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Paul Merrell

CIA Accused Of Spying On Senate Intelligence Committee Staffers | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...gence-committee-staffers.shtml

surveillance state CIA Senate-Intelligence-Committee torture lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The details are still a little cloudy, but in December, Senator Mark Udall revealed that the Senate Intelligence Committee had come across an internal CIA study that apparently corroborated the information that is in the big Senate report -- and which directly contradicted claims by the CIA to the Committee about how the report was inaccurate -- suggesting that, on top of everything else, the CIA lied to the Intelligence Committee. Udall quizzed CIA boss John Brennan about that internal report. And according to the NY Times, it appears that CIA folks freaked out that the Intelligence Committee somehow got access to that internal study, and responded the way the CIA knows best: by starting to spy on Intelligence Committee staffers: The agency’s inspector general began the inquiry partly as a response to complaints from members of Congress that C.I.A. employees were improperly monitoring the work of staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to government officials with knowledge of the investigation. The committee has spent several years working on a voluminous report about the detention and interrogation program, and according to one official interviewed in recent days, C.I.A. officers went as far as gaining access to computer networks used by the committee to carry out its investigation.
  • On Tuesday, Udall sent a strongly worded letter to President Obama, pushing for the declassification and release of the big 6,300 page report, but also that internal CIA study, which would highlight how the CIA lied. On top of that, he made an oblique reference to this spying activity by the CIA: As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the Committee in relation to the internal CIA review, and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee's oversight responsibilities and for our democracy. It is essential that the Committee be able to do its oversight work -- consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers -- without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it is today. In many ways, the idea that the CIA is directly spying on the Senate Committee charged with its own oversight is a bigger potential scandal than many of the Snowden NSA revelations so far. Even more importantly, it may finally lead to Congress taking action against an out-of-control intelligence community.
Paul Merrell

The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is -- The CIA | War Is A Crime .org - 0 views

warisacrime.org/...only-thing-we-have-fear-cia

conspiracies JFK Obama CIA Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report CIA-stonewalling

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.” It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.
  • Is this why the President feels he cannot fire his clumsily devious Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had to apologize to Congress for giving “clearly erroneous” testimony in March? Is this why he allows National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and counterparts in the FBI to continue to mislead the American people, even though the intermittent snow showers from Snowden show our senior national security officials to have lied — and to have been out of control? This may be small solace to President Obama, but there is no sign that the NSA documents that Snowden’s has released include the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,300-page report on CIA torture. Rather, that report, at least, seems sure to be under Obama’s and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein’s tight control.
  • But Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak. He fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion, and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” The outrage was very obviously mutual.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Truman concluded the op-ed with an admonition that was as clear as the syntax was clumsy: “I would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field – and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” The importance and prescient nature of that admonition are even clearer today, a half-century later.
  • After Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the patrician, well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination. Documents in the Truman Library show that Dulles also mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s warnings about covert action.
  • As the de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles was perfectly positioned to protect himself and his associates, were any commissioners or investigators — or journalists — tempted to question whether Dulles and the CIA played a role in killing Kennedy. And so, the question: Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger” CIA operatives have a hand in John Kennedy’s assassination and in then covering it up? In my view, the best dissection of the evidence pertaining to the murder appeared in James Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable. After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes that the answer is Yes.
  • The mainstream media had an allergic reaction to Douglass’s book and gave it almost no reviews. It is, nevertheless, still selling well. And, more important, it seems a safe bet that President Barack Obama knows what it says and maybe has even read it. This may go some way toward explaining why Obama has been so deferential to the CIA, NSA, FBI and the Pentagon. Could this be at least part of the reason he felt he had to leave the Cheney/Bush-anointed torturers, kidnappers and black-prison wardens in place, instructing his first CIA chief Leon Panetta to become, in effect, the agency’s lawyer rather than leader.
  • Sadly, those concerns that Truman expressed in that op-ed — that he had inadvertently helped create a Frankenstein monster — are as valid today as they were 50 years ago, if not more so.
  • But the timorous President has a big problem. He is acutely aware that, if released, the Senate committee report would create a firestorm – almost certainly implicating Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and many other heavy-hitters of whom he appears to be afraid. And so Obama has allowed Brennan to play bureaucratic games, delaying release of the report for more than a year, even though its conclusions are said to closely resemble earlier findings of the CIA’s own Inspector General and the Constitution Project (see below).
  • Hat tip to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who took the trouble to read the play-by-play of testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee by former CIA General Counsel (2009-2013) Stephen W. Preston, nominated (and now confirmed) to be general counsel at the Department of Defense. Under questioning by Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, Preston admitted outright that, contrary to the CIA’s insistence that it did not actively impede congressional oversight of its detention and interrogation program, “briefings to the committee included inaccurate information related to aspects of the program of express interest to Members.”
  • That “inaccurate information” apparently is thoroughly documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee report which, largely because of the CIA’s imaginative foot-dragging, cost taxpayers $40 million. Udall has revealed that the report (which includes 35,000 footnotes) contains a very long section titled “C.I.A. Representations on the C.I.A. Interrogation Program and the Effectiveness of the C.I.A.’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to Congress.” Preston also acknowledged that the CIA inadequately informed the Justice Department on interrogation and detention. He said, “CIA’s efforts fell well short of our current practices when it comes to providing information relevant to [the Office of Legal Counsel]’s legal analysis.”
  • As Katherine Hawkins, the senior investigator for last April’s bipartisan, independent report by the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, noted in an Oct. 18, 2013 posting, the memos from acting OLC chief, Steven Bradbury, relied very heavily on now-discredited CIA claims that “enhanced interrogation” saved lives, and that the sessions were carefully monitored by medical and psychological personnel to ensure that detainees’ suffering would not rise to the level of torture. According to Hawkins, Udall complained – and Preston admitted – that, in providing the materials requested by the committee, “the CIA removed several thousand CIA documents that the agency thought could be subjected to executive privilege claims by the President, without any decision by Obama to invoke the privilege.”
  • Worse still for the CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee report apparently destroys the agency’s argument justifying torture on the grounds that there was no other way to acquire the needed information save through brutalization. In his answers to Udall, Preston concedes that, contrary to what the agency has argued, it can and has been established that legal methods of interrogation would have yielded the same intelligence. Is anyone still wondering why our timid President is likely to sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee report for as long as he can? Or why he will let John Brennan redact it to a fare-thee-well, if he is eventually forced to release some of it by pressure from folks who care about things like torture?
  • It does appear that the newly taciturn CIA Director Brennan has inordinate influence over the President in such matters – not unlike the influence that both DNI Clapper and NSA Director Alexander seem able to exert. In this respect, Brennan joins the dubious company of the majority of his predecessor CIA directors, as they made abundantly clear when they went to inordinate lengths to prevent their torturer colleagues from being held accountable. (Also, see “CIA Torturers Running Scared,” Sept. 20, 2009; or “Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA?” Dec. 29, 2009)
Paul Merrell

Senators: Palestinian Authority's Decision To Join International Criminal Court is Depl... - 0 views

www.lgraham.senate.gov/...index.cfm

war & peace Israel Palestine ICC senators Israel-firsters

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), Chuck Schumer (D-New York), and Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) today made this statement on the Palestinian Authority's (PA) decision to join the International Criminal Court (ICC). "The Palestinian Authority's (PA) decision to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) is deplorable, counterproductive, and will be met with a strong response by the United States Congress. "Israel, like the United States, is not a member of the ICC and therefore is not subject to its jurisdiction. Further, existing U.S. law makes clear that if the Palestinians initiate an ICC judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, all economic assistance to the PA must end. In light of this legal requirement, Congress will reassess its support for assistance to the PA and seek additional ways to make clear to President Abbas that we strongly oppose his efforts to seek membership in the ICC. If the ICC makes the egregious mistake of accepting the Palestinian Authority as a member, given that it is not a state, Congress will seek ways to protect Israeli citizens from politically abusive ICC actions. "Palestinian leaders will no doubt try to do to the ICC what they have done to international organizations like the UN Human Rights Council - take an organization with laudable goals and undermine its credibility by turning it into a political battering ram against Israel. The ICC and its members would be making a terrible mistake if they allow their important global role to be compromised.
  • "Today there is no viable Palestinian state, and nothing will bring about that goal other than direct negotiations. Rather than committing to direct negotiations with Israel for a sustainable, realistic two-state compromise, President Abbas seeks to launch unilateral, politicized investigations of Israel citizens. He would do better to commit to the exacting, demanding work of diplomacy. As an immediate demonstration of his intentions, President Abbas should end Palestinian actions to join the ICC and pledge to re-enter negotiations with Israel for an enduring, realistic solution to this ongoing conflict. We renew our calls for the Palestinian Authority to end its pact with Hamas, a recognized terror organization that is committed to Israel's destruction and whose charter calls for the murder of Jews."
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jan 15
     
    Yes, direct negotiations with Israel has worked so well for Palestinians since Israel ejected some 750,000 of them in 1948. Not. Note that the particular group of senators who signed onto this press statement are the leading attack dogs in the U.S. Senate for the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). 
Paul Merrell

Wyden Statement at Senate Intelligence Committee's Open Hearing | Press Releases | U.S.... - 0 views

www.wyden.senate.gov/...igence-committees-open-hearing

surveillance state Senate-investigation Wyden Clapper Comey Brennan lies NSA CIA FBI must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) delivered the following statement prior to questioning senior Intelligence Community officials during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s open hearing. Wyden is a senior member of the Intelligence committee. “The men and women of America’s intelligence agencies are overwhelmingly dedicated professionals and they deserve to have leadership that is trusted by the American people. Unfortunately, that trust has been seriously undermined by senior officials’ reckless reliance on secret interpretations of the law and battered by years of misleading and deceptive statements that senior officials made to the American people. These statements did not protect sources and methods that were useful in fighting terror. Instead they hid bad policy choices and violations of the liberties of the American people. For example, the director of the NSA said publicly that the NSA doesn’t hold data on U.S. citizens. That was obviously untrue.  Justice Department officials testified that section 215 of the Patriot Act is analogous to grand jury subpoena authority. And that deceptive statement was made on multiple occasions. Officials also suggested that the NSA doesn’t have the authority to read Americans’ emails without a warrant but the FISA court opinions declassified last August showed that wasn’t true either.
  • The statement and subsequent questions may be viewed below or here:
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 14
     
    Ron Wyden comes out swinging at a Senate hearing, giving 3 examples of lies about digital surveillance told to Congress by intelligence officials and DoJ. Then he presses DNI Clapper, CIA head Brennan, and FBI head Comey to provide by dates certain written public answers to a series of questions that he had previously asked in writing but never received answers on. All three said they would provide the answers, Clapper within 30 days and the other two within 7 days.  The questions themselves are extremely important, about the government's interpretation of legal authorities to conduct warrantless searches and in the case of the CIA, whether it is subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That Act provides for criminal penalties and civil damages for accessing a "protected computer" (essentially any computer connected to the internet, whether in the U.S. or abroad) or activating any command or installing any malware on a protected computer. See generally, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act That question suggests that Wyden and his staff are boring into issues involving the government breaking into computers to access private data. Another question asked whether the government claimed the authority to access private data stored in the cloud without a warrant.  This is a short video well worth the watching time.
Paul Merrell

CIA chief scolds senators for 'outburst' | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...tions-unsupported-by-the-facts

surveillance state CIA targets Senate-Intelligence-Committee torture

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • CIA Director John Brennan fired back at reports that the CIA spied on Senate staffers’ computers while accusing lawmakers of making "spurious allegations."“I am deeply dismayed that some members of the Senate have decided to make spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts,” Brennan said in a statement Wednesday evening. ADVERTISEMENTLawmakers expressed outrage at allegations reported Wednesday of CIA intrusions into staffers’ computers on the Senate Intelligence Committee.Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) confirmed that the CIA Inspector General was investigating, and McClatchy had reported the matter was referred to the Justice Department.But Brennan suggested in his statement that wrongdoing could also have occurred in Congress.“I am very confident that the appropriate authorities reviewing this matter will determine where wrongdoing, if any, occurred in either the Executive Branch or Legislative Branch,” Brennan said.“Until then, I would encourage others to refrain from outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and Congressional overseers.”
  • His statement was released Wednesday evening as McClatchy reported that the computer spying was allegedly discovered when the CIA confronted the Senate Intelligence panel about documents removed from the agency’s headquarters.The second McClatchy report suggested that it was unclear whether the CIA referral to the Justice Department was tied to the computer monitoring, the removal of the documents or another study.The back-and-forth is escalating tensions between the Intelligence Committee and CIA, which were already strained over the panel’s 6,300-page report on the Bush-era interrogation techniques that is critical of the spy agency.
Paul Merrell

Senators clash with Justice Department lawyer over CIA intelligence memos | World news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...er-over-cia-intelligence-memos

surveillance state CIA NSA oversight secret-law

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • An argument about a secret congressional committee's ability to review the US intelligence agencies exploded into rare public view on Tuesday as angry senators demanded legal memos from a nominee to run the CIA's legal office. Caroline Krass, a top justice department lawyer, sparked the ire of several Senate intelligence committee members by claiming that crucial legal opinions about intelligence matters were beyond the scope of the committee. Asked directly and repeatedly if the Senate panel was entitled to the memos, which several senators claimed were crucial for performing their oversight functions, Krass replied: "I do not think so, as a general matter." Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, suggested that Krass placed her nomination as CIA general counsel in jeopardy. "You are going to encounter some heat in that regard," Feinstein said.
  • The Senate intelligence committee, whose public hearings are increasingly rare, is usually a bastion of support for the CIA and its sister intelligence agencies. The exception is the committee's prolonged fight with the CIA over a 6,300-page report on the agency's torture of terrorism detainees in its custody since 9/11. The committee has prepared its report for years; the former chairman, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said the classified version contains 50,000 footnotes. For a year, the panel has sought to release a public version that multiple members of the panel say documents both the brutality of CIA torture and what they have called "lies" told by the CIA to the oversight committees in Congress and the rest of the executive branch concerning its torture practices. CIA director John Brennan, who was a senior CIA official during the years scrutinised by the committee, is resisting release of the report. The CIA has told reporters that the report contains numerous factual errors, which Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat on the panel, said on Tuesday was a "misleading" and self-serving description of differences of "interpretation" between the agency and the committee. "I'm more confident than ever in the factual accuracy" of the torture report, Udall said.
  • The panel said at the hearing that the CIA is stalling on the provision of documents to the committee that will help it complete its work. Krass, a former White House official who worked alongside Brennan there, did not assure the committee she would help provide them. Krass said the general counsel of the CIA had a "duty and obligation to make sure the committee understands the legal basis" for CIA activities. She worried that disclosure of the legal memos themselves would inhibit the executive branch from candidly discussing policy proposals for fear of embarrassing public disclosure. Several senators found Krass's statement insufficient. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who has investigated torture while serving on the Armed Services Committee as well, asked if the committee was "entitled" to the opinions as a matter of oversight. Krass said her "caveated answer" was, "I do not think so, as a general matter." It is unclear if the committee will reject Krass's nomination. But the two-hour exchange highlighted the difficulties the intelligence committees can face in getting basic factual information from the intelligence agencies they are tasked with overseeing.
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  • Those difficulties carry over to the ongoing controversy about the NSA's bulk surveillance activities, Udall and his colleague Ron Wyden of Oregon have charged. But they are the only dissenters on a committee that has been stalwart in favour of the NSA, even as the committee is feuding with the CIA. Feinstein got Krass to say she disagreed with a federal judge's opinion on Monday that the NSA's bulk surveillance of US phone data was likely unconstitutional. Krass, who would have a limited ability to oversee that program at CIA but likely has insight into it through her Justice Department role, disputed Judge Richard Leon's assessment that such constitutional protections surround that data. "I have a different view about the Fourth Amendment," Krass said. Feinstein said she agreed with Krass, but said no one on the committee wished to contravene the constitution, urging the Supreme Court to settle the issue.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Dec 13
     
    John Kennedy had the right idea: abolish the CIA. 
Gary Edwards

Articles of Impeachment Against Obama - 0 views

blackrepublican.blogspot.com/...an-citizens-file-articles.html

Impeachment articles-of-impeachment

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 13
     
    Sarasota, FL ( August 12, 2013) - The National Black Republican Association (NBRA) based in Sarasota, FL, headed by Chairman Frances Rice, filed Articles of Impeachment against President Barack Obama with the following language.   We, black American citizens, in order to free ourselves and our fellow citizens from governmental tyranny, do herewith submit these Articles of Impeachment to Congress for the removal of President Barack H. Obama, aka, Barry Soetoro, from office for his attack on liberty and commission of egregious acts of despotism that constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.   On July 4, 1776, the founders of our nation declared their independence from governmental tyranny and reaffirmed their faith in independence with the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791.   Asserting their right to break free from the tyranny of a nation that denied them the civil liberties that are our birthright, the founders declared:   "When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."  -  Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.   THE IMPEACHMENT POWER   Article II, Section IV of the United States Constitution provides: "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."   THE ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT   In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Barack H. Obama, aka Barry Soetoro, personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, in that:   ARTICL
Paul Merrell

Spy Chief James Clapper Wins Rosemary Award - 0 views

www2.gwu.edu/...20140324

surveillance state NSA Rosemary-Award Obama Clapper Alexander

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance in 2013, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. Despite heavy competition, Clapper's "No, sir" lie to Senator Ron Wyden's question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" sealed his receipt of the dubious achievement award, which cites the vastly excessive secrecy of the entire U.S. surveillance establishment. The Rosemary Award citation leads with what Clapper later called the "least untruthful" answer possible to congressional questions about the secret bulk collection of Americans' phone call data. It further cites other Clapper claims later proved false, such as his 2012 statement that "we don't hold data on U.S. citizens." But the Award also recognizes Clapper's fellow secrecy fetishists and enablers, including:
  • Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, for multiple Rose Mary Woods-type stretches, such as (1) claiming that the secret bulk collection prevented 54 terrorist plots against the U.S. when the actual number, according to the congressionally-established Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) investigation (pp. 145-153), is zero; (2) his 2009 declaration to the wiretap court that multiple NSA violations of the court's orders arose from differences over "terminology," an explanation which the chief judge said "strains credulity;" and (3) public statements by the NSA about its programs that had to be taken down from its website for inaccuracies (see Documents 78, 85, 87 in The Snowden Affair), along with public statements by other top NSA officials now known to be untrue (see "Remarks of Rajesh De," NSA General Counsel, Document 53 in The Snowden Affair).
  • Robert Mueller, former FBI director, for suggesting (as have Gen. Alexander and many others) that the secret bulk collection program might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks, when the 9/11 Commission found explicitly the problem was not lack of data points, but failing to connect the many dots the intelligence community already had about the would-be hijackers living in San Diego. The National Security Division lawyers at the Justice Department, for misleading their own Solicitor General (Donald Verrilli) who then misled (inadvertently) the U.S. Supreme Court over whether Justice let defendants know that bulk collection had contributed to their prosecutions. The same National Security Division lawyers who swore under oath in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for a key wiretap court opinion that the entire text of the opinion was appropriately classified Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (release of which would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to U.S. national security). Only after the Edward Snowden leaks and the embarrassed governmental declassification of the opinion did we find that one key part of the opinion's text simply reproduced the actual language of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the only "grave damage" was to the government's false claims.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • President Obama for his repeated misrepresentations about the bulk collection program (calling the wiretap court "transparent" and saying "all of Congress" knew "exactly how this program works") while in effect acknowledging the public value of the Edward Snowden leaks by ordering the long-overdue declassification of key documents about the NSA's activities, and investigations both by a special panel and by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The PCLOB directly contradicted the President, pointing out that "when the only means through which legislators can try to understand a prior interpretation of the law is to read a short description of an operational program, prepared by executive branch officials, made available only at certain times and locations, which cannot be discussed with others except in classified briefings conducted by those same executive branch officials, legislators are denied a meaningful opportunity to gauge the legitimacy and implications of the legal interpretation in question. Under such circumstances, it is not a legitimate method of statutory construction to presume that these legislators, when reenacting the statute, intended to adopt a prior interpretation that they had no fair means of evaluating." (p. 101)
  • Even an author of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), was broadsided by the revelation of the telephone metadata dragnet. After learning of the extent of spying on Americans that his Act unleashed, he wrote that the National Security Agency "ignored restrictions painstakingly crafted by lawmakers and assumed plenary authority never imagined by Congress" by cloaking its actions behind the "thick cloud of secrecy" that even our elected representatives could not breech. Clapper recently conceded to the Daily Beast, "I probably shouldn't say this, but I will. Had we been transparent about this [phone metadata collection] from the outset … we wouldn't have had the problem we had." The NSA's former deputy director, John "Chris" Inglis, said the same when NPR asked him if he thought the metadata dragnet should have been disclosed before Snowden. "In hindsight, yes. In hindsight, yes." Speaking about potential (relatively minimal) changes to the National Security Agency even the president acknowledged, "And all too often new authorities were instituted without adequate public debate," and "Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us. We won't abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached." (Exhibit A, of course, is the NSA "watchlist" in the 1960's and 1970's that targeted not only antiwar and civil rights activists, but also journalists and even members of Congress.)
  • The Archive established the not-so-coveted Rosemary Award in 2005, named after President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who testified she had erased 18-and-a-half minutes of a crucial Watergate tape — stretching, as she showed photographers, to answer the phone with her foot still on the transcription pedal. Bestowed annually to highlight the lowlights of government secrecy, the Rosemary Award has recognized a rogue's gallery of open government scofflaws, including the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Air Force, the FBI, the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council, and the career Rosemary leader — the Justice Department — for the last two years. Rosemary-winner James Clapper has offered several explanations for his untruthful disavowal of the National Security Agency's phone metadata dragnet. After his lie was exposed by the Edward Snowden revelations, Clapper first complained to NBC's Andrea Mitchell that the question about the NSA's surveillance of Americans was unfair, a — in his words — "When are you going to stop beating your wife kind of question." So, he responded "in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying 'no.'"
  • After continuing criticism for his lie, Clapper wrote a letter to Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Dianne Feinstein, now explaining that he misunderstood Wyden's question and thought it was about the PRISM program (under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) rather than the telephone metadata collection program (under Section 215 of the Patriot Act). Clapper wrote that his staff "acknowledged the error" to Senator Wyden soon after — yet he chose to reject Wyden's offer to amend his answer. Former NSA senior counsel Joel Brenner blamed Congress for even asking the question, claiming that Wyden "sandbagged" Clapper by the "vicious tactic" of asking "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Meanwhile, Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists countered that "it is of course wrong for officials to make false statements, as DNI Clapper did," and that in fact the Senate Intelligence Committee "became complicit in public deception" for failing to rebut or correct Clapper's statement, which they knew to be untruthful. Clapper described his unclassified testimony as a game of "stump the chump." But when it came to oversight of the National Security Agency, it appears that senators and representatives were the chumps being stumped. According to Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich), the House Intelligence Committee "decided it wasn't worthwhile to share this information" about telephone metadata surveillance with other members of Congress. Classified briefings open to the whole House were a "farce," Amash contended, often consisting of information found in newspapers and public statutes.
  • The Emmy and George Polk Award-winning National Security Archive, based at the George Washington University, has carried out thirteen government-wide audits of FOIA performance, filed more than 50,000 Freedom of Information Act requests over the past 28 years, opened historic government secrets ranging from the CIA's "Family Jewels" to documents about the testing of stealth aircraft at Area 51, and won a series of historic lawsuits that saved hundreds of millions of White House e-mails from the Reagan through Obama presidencies, among many other achievements.
  • Director Clapper joins an undistinguished list of previous Rosemary Award winners: 2012 - the Justice Department (in a repeat performance, for failure to update FOIA regulations for compliance with the law, undermining congressional intent, and hyping its open government statistics) 2011- the Justice Department (for doing more than any other agency to eviscerate President Obama's Day One transparency pledge, through pit-bull whistleblower prosecutions, recycled secrecy arguments in court cases, retrograde FOIA regulations, and mixed FOIA responsiveness) 2010 - the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council (for "lifetime failure" to address the crisis in government e-mail preservation) 2009 - the FBI (for having a record-setting rate of "no records" responses to FOIA requests) 2008 - the Treasury Department (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades) 2007 - the Air Force (for disappearing its FOIA requests and having "failed miserably" to meet its FOIA obligations, according to a federal court ruling) 2006 - the Central Intelligence Agency (for the biggest one-year drop-off in responsiveness to FOIA requests yet recorded).   ALSO-RANS The Rosemary Award competition in 2013 was fierce, with a host of government contenders threatening to surpass the Clapper "least untruthful" standard. These secrecy over-achievers included the following FOI delinquents:
  • Admiral William McRaven, head of the Special Operations Command for the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, who purged his command's computers and file cabinets of all records on the raid, sent any remaining copies over to CIA where they would be effectively immune from the FOIA, and then masterminded a "no records" response to the Associated Press when the AP reporters filed FOIA requests for raid-related materials and photos. If not for a one-sentence mention in a leaked draft inspector general report — which the IG deleted for the final version — no one would have been the wiser about McRaven's shell game. Subsequently, a FOIA lawsuit by Judicial Watch uncovered the sole remaining e-mail from McRaven ordering the evidence destruction, in apparent violation of federal records laws, a felony for which the Admiral seems to have paid no price. Department of Defense classification reviewers who censored from a 1962 document on the Cuban Missile Crisis direct quotes from public statements by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The quotes referred to the U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey that would ultimately (and secretly) be pulled out in exchange for Soviet withdrawal of its missiles in Cuba. The denials even occurred after an appeal by the National Security Archive, which provided as supporting material the text of the Khrushchev statements and multiple other officially declassified documents (and photographs!) describing the Jupiters in Turkey. Such absurd classification decisions call into question all of the standards used by the Pentagon and the National Declassification Center to review historical documents.
  • Admiral William McRaven memo from May 13, 2011, ordering the destruction of evidence relating to the Osama bin Laden raid. (From Judicial Watch)
  • The Department of Justice Office of Information Policy, which continues to misrepresent to Congress the government's FOIA performance, while enabling dramatic increases in the number of times government agencies invoke the purely discretionary "deliberative process" exemption. Five years after President Obama declared a "presumption of openness" for FOIA requests, Justice lawyers still cannot show a single case of FOIA litigation in which the purported new standards (including orders from their own boss, Attorney General Eric Holder) have caused the Department to change its position in favor of disclosure.
Paul Merrell

Details of Illegal Torture That the CIA Doesn't Want You to Know About - Atlantic Mobile - 0 views

m.theatlantic.com/...284528

war & peace torture criminal-prosecution CIA cover-up Senate-Intelligence-Committee

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The Senate report on CIA torture is still being suppressed. But details are leaking out, according to a report by Jason Leopold. Citing Intelligence Committee staffers, he writes that "at least one high-value detainee was subjected to torture techniques that went beyond those authorized by George W. Bush's Justice Department." In addition, "harsh measures authorized by the Department of Justice had been applied to at least one detainee before such legal authorization was received."  The notion that Bush-era interrogations were lawful has always been highly dubious. This latest news plucks away even the fig leaf afforded by Bush Administration attorneys. Some say it would be unfair to prosecute anyone told that a tactic was permitted.  Will they call for a criminal investigation of these incidents? The CIA seems to agree that these details are important. It is seeking new assurances that the report won't lead to criminal investigations, according to Leopold's sources:
  • When Panetta briefed CIA employees on March 16, 2009, about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review, he said Feinstein and her Republican counterpart, Kit Bond of Missouri, had “assured” him “that their goal is to draw lessons for future policy decisions, not to punish those who followed guidance from the Department of Justice.” But now that some of the report’s conclusions suggest that some of the techniques used on Abu Zubaydah and other captives either went beyond what was authorized by the Justice Department or were applied before they had been authorized, the congressional staffers and U.S. officials who spoke to Al Jazeera said CIA officials are seeking further assurances against any criminal investigation. Thus far, no such assurances have been given, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, nor is there any indication that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report would prompt a criminal investigation. Any agreement to refrain from investigating torture as a criminal offense would itself violate the law. The UN Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan and later ratified by the U.S. Senate, compels signatories to investigate torture and "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution." Perhaps the U.S. will one day adhere to the law.
Paul Merrell

We Can Handle the Truth - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/..._the_truth_cia_excuses_torture

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report over-classification

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Several years back, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) began a massive effort to evaluate and report on the CIA's post-9/11 interrogation practices, seeking to make a definitive determination of whether CIA techniques were lawful and effective. SSCI staff undertook a $40 million investigation over a three-year period, reviewing millions of classified documents and interviewing hundreds of people, inside and outside the government. SSCI chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, calls it "by far the most important oversight activity ever conducted by this committee."
  • The CIA refused to permit SSCI investigators to interview its interrogators, however, and a full year after the SSCI adopted a 6,000-page report on the investigation in a bipartisan vote, the agency continues to resist efforts to make the report public. Let's take a look at the most common arguments against releasing the SSCI report. None holds water.
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14
     
    Perceptive rebuttal of the CIA's excuses for keeping the lid on the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the CIA and torture. 
Paul Merrell

McCain Proposes New Select Committee on NSA Leaks - Secrecy News - 0 views

blogs.fas.org/...mccain-select

surveillance state NSA NSA-reform McCain select-committee Senate-investigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • A resolution introduced yesterday by Sen. John McCain would establish a new Senate Select Committee to investigate the unauthorized disclosures of classified information on National Security Agency collection programs and their implications for national policy. The McCain resolution is framed broadly and touches on many issues besides leaks, including intelligence policy, congressional oversight, the role of contractors, the constitutionality of current intelligence programs, and more. The resolution asserts that “senior officials in the intelligence community may have misled Congress or otherwise obfuscated the nature, extent, or use of certain intelligence-collection programs, operations, and activities of the National Security Agency, including intelligence-collection programs affecting Americans.” “[T]he provision of incomplete or inaccurate information by officials of the intelligence community has inhibited effective congressional oversight of certain intelligence-collection programs, operations, and activities of the National Security Agency, including intelligence-collection programs affecting Americans, and undermined congressional and public support of these programs,” the resolution stated.
  • Moreover, “some such programs, operations, and activities that are the subject matter of the unauthorized disclosures may not have been authorized, or may have exceeded that which was authorized, by law, or may not have been permitted under the Constitution of the United States.” The proposed new select committee would investigate the unauthorized disclosures and assess how they occurred, the damage to U.S. national security that resulted, and how such damage could be mitigated. The committee would review the role of intelligence contractors and the adequacy of current management controls.
  • The committee would evaluate the legality, constitutionality, and efficacy of the NSA collection programs that have been disclosed. It would also consider “the need for greater transparency and more effective congressional oversight of intelligence community activities,” and whether existing laws are sufficient “to safeguard the rights and privacies of citizens of the United States.” In proposing a new select committee, Senator McCain is implicitly declaring that existing oversight procedures are inadequate, and that a new, more fundamental approach is required. The prospects for the McCain proposal to become a reality are uncertain.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Feb 14
     
    Reading the McCain resolution left me with mixed feelings. As worded, the proposed Select Committee is largely aimed at the right subjects but suffers somewhat from focus on a rather diffuse set of individual trees rather than on the forest. I.e., the topic should be definition of digital privacy rights and their vindication but focuses instead on NSA reform. The most worrisome aspect is the absence of a mechanism to ensure that the few Senators who have taken the lead in protection of civil liberties would become members of the Select Committee; rather, appointments to the Select Committee are parceled out to be made various existing Committee chairs and ranking minority members, plus top ranking Senators of both parties.   But this could also be the 2014 counterpart to the 1975 Church Committee that resulted in significant reform of U.S. spy agencies, albeit the spy agencies seem to have managed to work their way around those reforms.  
Paul Merrell

Behind Clash Between C.I.A. and Congress, a Secret Report on Interrogations - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-report-on-interrogations.html

surveillance state CIA Senate-Intelligence-Committee

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • It was early December when the Central Intelligence Agency began to suspect it had suffered what it regarded as an embarrassing computer breach.Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee. What the C.I.A. did next opened a new and even more rancorous chapter in the struggle over how the history of the interrogation program will be written. Agency officials began scouring the digital logs of the computer network used by the Senate staff members to try to learn how and where they got the report. Their search not only raised constitutional questions about the propriety of an intelligence agency investigating its congressional overseers, but has also resulted in two parallel inquiries by the Justice Department — one into the C.I.A. and one into the committee.
  • Each side accuses the other of spying on it, with the Justice Department now playing the uneasy role of arbitrator in the bitter dispute. “It’s always been a dicey proposition to be investigating Congress,” said W. George Jameson, a C.I.A. lawyer for decades. “You don’t do it lightly.”At the center of the dispute is the classified internal C.I.A. review of the detention and interrogation program, a review that Democratic senators believe buttresses the conclusion in the intelligence committee’s 6,300-page report that the program yielded little valuable intelligence.The story of how the internal review became the focal point of an escalating fight is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials on both sides of the battle. Most of them declined to be identified because of the continuing investigations.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 14
     
    More details of the CIA surveillance of the Senate Intelligence Committee that led to the current confrontation.
Paul Merrell

Tikkun Daily Blog » Blog Archive » Obama Suppressing 6,000-Page Report on CIA... - 0 views

www.tikkun.org/...-senate-intelligence-committee

tyranny CIA extraordinary rendition torture Senate-Intelligence-Committee

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  • Over a year ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to adopt a historic, 6,000-page report which contains “startling details” about CIA misdeeds related to its torture program. The report, which cost $40 million to produce and appears to pose no national security threats, has been set for release since December 13, 2012. However, it has yet to see the light of day. The reason: the Obama administration continues to suppress its release, apparently for no reason other than to protect the reputations of the guilty. Per The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf:
  • [Over a year ago], the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to adopt a 6,000-page report on the CIA rendition, detention, and interrogation program that led to torture. Its contents include details on each prisoner in CIA custody, the conditions of their confinement, whether they were tortured, the intelligence they provided, and the degree to which the CIA lied about its behavior to overseers. Senator Dianne Feinstein declared it one of the most significant oversight efforts in American history, noting that it contains “startling details” and raises “critical questions.” But all these months later, the report is still being suppressed. The Obama Administration has no valid reason to suppress the report. Its contents do not threaten national security, as evidenced by the fact that numerous figures who normally defer to the national-security state want it released with minor redactions. The most prominent of all is Vice President Joe Biden. The Center for Victims of Torture, in advocating for the public’s right to fully understand the CIA’s lawless torture program during the Bush administration, has procured the signatures of 58 national security experts and officials. These signatures include U.S. senators, former Obama administration officials and retired military leaders. President Obama once promised that his White House would be the most transparent in history, and went so far in February to claim that such is indeed the case. This most-transparent-ever administration is now
  • marking the CIA report as classified, determined “to keep secret the most thorough accounting we have of the agency’s lawless, immoral behavior.” Is President Obama bowing to factions within the CIA? Shielding the powerful from rebuke during his own illegal drone program? Protecting past criminals as a down payment on future investigations? To answer those questions would be to speculate. However, what is known is this: if we don’t fully understand those CIA abuses perpetrated in the name of the State and national security, we are more likely to allow those abuses to happen again.
Paul Merrell

CIA Torture Report: Oversight, But No Remedies Yet - 0 views

fas.org/...torture-remedies

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation. Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full. That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell. “The CIA informed the Committee that due to CIA record retention policies, the CIA could not produce all CIA email communications requested by the Committee,” the report noted, explaining that the desired information was sometimes recovered from a reply message when the original email was missing. Agency emails turned out to be a critical source of information, a fact that illuminates the Committee’s sharp response recently to the (now suspended) CIA proposal to the National Archives (NARA) to destroy most Agency emails of non-senior officials.
  • Thus, the gruesome record of the waterboarding of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah “was referenced in emails, but was not documented or otherwise noted in CIA cables.” (This is at odds with NARA’s initial view that “It is unlikely that permanent records will be found in these email accounts that is not filed in other appropriate files.”) The Committee report is also a remarkable demonstration of the congressional oversight function that is all the more impressive because it was performed in adverse, unfavorable conditions. It is striking to see how the CIA sometimes treated the Senate Intelligence Committee, its leadership and its staff with the same disdain and evasiveness that is often perceived by FOIA requesters and other members of the public. Committee questions were ignored, inaccurate information was provided, and the oversight process was gamed.
  • “Internal CIA emails include discussion of how the CIA could ‘get… off the hook on the cheap’ regarding [then-Committee] Chairman [Bob] Graham’s requests for additional information…. In the end, CIA officials simply did not respond to Graham’s requests prior to his departure from the Committee in January 2003,” the report said. “I am deeply disturbed by the implications of the study for the committee’s ability to discharge its oversight responsibility,” wrote Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) in his additional remarks. “Because it appears from the study that the committee was continuously misled as to virtually all aspects of this program, it naturally raises the extremely troubling question as to whether we can trust the representations of the agency in connection with difficult or sensitive issues in the future.” But minority members of the Committee disputed this characterization: “In reality, the overall pattern of engagement with the Congress shows that the CIA attempted to keep the Congress informed of its activities,” they wrote in their extensive dissenting views. Perhaps the most important achievement of the Committee report was to document and memorialize the fact that agents of the US Government practiced torture. Not “harsh measures” or “enhanced techniques,” but torture.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), who criticized what she said were methodological flaws in the Committee report, said in her additional views that “Despite these significant flaws, the report’s findings lead me to conclude that some detainees were subject to techniques that constituted torture. This inhumane and brutal treatment never should have occurred.” By the same token, the most important omission from the report is the absence of any discussion of remedies. Now that it is firmly established that “we tortured some folks,” as President Obama awkwardly put it, the question is what to do about it. Confession without atonement is incomplete. Prosecution seems problematic for a number of reasons, including the difficulty of localizing responsibility, when it is entire institutions and not just particular officials that failed. A different approach to the problem would start by considering the individuals who suffered abuse at the hands of the U.S. government, including a number of persons who were detained in error. Congress could now ask how some of them (i.e. those who are still alive) could be compensated in some measure for what was wrongly done to them.
  • Several previous efforts to seek remedies for torture were deflected by use of the state secrets privilege. In light of the detailed findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, that sort of evasion should be harder to sustain. Congress could accelerate a resolution of the problem with a focused investigation of what potential remedies are now feasible and appropriate.
Paul Merrell

Florida Event Spotlights Signs of Foreign Support of 9/11 Plot | 28Pages.org - 0 views

28pages.org/...of-foreign-support-of-911-plot

9-11 28-pages declassification-review Graham video

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Last month, 9/11 parents Loreen and Matt Sellitto hosted an informative event focused on one of the most important yet least-understood aspects of September 11: the extent to which the terrorists received support from foreign governments—and the extent of the government’s knowledge of that support, both before and after the attacks.
  • Held in Naples, Florida, the November 11 event was called “The Untold Story of 9/11: A Conversation with Bob Graham.” Following opening remarks from host Loreen Sellitto and from Terry Strada of 9/11 Families United for Justice Against Terrorism, the event featured three speakers: Former Senator Bob Graham, the most prominent voice outside government fighting for declassification of the 28 pages. Broward Bulldog editor Dan Christensen, who broke the story of the FBI’s discovery of a 9/11 cell in Sarasota, and who continues working to bring FBI investigation documents into the daylight. Attorney Tom Julin, who is helping the Broward Bulldog in its effort to overcome the government’s stonewalling. Here, we cover many of the highlights; a full video of the event can be found at the bottom of the page.
  • Broward Bulldog Battles Feds Over Sarasota Investigation Christensen’s quest for answers about foreign sources of support of the 9/11 hijackers began in 2011 with a tip passed to him by Anthony Summers, who, with his wife Robbyn Swan, had just completed their book, “The Eleventh Day.” Summers and Swan had learned about an FBI investigation of a Saudi family with close ties to the Saudi government that suddenly abandoned its upscale home just outside Sarasota about two weeks before 9/11. Pursuing the lead, Christensen contacted Senator Graham for his insights into the Sarasota cell. Braced for the possibility that Graham would decline comment because of classification restraints, Christensen was stunned to learn that Graham—who had been chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and co-chaired the joint Congressional inquiry into 9/11—was unable to comment for an altogether different reason: Graham said the FBI had never told him about its Sarasota investigation.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Christensen then inquired with the FBI, which confirmed there had been an investigation, but said it found no connection to 9/11. Next, seeking to learn how they reached that conclusion, he requested the FBI’s investigation documents using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but the FBI said there were no documents matching the request. Finding that completely implausible, in September 2012, Christensen and the Broward Bulldog filed a FOIA lawsuit. About six months later, the FBI sent Christensen 35 partially redacted pages that contained a bombshell conclusion directly contradicting the government’s earlier denials: The investigation had in fact “revealed many connections” between the Saudi family that fled their home and “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001.” (Indeed, investigations showed the home had been called and even visited by future 9/11 hijackers.)
  • In April 2014, as the Bulldog’s lawsuit progressed, Fort Lauderdale U.S. District Judge William Zloch ordered the FBI to conduct a more thorough search of its files, chiding the government for advancing “nonsensical” legal arguments in its effort to maintain secrecy. Later, he ordered the FBI to turn over more than 80,000 pages from its Tampa office so he could personally review them and reach his own conclusions about the need for secrecy. The judge’s review of that enormous cache is still underway.
  • Julin, in addition to providing an interesting elaboration on the legal battle to liberate the FBI’s Sarasota files, explained the Broward Bulldog’s attempts to secure the release of the 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers found in the 2002 report of the joint Congressional inquiry. Julin is helping Christensen, Summers and Swan push for the declassification of the 28 pages through a little-known process called Mandatory Declassification Review. Under that process, an agency’s refusal to declassify material can ultimately be appealed to a multi-agency panel that reviews the material and presents a recommendation to the president. The panel is now reviewing the 28 pages. While there’s no deadline, Julin has been told to expect the panel’s recommendation to President Obama sometime this winter.
  • Graham also explored the questions of: Why would the Saudis support Islamic terrorists operating in the United States? Why did the Bush administration shield Saudi Arabia by preventing the release of damning material? Why would the Obama administration continue the Bush administration’s “soft treatment” of Saudi Arabia? In the course of his remarks, Graham briefly discussed two of his books. The first, “Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America’s War on Terror,” is a non-fiction work, which required advance clearance from the federal government that resulted in many passages being censored. That disappointing experience prompted Graham to do an end-run around government censors by publishing “Keys to the Kingdom,” a work labelled as fiction but which Graham used to write on the topic with greater freedom.
Paul Merrell

CIA admits to spying on Senate staffers | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-admits-spying-senate-staffers

surveillance state CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report Brennan

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials. Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture. Among other things, it was revealed that agency officials conducted keyword searches and email searches on committee staff while they used the network.The admission brings Brennan’s already rocky tenure at the head of the CIA under renewed question. One senator on the panel said he had lost confidence in the director, although the White House indicated its support for a man who has been one of Barack Obama’s most trusted security aides.
  • CIA spokesman Dean Boyd acknowledged that agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members, who were using a network the agency had set up, called RDINet. “Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between [the committee] and the CIA in 2009 regarding access to the RDINet,” he said.Asked if Brennan had or would offer his resignation, a different CIA spokesman, Ryan Trapani, replied: “No.”
  • McClatchy first reported the apology on Thursday.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Aug 14
     
    A bit more detail on what CIA admits to doing. 
Paul Merrell

WASHINGTON: Citing redactions, Feinstein delays release of report on CIA interrogations... - 0 views

www.newsobserver.com/...s-fuel-to-cia-controversy.html

war & peace torture CIA Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report declassification

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration censored significant portions of the findings of an investigation into the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists, forcing the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to delay their release “until further notice.”The postponement late Friday added to serious frictions over the investigation between the administration and lawmakers, who have been pressing for the swiftest, most extensive publication of the findings on one of darkest chapters in the CIA’s 65-year history.Feinstein announced the delay only hours after the White House returned the document to her after it completed its declassification review
  • “A preliminary review of the report indicates that there have been significant redactions. We need additional time to understand the basis for these redactions and determine their justification,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a statement.Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., a member of the committee who’s been fiercely critical of the CIA interrogation program, also decried the blackouts, saying President Barack Obama had pledged to ensure a release of the findings.“I am concerned about the excessive redactions Chairman Feinstein referenced in her statement, especially given the president’s unequivocal commitment to declassifying the Senate Intelligence Committee’s study,” Udall said. “I promised earlier this year to hold the president to his word and I intend to do so.”Udall vowed to work with Feinstein to declassify the findings “to the fullest extent possible, correct the record on the CIA’s brutal and ineffective detention and interrogation program, and ensure the CIA learns from its past mistakes.”
  • Reacting to Feinstein’s announcement, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that more than 85 percent of the report had been declassified and half of the redactions were in footnotes. “The redactions were the result of an extensive and unprecedented inter-agency process, headed up by my office, to protect sensitive classified information,” Clapper said in a statement. “We are confident that the declassified document delivered to the committee will provide the public with a full view of the committee’s report on the detention and interrogation program, and we look forward to a constructive dialogue with the committee.”
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Aug 14
     
    The Great CIA Torture Cover-up Continues, now in its 12th year. And even the summary of the Senate report, sanitized by the Senate Intelligence Committee for complete public release, now gets axed by CIA. Our great-great-grandchildren might even get to read the full report, long after everyone involved in these war crimes has died.  
Paul Merrell

U.S. officials: Russian airstrikes have changed 'calculus completely' in Syria - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-b2bc-988409ee911b_story.html

war & peace Syria Russia U.S.-intelligence DNI-Clapper

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Russian military intervention in Syria has turned the course of that country’s civil war against U.S.-backed rebel groups, increasing the likelihood that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his loyalists will remain in power, U.S. intelligence officials testified Tuesday. The assessment amounts to an acknowledgment by U.S. spy agencies that Russian airstrikes have derailed the Obama administration’s aims of pushing Assad aside as part of a political settlement to the nearly five-year old conflict. “The Russian reinforcement has changed the calculus completely,” Lt. Gen. Vincent R. Stewart, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in Senate testimony. Assad is “in a much stronger negotiating position than he was just six months ago,” Stewart said. “I’m more inclined to believe that he is a player on the stage longer term than he was six months to a year ago.” As recently as last summer, U.S. intelligence officials were openly talking about an “endgame” for the Syrian leader, who is also supported by Iran.
  • Stewart’s remarks came during a pair of Senate hearings on Tuesday that served as a grim survey of the security problems — including cyberattacks, terror threats and failing states — that seem certain to confront the next occupant of the White House. Among those testifying were Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., FBI Director James B. Comey and CIA Director John Brennan, who was making his first public appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee since the panel issued a scathing 2014 report on the agency’s use of brutal interrogation methods on terrorism suspects. The lingering tensions behind that Senate probe erupted during a heated exchange Tuesday between Brennan and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who demanded an admission from the CIA chief that his staff had improperly accessed files of Senate investigators combing through agency records. As Wyden made his case, Brennan bristled, saying, “This is the annual threat assessment, is it not.”
  • Brennan seemed to be chiding Wyden for raising the computer intrusion issue during a hearing that is annually devoted to examining security threats. But the confrontation only continued, with both men raising their voices. Ultimately, Brennan admitted “very limited inappropriate actions” by CIA staff but accused Senate investigators of comparable transgressions and came close to shouting at Wyden: “Do not say that we spied on Senate computers or your files! Do not say that!”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Despite nearly 15 years of U.S. counterterrorism operations after the Sept. 11 attacks, Clapper said, “there are now more Sunni violent extremist groups, members and safe havens than at any time in history.” At one point, Clapper described his grim presentation, only half jokingly, as a “litany of doom.”
Paul Merrell

FinCEN Files: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren join watchdog groups in calling for b... - 1 views

www.icij.org/...in-calling-for-banking-reforms

banksters money-laundering FinCEN-files banking-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Prominent U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have joined watchdog groups and banking regulators in calling for a crackdown on dirty money and banks that profit from it in the wake of the FinCEN Files investigation. Sanders and Warren, former candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination who both inspired strong support on the left, called for tougher consequences for banks and their executives who move money linked to crime and corruption.
  • Sanders’ messages came less than a day after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ release of FinCEN Files, a global investigation revealing how leading banks allowed trillions of dollars in tainted money to flow freely through the financial system. Based on more than 2,100 secret reports filed by banks to the U.S. Department of Treasury and obtained by BuzzFeed News, the investigation included more than 400 journalists in 88 countries around the world. Warren also called for a crackdown on banks that are complicit in the spread of dirty money, highlighting policy proposals that would strengthen the ability of law enforcement to combat white collar crime. Warren called for the creation of a new unit in the U.S. Treasury Department to investigate financial crimes linked to the flow of dirty money. She also pushed for the passage of the Ending Too Big to Jail Act, a law she proposed in 2018 that would make it easier to hold Wall Street executives criminally accountable when the banks they lead engage in illegal activity.
  • Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former sanctions official for the U.S. Treasury Department, said the revelations exposed the national security threats posed by banks’ laxity. “The FinCEN Files illustrate the alarming truth that an enormous amount of illicit money is sloshing around our financial system, and that U.S. banks play host and facilitator to rogues and criminals that represent some of America’s most insidious national security threats,” Rosenberg told the Wall Street Journal. Rosenberg urged the passage of stronger transparency laws that crack down on the use of anonymous companies, which are often used for money laundering.
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  • Legislation that would end shell companies by creating a national registry of the real, flesh-and-blood owners of all U.S. companies enjoys overwhelming support in both parties, but remains stalled in the U.S. Senate due to a packed schedule and partisan dysfunction, ICIJ reported in August.
Paul Merrell

White House OKd spying on allies, U.S. intelligence officials say - latimes.com - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...-20131029,0,4289803,full.story

surveillance state NSA Obama NSA-targets lies scandal

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping. Professional staff members at the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are angry, these officials say, believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with close allies. The resistance emerged as the White House said it would curtail foreign intelligence collection in some cases and two senior U.S. senators called for investigations of the practice. France, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Sweden have all publicly complained about the NSA surveillance operations, which reportedly captured private cellphone conversations by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, among other foreign leaders.
  • On Monday, as Spain joined the protest, the fallout also spread to Capitol Hill.
  • Until now, members of Congress have chiefly focused their attention on Snowden's disclosures about the NSA's collection of U.S. telephone and email records under secret court orders. "With respect to NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of U.S. allies — including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany — let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Unless the United States is engaged in hostilities against a country or there is an emergency need for this type of surveillance, I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers," she said in a statement. Feinstein said the Intelligence Committee had not been told of "certain surveillance activities" for more than a decade, and she said she would initiate a major review of the NSA operation. She added that the White House had informed her that "collection on our allies will not continue," although other officials said most U.S. surveillance overseas would not be affected. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee, said Congress should consider creating a special select committee to examine U.S. eavesdropping on foreign leaders.
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  • "Obviously, we're going to want to know exactly what the president knew and when he knew it," McCain told reporters in Chicago. "We have always eavesdropped on people around the world. But the advance of technology has given us enormous capabilities, and I think you might make an argument that some of this capability has been very offensive both to us and to our allies."
  • Precisely how the surveillance is conducted is unclear. But if a foreign leader is targeted for eavesdropping, the relevant U.S. ambassador and the National Security Council staffer at the White House who deals with the country are given regular reports, said two former senior intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in discussing classified information. Obama may not have been specifically briefed on NSA operations targeting a foreign leader's cellphone or email communications, one of the officials said. "But certainly the National Security Council and senior people across the intelligence community knew exactly what was going on, and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous." If U.S. spying on key foreign leaders was news to the White House, current and former officials said, then White House officials have not been reading their briefing books. Some U.S. intelligence officials said they were being blamed by the White House for conducting surveillance that was authorized under the law and utilized at the White House. "People are furious," said a senior intelligence official who would not be identified discussing classified information. "This is officially the White House cutting off the intelligence community."
  • Any decision to spy on friendly foreign leaders is made with input from the State Department, which considers the political risk, the official said. Any useful intelligence is then given to the president's counter-terrorism advisor, Lisa Monaco, among other White House officials. Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said Monday that Obama had ordered a review of surveillance capabilities, including those affecting America's closest foreign partners and allies. "Our review is looking across the board at our intelligence gathering to ensure that as we gather intelligence, we are properly accounting for both the security of our citizens and our allies and the privacy concerns shared by Americans and citizens around the world," Carney said.
  • Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the review would examine "whether we have the appropriate posture when it comes to heads of state, how we coordinate with our closest allies and partners, and what further guiding principles or constraints might be appropriate for our efforts." She said the review should be completed this year.
  • Intelligence officials also disputed a Wall Street Journal article Monday that said the White House had learned only this summer — during a review of surveillance operations that might be exposed by Snowden — about an NSA program to monitor communications of 35 world leaders. Since then, officials said, several of the eavesdropping operations have been stopped because of political sensitivities.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 13
     
    Good. The Intelligence community is calling BS on Obama's claim that he didn't know about the spying on foreign heads of allied states. And McCain says we need a select Congressional committee to look into what the president knew and when he knew it. That's an implicit slam of the Feinstein-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's oversight of the intelligence agencies and a signal that there is a scandal lurking here. More importantly, a new select committee would not have the same membership as the existing Intelligence Community, which has largely functioned as a rubber stamp for what the intelligence agencies want. We have been down this road before, in the mid-70s, when the Defense Dept. intelligence agencies were caught spying on Americans, leading to the Select Committee investigation headed by former Sen. Frank Church and to the initial passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, among other legislation delivering a strong message to the intelligence agencies that what happens within the U.S. is off-limits to them. But that was a lesson forgotten as new technology came along for NSA to play with. If Obama is smart, he will promptly respond to the LA Times article with a clarification that top members of his staff knew and the previous statement dealt only with his personal knowledge. But the Obama Administration has overwhelmingly demonstrated an inability to head off scandals and a big tendency to cover-up rather than get out in front of story, particularly in matters involving the NSA. So we may see a major scandal emerge from this already enormous scandal that is laid directly at Barack Obama's feet, a cover-up scandal.   Who knew what when, where, why, and how? My favorite question. 
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