appears the NSA still has the ability to locate them. Buried inside a Washington Post story by Dana Priest is the following tidbit: By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this "The Find," and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit. At the same time, the NSA developed a new computer linkup called the Real Time Regional Gateway into which the military and intelligence officers could feed every bit of data or seized documents and get back a phone number or list of potential targets. It also allowed commanders to see, on a screen, every type of surveillance available in a given territory.

"The Find," the Post article says, is run by a team in the basement of the NSA's headquarters whose job is to track the location of mobile phones in real time. Because many phones have chips that stay on even after a battery has been removed, tracking powered-down phones is within the realm of possibility. The revelations fit right in with the Edward Snowden disclosures, but the NSA isn't the only one tracking phones: Other government agencies and private companies regularly track them without warrants or court orders as well.

A report by a respected British medical journal the Lancet, has supported the possibility that late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium 210. The journal published a peer review of last year’s research by Swiss scientists. It backed their work, which found high levels of the highly radioactive element in blood, urine, and saliva stains on Arafat’s clothes and toothbrush. The Palestinian leader died in 2004 in a French hospital near Paris, after being effectively confined to his West Bank compound for two years. In November 2012, experts from Switzerland, France and Russia exhumed his remains and took samples to examine for possible poisoning. It was prompted by a documentary aired on Al- Jazeera, that claimed there were traces of polonium in Arafat’s personal belongings.

Tony Blair knew in detail about the CIA’s secret kidnap and interrogation programme after the September 11 attacks and was kept informed “every step of the way” by MI6, a security source has told The Telegraph. Mr Blair, the then prime minister, and Jack Straw, his foreign secretary, were fully briefed on CIA activities and were shown now infamous Bush administration legal opinions that declared “enhanced interrogation” techniques such as waterboarding and stress positions to be legal, the source said.

The claims come as Scotland Yard continues to investigate whether MI6 officers should face criminal charges for alleged complicity in the rendition of suspected terrorists, including two Libyan Islamists who were sent back in 2004 to Tripoli, where they were tortured.

The case was opened in January 2012 after documents recovered during the Libyan revolution appeared to show that Sir Mark Allen, the former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, and other agents had been complicit in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhadj, who was captured by the CIA with his pregnant wife and sent back to Libya. Among the documents was a memo apparently signed by Sir Mark congratulating the then Libyan intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa, on the “safe arrival” of Mr Belhadj. The Telegraph understands that MI6 has been forced to hand over top secret documents from that period to police and that senior officers who served at the time have been interviewed as part of the investigation. It is not known whether Mr Straw, who intelligence sources have indicated was fully briefed on the rendition, has also been interviewed by police.

A still-secret Senate Intelligence Committee report calls into question the legal foundation of the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists, a finding that challenges the key defense on which the agency and the Bush administration relied in arguing that the methods didn’t constitute torture.The report also found that the spy agency failed to keep an accurate account of the number of individuals it held, and that it issued erroneous claims about how many it detained and subjected to the controversial interrogation methods. The CIA has said that about 30 detainees underwent the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

The CIA’s claim “is BS,” said a former U.S. official familiar with evidence underpinning the report, who asked not to be identified because the matter is still classified. “They are trying to minimize the damage. They are trying to say it was a very targeted program, but that’s not the case.”The findings are among the report’s 20 main conclusions. Taken together, they paint a picture of an intelligence agency that seemed intent on evading or misleading nearly all of its oversight mechanisms throughout the program, which was launched under the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and ran until 2006.

Some of the report’s other conclusions, which were obtained by McClatchy, include:_ The CIA used interrogation methods that weren’t approved by the Justice Department or CIA headquarters._ The agency impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making regarding the program._ The CIA actively evaded or impeded congressional oversight of the program._ The agency hindered oversight of the program by its own Inspector General’s Office.

In February, 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker (1989-1992), representing President George HW Bush, traveled to Moscow to meet with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev regarding the possible reunification of Germany and the removal of 300,000 Soviet troops. There is little serious dispute that as the Berlin Wall teetered, Baker promised Gorbachev “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Gorbachev is reported to have taken the US at its word and responded “any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.” “I agree,” replied Baker.” Unfortunately, Gorbachev never got it in writing and most historians, at the time, agreed that NATO expansion was “ill conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.”

President Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary were also in agreement. But by 1994, that verbal contract had not deterred the concerted efforts of a handful of State Department policy professionals to subdue the overwhelming bureaucratic opposition according to James Goldgeier in his classic “Not Whether but When: The US Decision to Enlarge NATO.” By 1997, the Gorbachev-Baker-Bush agreement was a forgotten policy trinket as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were accepted into NATO. In 2004, former Soviet satellite countries Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were admitted and in 2009, Croatia and Albania joined NATO. Currently, the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Azerbaijan are pending membership and all five former Soviet republics in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan) provide NATO with logistical support for the US war in Afghanistan. As the US-led NATO alliance tightens its grip on the Caucasus countries, the American public has not been informed about the Ukrainian Parliament’s approval for a series of NATO military exercises that would put US troops on Russia’s border, even though the Ukraine is not yet a member of NATO. Rapid Trident is a 12-nation military ‘interoperability’ exercise led by the US who will commit the majority of participating troops and Sea Breeze is a naval exercise that will take place on the Black Sea adjacent to Russian ports. The NATO buildup includes joint ground operations with Moldova and Romania.

Most recently, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced that the military alliance has cut Russia off from civilian and military cooperation and that there would be the deployment and reinforcement of military assets including increased air patrols over the Baltic Sea and AWACS surveillance flights over Poland and Romania. It goes without saying that the NATO build up is in addition to the deployment of US troops and F-16 warplanes to Poland, F-15C warplanes to Lithuania and aircraft carriers to the Black and Mediterranean Seas. All this raises the question about whether a promise and handshake in the world of international diplomacy is a real commitment and what is a 1991 international promise made by a Republican Administration worth in 1994 to a Democratic Administration? Apparently zilch.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report provides the first official confirmation that the CIA secretly operated a black site prison out of Guantánamo Bay, two U.S. officials who have read portions of the report have told Al Jazeera. The officials — who spoke on condition of anonymity because the 6,600-page report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program remains classified — said top-secret agency documents reveal that at least 10 high-value targets were secretly held and interrogated at Guantánamo’s Camp Echo at various times from late 2003 to 2004. They were then flown to Rabat, Morocco, before being officially sent to the U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantánamo in September 2006. In September 2006, President George W. Bush formally announced that 14 CIA captives had been transferred to Guantánamo and would be prosecuted before military tribunals. He then acknowledged for the first time that the CIA had been operating a secret network of prisons overseas to detain and interrogate high-value targets.

The Senate report, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, says that the CIA detained some high-value suspects on Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean island controlled by the United Kingdom and leased to the United States. The classified CIA documents say the black site arrangement at Diego Garcia was made with the “full cooperation” of the British government. That would confirm long-standing claims by human rights investigators and journalists, whose allegations — based on flight logs and unnamed government sources — have routinely been denied by the CIA. The CIA and State Department declined Al Jazeera’s requests for comment. The Intelligence Committee last week voted 11 to 3 to declassify the report’s 480-page executive summary and 20 conclusions and findings, which incorporate responses from Republican members of the committee and from the CIA. The executive summary will undergo a declassification review, led by the CIA, with input from the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the U.S. officials said. The panel’s chairwoman, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said in a statement last Thursday that the full 6,600-page report, with 37,000 footnotes, “will be held for declassification at a later time.”

Leaked details of the committee’s report have caused waves in countries like Poland, where the CIA is known to have operated a black site prison — which Polish officials continue to deny having known about. The U.S. officials who spoke to Al Jazeera said that the Senate report reveals 20 prisoners were secretly detained in Poland from 2002 to 2005. They added that Polish officials recently sought assurances from diplomats and visiting U.S. officials that the Senate report would conceal details about Poland’s role in allowing the CIA black site to be operated on Polish soil. Al Jazeera’s sources said U.S. officials reassured their Polish counterparts last year that it was almost certain that the declassified version of the report would not identify the countries that cooperated with the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

It is alleged that some of the bail money that released Sturgis and the other Watergate burglars was drug money from the CIA asset turned drug trafficker, Manuel Artime, and delivered by Artime’s money-launderer, Ramón Milián Rodríguez. After the Iran-Contra scandal went public, Milián Rodríguez was investigated by a congressional committee – not for Watergate, but because, in support of the Contras, he had managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.6

In the 1950s Wall Street was a dominating complex. It included not just banks and other financial institutions but also the oil majors whose cartel arrangements were successfully defended against the U.S. Government by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers. The inclusion of Wall Street conforms with Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in 1933 to his friend Col. E.M. House that “The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”18 FDR’s insight is well illustrated by the efficiency with which a group of Wall Street bankers (including Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson Aldrich) were able in a highly secret meeting in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve System – a system which in effect reserved oversight of the nation’s currency supply and of all America’s banks in the not impartial hands of its largest.19 The political clout of the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board was clearly demonstrated in 2008, when Fed leadership secured instant support from two successive administrations for public money to rescue the reckless management of Wall Street banks: banks Too Big To Fail, and of course far Too Big To Jail, but not Too Big To Bail.20

since its outset, the CIA has always had access to large amounts of off-the books or offshore funds to support its activities. Indeed, the power of the purse has usually worked in an opposite sense, since those in control of deep state offshore funds supporting CIA activities have for decades also funded members of Congress and of the executive – not vice versa. The last six decades provide a coherent and continuous picture of historical direction being provided by this deep state power of the purse, trumping and sometimes reversing the conventional state. Let us resume some of the CIA’s sources of offshore and off-the-books funding for its activities. The CIA’s first covert operation was the use of “over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”25 (The fundraising had begun at the wealthy Brook Club in New York; but Allen Dulles, then still a Wall Street lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at first had preferred a private funding campaign, to authorize the operation through the National Security Council and the CIA.)26 Dulles, together with George Kennan and James Forrestal, then found a way to provide a legal source for off-the-books CIA funding, under the cover of the Marshall Plan. The three men “helped devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim millions of dollars from the plan.”27

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In other news from Iraq, pressure is mounting on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to form a less sectarian government or to resign. Earlier today, a representative of the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for the creation of what he described as a new "effective" government. Meanwhile, on Thursday, The New York Times revealed that the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Robert Beecroft, and the State Department’s top official in Iraq, Brett McGurk, recently met with the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who has been described as a potential candidate to replace Maliki. AMY GOODMAN: Chalabi is the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA-funded Iraqi exile group that strongly pushed for the 2003 U.S. invasion. Chalabi’s INC helped drum up pre-war claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. The group provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration, U.S. lawmakers, and journalists at The New York Times and other papers. After the invasion, Chalabi became chair of the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification. Many blame his actions for politically isolating Iraq’s Sunni minority and causing sectarian strife.

Chalabi has defended his actions leading up to the invasion. In 2004, he told the London Telegraph, quote, "We are heroes in error. ... As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important," Chalabi said. Well, to talk more about Ahmed Chalabi, we’re joined by Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine. His latest piece for Harper’s is headlined "The Long Shadow of a Neocon." Welcome to Democracy Now!, Andrew Cockburn. Talk about what you understand is happening in this battle right now over whether Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be—will be overthrown and what role Chalabi could play in this.

ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, my understanding is that the Americans have made it very clear in Baghdad that Maliki—they want Maliki to go, I mean, even to the point of saying—they were saying a couple days ago that there would be no aid of any kind—military aid, airstrikes or what have you—unless—while Maliki was leader of the government. I mean, they view him as the source of all their troubles, which is not totally inaccurate. There’s a certain irony in this, in that they—Maliki is in power, really, thanks to the—thanks to the U.S. Zalmay Khalilzad, then the ambassador to Baghdad, in 2006 selected Maliki, much to everyone’s surprise, including Maliki’s. When Khalilzad said, "How would you like to be prime minister?" Maliki said, "Are you serious?" So, and then that was reaffirmed again in 2010 when Maliki had basically lost an election, and the U.S. and Iran, for that matter—further ironies here—really got—really rammed him back down the throats of the Iraqi people. So, now to be saying, you know, Maliki has to go, as I say, is rich with irony.

December 25, 2005

DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour. Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country. A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment. According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.

But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned. "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide." He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."

OpenTheGovernment.org urges you to press for public disclosure of all Office of Legal Counsel memoranda and other legal opinions setting forth the legal rationale for the United States to use military force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Congress cannot meaningfully exercise its Constitutional power to authorize force if the Executive uses secret legal opinions to extend past authorizations in ways that Congress never anticipated or intended. The Obama administration has stated that it already has the authority it needs to launch airstrikes against ISIS in Syria, but has given shifting, incomplete explanations of the source of that authority.

Last week, administration officials stated that Congress did not need to vote to authorize strikes against ISIS (also commonly known as ISIL or the Islamic State) because the President could rely on the post-September 11, 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). An administration official acknowledged that ISIS had publicly split with Al Qaeda, but said that the AUMF still applied to ISIS based on its past relationship with Al Qaeda, its role in the Iraq war, and ISIS’s “position – supported by some individual members and factions of AQ-aligned groups – that it is the true inheritor of Usama bin Laden’s legacy.”1But the 2001 AUMF does not authorize force against all anti-American terrorist organizations that are arguably “the true inheritors of Usama bin Laden’s legacy.” It authorizes force against “those nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”2

The leadership of ISIS had no known role in the September 11 attacks, and the administration’s recent statements acknowledge that the group first affiliated with Al Qaeda in 2004. The Obama administration has argued for some time that the 2001 AUMF authorized military action against “associated forces” of Al Qaeda even if those affiliates had no role in the September 11 attacks, but has also assured Congress that there were meaningful limits on what constituted an “associated force.” Department of Defense General Counsel Stephen Preston testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May that to be an “associated force,” a group had to be both (1) an organized, armed group that has entered the fight alongside al-Qa’ida or the Taliban and (2) a co-belligerent with al-Qa’ida or the Taliban in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.(3) Al Qaeda specifically disavowed conducting operations with ISIS earlier this year.4 York Times, the administration has said it has no secret intelligence that the groups have reconciled,5 is difficult to understand how it could remain an “associated force.”

Angela Merkel’s reputation as an unassailable chancellor is under threat amid mounting pressure for her to reveal how much she knew about a German-supported US spying operation on European companies and officials. The onus on her government to deliver answers over the spying scandal has only increased with the Austrian government’s announcement that it has filed a legal complaint against an unnamed party over “covert intelligence to the detriment of Austria”. EADS, now Airbus, one of the companies known to have been spied on by the BND – Germany’s foreign intelligence agency – is also taking legal action, saying it will file a complaint with prosecutors in Germany. The BND stands accused of spying on behalf of America’s NSA on European companies such as EADS, as well as the French presidency and the EU commission. There are also suspicions that German government workers and journalists were spied on.

The Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel’s government partners, along with Germany’s federal public prosecutor, Harald Range, are demanding the release of a list of “selectors” – 40,000 search terms used in the spying operations – the results of which were passed on to the NSA. “The list must be published and only then is clarification possible,” said Christine Lambrecht, parliamentary head of the SPD faction. Merkel has so far refused to allow its release. Her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said she would make a decision on whether or not to do so only “once consultations with the American partners are completed”. Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister and a close Merkel confidante, is under even more pressure than the chancellor over allegations he lied about what he knew of BND/NSA cooperation. On Wednesday he answered questions on the affair to a parliamentary committee investigating the row, but only in camera and in a bug-proof room. Among other alleged shortcomings over the affair, he stands accused of failing to act when the BND informed him of the espionage activities in 2008 when he was Merkel’s chief of staff. He has repeatedly been portrayed in the tabloid media with a Pinocchio nose.

While Merkel appeared to have remained relatively unscathed by the scandal until now, an opinion poll showed that most Germans believed the trustworthiness of the three-times chancellor was now seriously at stake. 62% of Germans said her credibility was in doubt, according to the poll, carried out by the Insa institute, while 18% said it was not. Merkel told Radio Bremen in an interview that she was prepared to speak out over the allegations to a parliamentary committee. “I will testify there and justify myself to them where it is required,” she told the broadcaster.