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Paul Merrell

CISA Cybersecurity Bill Advances Despite Privacy Concerns | WIRED - 0 views

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surveillance state NSA cybersecurity legislation CISA privacy-loophole

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • For months, privacy advocates have been pointing to flaws in CISA, the new reincarnation of the cybersecurity bill known as CISPA that Congress has been kicking around since 2013. But today that zombie bill lurched one step closer to becoming law. The Senate Intelligence Committee passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, by a vote of 14 to one Thursday afternoon. The bill, like the failed Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act that proceeded it, is designed to encourage the sharing of data between private companies and the government to prevent and respond to cybersecurity threats. But privacy critics have protested that CISA would create a legal framework for companies to more closely monitor internet users and share that data with government agencies.
  • After Thursday’s vote, Senator Ron Wyden—the only member of the Senate’s intelligence committee to vote against the bill—repeated those privacy concerns in a public statement. “If information-sharing legislation does not include adequate privacy protections then that’s not a cybersecurity bill—it’s a surveillance bill by another name,” he wrote. “It makes sense to encourage private firms to share information about cybersecurity threats. But this information sharing is only acceptable if there are strong protections for the privacy rights of law-abiding American citizens.”
  • Looking at the most recently revealed public version of CISA, privacy advocates have pointed out that it would allow sharing of personal data that goes beyond cybersecurity threats. It also allows the sharing of private sector data with the government that could prevent “terrorism” or an “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm.” That language, Open Technology Institute privacy counsel Robyn Greene has argued, means CISA might “facilitate investigations into garden-variety violent crimes that have nothing to do with cyber threats.” “If that weren’t worrisome enough, the bill would also let law enforcement and other government agencies use information it receives to investigate, without a requirement for imminence or any connection to computer crime, even more crimes like carjacking, robbery, possession or use of firearms, ID fraud, and espionage,” Greene wrote in February. “While some of these are terrible crimes, and law enforcement should take reasonable steps to investigate them, they should not do so with information that was shared under the guise of enhancing cybersecurity.”
Paul Merrell

White House withholds records from Senate panel's CIA inquiry | Dallas Morning News - 0 views

www.dallasnews.com/...-senate-panels-cia-inquiry.ece

Obama CIA torture Senate-Intelligence-Committee cover-up

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The White House has been withholding for five years more than 9,000 top-secret documents sought by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for its investigation into the now-defunct CIA detention and interrogation program, even though President Barack Obama hasn’t exercised a claim of executive privilege.In contrast to public assertions that it supports the committee’s work, the White House has ignored or rejected offers in multiple meetings and in letters to find ways for the committee to review the records, a McClatchy investigation has found.The significance of the materials couldn’t be learned. But the administration’s refusal to turn them over or to agree to any compromise raises questions about what they would reveal about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons.The dispute indicates that the White House is more involved than it has acknowledged in the unprecedented power struggle between the committee and the CIA, which has triggered charges that the agency searched the panel’s computers without authorization and has led to requests to the Justice Department for criminal investigations of CIA personnel and Senate aides.“These documents certainly raise the specter that the White House has been involved in stonewalling the investigation,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University Law School.The committee and the CIA declined to comment.
  • In a prepared statement to McClatchy, the White House confirmed that “a small percentage” of the 6.2 million pages of documents provided to the committee were “set aside because they raise executive branch confidentiality interests.”
  • In question are 9,400 documents that came to the committee’s attention in 2009, McClatchy has learned. It’s unclear whether the CIA first gave the committee staff access to the materials before the White House withheld them.But Obama hasn’t formally decreed that the documents are protected by executive privilege, McClatchy learned. Although the doctrine isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, the Supreme Court recognized in 1974 a limited power by the White House to withhold certain communications between high officials and close aides who advise and assist them.
Gary Edwards

IRS Lawyer Carter Hull Confirms Tea Party Targeting Ordered By Washington - Investors.com - 0 views

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Christine-ODonnell IRS-gate irs

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Hull has confirmed the premeditated targeting of Tea Party groups went even higher than him or Lerner.
  • Apparently not only Tea Party groups were targeted but actual candidates as well. On March 9, 2010, the day Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell revealed her plan to run for Vice President Joe Biden's former Delaware Senate seat , an IRS tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers, an action that was quickly publicized by those who did not wish her well.
  • Earlier this year, Dennis Martel, special agent with the Department of Treasury in Baltimore, left a message on O'Donnell's cell phone telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day. The problem was that the house was not hers in the first place and the IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.
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  • To us it is inconceivable that one of only two political appointees was directly involved in targeting of Tea Party groups without White House knowledge and consent. It is said the fish rots from the head, and this one is really beginning to stink.
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Jul 13
     
    This has gone way too far.  The 2012 elections must be nullified and rescheduled.  Tens of millions of American citizens have been systematically targeted, their civil and Constitutional rights destroyed, and their voices and votes politically eliminated by a massive government conspiracy.  The 2012 election is a fraud.  And nothing short of complete nullification and recall, and the termination of the IRS will do the great Republic justice. excerpt: Scandal: A retiring IRS lawyer implicates the IRS chief counsel's office, headed by an Obama appointee, as well as the head of the IRS' exempt organizations office. The targeting included a Tea Party Senate candidate. In Thursday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee, 72-year-old retiring IRS lawyer Carter Hull implicated the IRS chief counsel's office headed by William J. Wilkins, who attended at least nine White House meetings, and Lois Lerner, head of the exempt-organizations office, in the IRS scandal. In so doing, he made clear the targeting of Tea Party groups started in Washington and was directed from Washington. A tax-law specialist with 48 years of IRS experience, Hull testified that Lerner, the former head of the exempt organizations division, demanded that he send some of the reviews of Tea Party groups to the IRS chief counsel's office in Washington. The chief counsel is one of two political appointees in the IRS. According to Hull's testimony, Lerner, who famously pleaded her Fifth Amendment rights before the same committee, gave an atypical instruction that the Tea Party applications undergo special scrutiny that included an uncommon multilayer review that involved a top adviser to Lerner as well as the chief counsel's office. Hull's name came up earlier in the testimony of Holly Paz, a D.C.-based supervisor in the IRS's tax-exempt status division, who reported to Lerner. It was on May 22, the day after Paz was interviewed by investigators, that Lerner refused to answer questions from
Paul Merrell

CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245_story.html

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques. The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.
  • “The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”
  • Several officials who have read the document said some of its most troubling sections deal not with detainee abuse but with discrepancies between the statements of senior CIA officials in Washington and the details revealed in the written communications of lower-level employees directly involved.Officials said millions of records make clear that the CIA’s ability to obtain the most valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda — including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 — had little, if anything, to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”The report is divided into three volumes — one that traces the chronology of interrogation operations, another that assesses intelligence officials’ claims and a third that contains case studies on virtually every prisoner held in CIA custody since the program began in 2001. Officials said the report was stripped of certain details, including the locations of CIA prisons and the names of agency employees who did not hold ­supervisor-level positions.One official said that almost all of the critical threat-related information from Abu Zubaida was obtained during the period when he was questioned by Soufan at a hospital in Pakistan, well before he was interrogated by the CIA and waterboarded 83 times.Information obtained by Soufan, however, was passed up through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence community, the Justice Department and Congress as though it were part of what CIA interrogators had obtained, according to the committee report.
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  • The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to vote Thursday to send an executive summary of the report to Obama for declassification. U.S. officials said it could be months before that section, which contains roughly 20 conclusions and spans about 400 pages, is released to the public. The report’s release also could resurrect a long-standing feud between the CIA and the FBI, where many officials were dismayed by the agency’s use of methods that Obama and others later labeled torture. CIA veterans have expressed concern that the report reflects FBI biases. One of its principal authors is a former FBI analyst,
  • “The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who has reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said. Agency officials described Abu Zubaida as a senior al-Qaeda operative — and, therefore, someone who warranted coercive techniques — although experts later determined that he was essentially a facilitator who helped guide recruits to al-Qaeda training camps.The CIA also oversold the role of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. CIA officials claimed he was the “mastermind.” The committee described a similar sequence in the interrogation of Hassan Ghul, an al-Qaeda operative who provided a critical lead in the search for bin Laden: the fact that the al-Qaeda leader’s most trusted courier used the moniker “al-Kuwaiti.” But Ghul disclosed that detail while being interrogated by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq who posed questions scripted by CIA analysts. The information from that period was subsequently conflated with lesser intelligence gathered from Ghul at a secret CIA prison in Romania, officials said. Ghul was later turned over to authorities in Pakistan, where he was subsequently released. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in 2012.
  • Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has previously indicated that harsh CIA interrogation measures were of little value in the bin Laden hunt. “The CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said in a 2013 statement, responding in part to scenes in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” that depict a detainee’s slip under duress as a breakthrough moment.
  • As with Abu Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating. On Sept. 22, 2003, he was flown from Kabul to a CIA black site in Romania. In 2006, he was taken to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His attorneys contend that he suffered head trauma while in CIA custody. Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Baluchi’s attorneys for information about his medical condition, but military prosecutors opposed the request. A U.S. official said the request was not based solely on the committee’s investigation of the CIA program.
  • Officials said a former CIA interrogator named Charlie Wise was forced to retire in 2003 after being suspected of abusing Abu Zubaida using a broomstick as a ballast while he was forced to kneel in a stress position. Wise was also implicated in the abuse at Salt Pit. He died of a heart attack shortly after retiring from the CIA, former U.S. intelligence officials said.
Paul Merrell

WASHINGTON: Not just torture: Senator says CIA stalling over bogus intelligence that le... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...just-torture-senator-says.html

war & peace Iraq al-Qaeda false-intelligence Brennan CIA Levin

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • CIA Director John Brennan, under fire over the Senate report on the CIA’s use of torture, is facing new heat over his role in what a senior lawmaker calls an apparent coverup involving bogus intelligence used by the George W. Bush administration to help justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Carl Levin, D-Mich., who’s ending 36 years in the Senate, plans to press Brennan one last time to fulfill a pledge to support the full declassification of a CIA cable debunking the claim that the leader of the 9/11 hijackers met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech capital of Prague just months before the attacks.“Director Brennan’s apparent refusal to do what he has committed to do – to ask the Czech government if it objects to release of the cable – now takes on the character of a continuing coverup,” Levin plans to tell the Senate on Thursday, according to a draft of his speech obtained by McClatchy.
  • At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters on Wednesday, Levin said he’s been told by Czech officials that “they have no objection” to the release of the cable.Levin also pointed out that the former chief of the Czech counterintelligence service, who was in the post at the time of the alleged meeting, published a memoir this year in which he asserted that the CIA pressured him to confirm the encounter and that U.S. officials pressured the Czech government when he couldn’t do so.“Without any regard to us, they used our intelligence information for propaganda press leaks. They wanted to mine certainty from unconfirmed suspicion and use it as an excuse for military action,” wrote Jiri Ruzek. “We were to play the role of useful idiot.”The CIA declined to comment. But a U.S. intelligence official said that Levin had been told that releasing the full cable couldn’t be done without damaging intelligence sources.
  • The alleged meeting between Mohammad Atta and Ahmad Samir al Ani was repeatedly cited by former Vice President Dick Cheney before and after the invasion to bolster the Bush administration’s assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with al Qaida and could pass Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – which didn’t exist – to the terrorist group.“The notion of such a meeting was a centerpiece of the administration’s campaign to create an impression in the public mind that Saddam was in league with the al Qaida terrorists who attacked us on 9/11,” Levin planned to tell the Senate, according to the speech draft.“Now why am I bringing up a CIA cable from more than a decade ago?” the draft said. “This is about giving the American people a full account of the march to war as new information becomes available. It is about trying to hold leaders who misled the public accountable.”
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  • The March 13, 2003, cable was sent by CIA field officers in response to a request for more information on a single-source intelligence report of a meeting in a Prague park between Atta and al Ani. The cable warned that U.S. government officials shouldn’t cite the unverified report.Even so, Cheney continued to give the report credibility in media interviews, telling CNN in June 2004 that the truth of the report hadn’t been resolved.“Those statements were simply not true,” Levin said in the draft. “The vice president was recklessly disregarding the truth, and he did so in a way calculated to maintain support for the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq.”During his February 2013 hearing to be confirmed as CIA director, Brennan was urged by Levin to ask the Czech government if it would object to the release of the cable. “Absolutely, Senator, I will,” Brennan replied.
  • After receiving no response from Brennan, Levin earlier this year blocked the nomination of Caroline Krass to be the CIA general counsel. He agreed to lift his hold on Krass after receiving a March 13 letter from Brennan that summarized the cable, saying that it cast “serious doubt” that the alleged meeting occurred.Brennan added, “Investigative records subsequently placed Atta in the United States just before and after the date on which the single-source report said the meeting was to have occurred,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by McClatchy.Brennan declassified a single line from the cable that said, “There is not one USG (U.S. government counterterrorism) or FBI expert that . . . has said they have evidence or ‘know’ that (Atta) was indeed (in Prague). In fact, the analysis has been quite the opposite.”
  • In the draft of his remarks, Levin asserted that there was other “critically relevant information” in the cable that had been “denied to the public in order to protect those in the Bush White House who are responsible” for “playing games with intelligence.”“I believe decision-makers should have to face the full, unadulterated, unredacted truth about their decisions,” said Levin. “The American people should know the full story . . . as a warning to future leaders against the misuse of intelligence and the abuse of power.”
Paul Merrell

The Mysterious Case of Prisoner 212 - The Intercept - 0 views

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war & peace CIA torture Gitmo-detainees Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Researchers and reporters had long counted the total number of prisoners who cycled through Guantanamo at 779, but the Senate intelligence committee’s report on CIA torture revealed that there was one more previously unknown detainee. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, also known as prisoner 212, was held at a secret black site at Guantanamo Bay, according to the report, bringing the total number of detainees to 780. That al-Libi was held by the CIA is long established.  After all, al-Libi’s name is notorious as the source of bad information used by the Bush administration to tie Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda to support the US invasion of Iraq — information he provided while being tortured in Egyptian custody, and later recanted. More than a single digit change in the tally, al-Libi’s hitherto unknown presence at Guantanamo underscores how much remains unknown about the total number of detainees and their fates. The Senate report includes a list of 119 men– a rare official disclosure of the individuals held and in many cases tortured by the CIA. Only a fraction of those had previously been acknowledged as CIA detainees, though journalists and human rights groups had pieced together the population of prisoners from disclosures about Guantanamo, leaked documents, and court proceedings.
  • The black sites in the Senate report are identified by color code names, but journalists and human rights groups quickly identified them. As the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg first noted, the report confirms that al-Libi was at one of Guantanamo’s black sites—“Maroon” and “Indigo” in the report. Al-Libi was secreted away from Guantanamo in 2004 along with four other so-called high value detainees, before the Supreme Court determined that prisoners at the naval base had the right to challenge their detention. Disappearing those detainees gave the CIA leeway to continue secret interrogations outside the view of any court system. Al-Libi ultimately ended up in prison in Libya, where he died in 2009. The Senate report doesn’t cover everyone caught up in the CIA’s net. The Open Society Foundations, for example, published a report last year detailing 136 cases of individuals suspected to have been detained or rendered by the CIA. The Senate report misses some high-profile cases, however, because it didn’t include rendition — when the CIA handed prisoners over to third countries for interrogation or imprisonment. (As the Intercept’s Peter Maass noted last week, it also doesn’t touch on detainee abuse by the military.)
  • According to the Intercept’s research, there are still 50 former CIA prisoners named by Senate investigators whose fates are unknown, and who have not, to our knowledge, spoken to the media or human rights groups. If you have any information about the names listed here, email the authors at cora.currier@theintercept.com or margot.williams@theintercept.com, or communicate with us anonymously via SecureDrop.
Paul Merrell

Menendez Is to Face Corruption Charges, U.S. Official Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ederal-corruption-charges.html

Menendez criminal-prosecution

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department is preparing to file corruption charges against Senator Robert Menendez, a scrappy 61-year-old veteran of New Jersey politics, after a two-year investigation into allegations that he accepted gifts and lavish vacations in exchange for political favors for a longtime friend and political benefactor.A law enforcement official said on Friday that the charges would be filed within a month against Mr. Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, who rose from a childhood in the tenements to become the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is now the highest-ranking Latino Democrat in Congress.
  • With the senator aggressively raising money for a legal-defense fund for more than a year now, charges against him had long been anticipated. But even in New Jersey, a state with a long history of political corruption, the case is jarring.
  • It revolves around the friendship between the senator and Salomon Melgen, a wealthy Florida eye surgeon. The two spent holidays together at Dr. Melgen’s home in the Dominican Republic, a gated oceanfront resort where the neighbors included Oscar de la Renta. Dr. Melgen eventually delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars to benefit Mr. Menendez and the national Democratic Party.Mr. Menendez accepted two round-trip flights aboard Dr. Melgen’s private jet for personal vacations in the Dominican Republic in 2010, but failed to report them as gifts or to reimburse Dr. Melgen at the time, as required under Senate disclosure rules.
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  • According to court papers that were mistakenly and briefly unsealed last week, prosecutors have been examining whether Mr. Menendez improperly tried to persuade Medicare officials in recent years to change reimbursement policies in a way that would make millions of dollars for Dr. Melgen, one of the country’s biggest recipients of Medicare funds. Mr. Menendez has acknowledged urging the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to change its reimbursement policy, but said he did so because he considered the policy unfair.
  • On Friday, Democratic leaders in the state took to the phones to plot how, as one put it, “to move a lot of the pieces around the board unexpectedly” should Mr. Menendez step down. Even as they did so, they cautioned against counting out a man known as one of the most tenacious political fighters in a state famous for them. But Mr. Menendez is also one of the least wealthy members of the United States Senate, and may not have the resources for a protracted legal fight.
  • The court papers that were mistakenly unsealed also revealed that a grand jury in New Jersey is looking into gifts that Dr. Melgen gave Mr. Menendez, in addition to the Medicare issue, as well as a deal Dr. Melgen had to sell port-screening equipment to the government of the Dominican Republic.The New Jersey Law Journal, which first reported about the documents last week, said the government also claims that Mr. Menendez, along with Senator Harry Reid, then the leader of the Democratic majority, advocated for Dr. Melgen in meetings with Kathleen E. Sebelius, then the secretary of health and human services.
  • The case will most likely involve a legal argument over when a senator’s activities are shielded from prosecution under the Constitution’s speech-or-debate privilege, which prohibits federal agents from using their law enforcement powers to interfere with lawmaking. The Justice Department and Congress have often battled over how broadly that protection applies.
Paul Merrell

Brazil: The Provisional Banana Scoundrel Republic - 0 views

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Brazil corruption car-wash-investigation coup Rousseff-impeachment Temer

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • Every political junkie on the planet has to be glued to the ongoing Brazilian House of Cards, consistently offering an unparalleled feast of cheap thrills.The latest cliffhanger was the leak of a conversation between one of the key operators involved in the oil giant Petrobras corruption scandal and a senator and short-lived Minister of Planning in the usurper interim government currently replacing President Dilma Rousseff while she is undergoing an impeachment trial by the Senate.  Call the leak a short autopsy of what from the beginning should have been defined as golpeachment; a mix of coup (“golpe”, in Portuguese) and impeachment, which took place in a one/two sequential vote in the Brazilian Congress and Senate, as a notorious congregation of crooks investigated for myriad offenses and crimes seized power in Brasilia in a full-fledged Buffon’s Opera. I call their scam Provisional Banana Scoundrel Republic (PBSR).  
  • The leak/autopsy duly unveiled how the PBSR cancer progressed.  One of the key plotters outlines the coup; stresses how it should protect Brazilian plutocracy/kleptocracy from unintended consequences of the ongoing, two-year-old Car Wash corruption investigation; and how the Left – from President Rousseff to Lula and the Workers’ Party – should be criminalized for good. 
  • The rest would be history, including the demolition of recently acquired social and workers’ rights via the imposition of a neoliberal restoration; total reversion in foreign policy, with geopolitical and geoeconomic relations back to a colonized mindset; and the reestablishment of a conservative, neoliberal, rentier hegemonic class lording over a socially-oriented, democratic society. That fits in with the current Brazilian Congress and Senate dominated by “BBB” interests. “BBB” stands for Beef (the powerful agribusiness lobby); Bullet (the weapons and private security complex); and Bible (evangelical fanatics), all supported by corporate media. Many of these unsavory characters are connected and/or represent the toxic Brazilian rural aristocracy – which are in fact heirs to nobility titles handed over to slave owners. It was going all so swell after only a few days – even with the former head of the lower house, notorious crook Eduardo Cunha, temporarily sidelined; Cunha – the ringleader of a campaign financing scam inside Congress – de facto had become the Prime Minister of the puppet former Vice-President and current, interim President Michel Temer. 
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  • The key variable from now on is how the PBSR gang will maneuver – possibly illegally — to cling to power. The Public Ministry and the Federal police are totally politicized. Increasingly there are no mediation powers. The PBSR gang will take no prisoners. The Public Ministry will go after Lula while the attorney general will try to block any chance of Rousseff being reinstated. Meanwhile, the social democrats turned neoliberal enforcers – key associates of the PBSR — will keep advancing their own agenda; hardcore privatizations; handing over the exploration of the pre-salt oil deposits to US Big Oil; and dutifully prostrating as Washington vassals. One just needs to examine the extreme interest by the US Department of Justice on all things related to the Car Wash investigation to infer how Washington is deeply involved in smashing leading Brazilian corporations.   
  • Washington has not had the balls to do it directly – relying on minions such as the State Department spokesman and the interim ambassador to the OAS. But the message is unmistakable; golpeachment is legal, and Washington trusts Brazilian “democratic institutions”. Compare it to the Russian Foreign Ministry, which alerted to “foreign interference” in Brazilian affairs. The new Brazilian Foreign Minister – a sore loser (twice) in presidential elections won by the Workers’ Party – took no time to launch his glorious Vassal of Washington/US Big Capital policy. He already issued a veiled “threat” to Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador and El Salvador. Mercosur will be sidelined to the benefit of the Pacific Alliance – where Mexico, Peru and Colombia are under Washington’s wings. Unasur will be ditched.
  • And then there’s the stale ice cream in the scoundrel’s tart; the “B” in BRICS is now dormant. This means the role of Brazil in the BRICS bank will be seriously compromised. Granted, the BRICS were never a homogenous group and have been riddled with conflicting interests. For instance, India’s nuclear-sharing agreement with the US effectively ties it up with Washington. The next BRICS summit is in India, in October. Brazil risks the ignominy of being represented by the PBSR gang.  Meanwhile, make no mistake; as much as the Car Wash investigation was revealed to be a totally politicized drive – where fighting corruption was just a convenient cover – the PBSR gang and their allies will do everything to get rid of the 2018 direct presidential elections. So here’s the sorry Brazilian road map up to 2018; total political, economic, social and juridical chaos. 
  • Paul Merrell on 31 May 16
     
    Pepe Escobar, himself a Brazilian expatriate journailist, riffs on the Brazilian coup-gone-sour-by-discllosure-of-plans. If you have a browser extension to do translations, read the article linked from the "U.S. Department of Justice" text. It seems that the U.S. played a part in setting the coup in motion. Surprise, surprise. A very fun read. 
Paul Merrell

The Torture Chronicle | The American Conservative - 0 views

www.theamericanconservative.com/...the-torture-chronicle

war crimes torture fascism rendition constitutional law international law

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • If there is one word missing from the United States government’s post-9/11 lexicon it is “accountability.” While perfectly legal though illicit sexual encounters apparently continue to rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, leading to resignations, no one has been punished for malfeasance, torture, secret prisons, or extraordinary renditions. Indeed, the Obama administration stated in 2009 that it would not punish CIA torturers because it prefers to “look forward and not back,” a decision not to prosecute that was recently confirmed by Attorney General Eric Holder in two cases involving the deaths of detainees after particularly brutal Agency interrogations. What the White House decision almost certainly means is that the president would prefer to avoid a tussle with the Republicans in congress over national security that would inevitably reveal a great deal of dirty laundry belonging to both parties.
  • The bipartisan willingness to avoid confrontation over possible war crimes makes the recently completed 6,000 page long Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture an extraordinary document. Though it is still classified and might well never see the light of day even in any sanitized or bowdlerized form, its principal conclusions have been leaking out in the media over the past two weeks. It directly addresses the principal argument that has been made by Bush administration devotees and continues to be advanced regarding the CIA torture agenda:  that vital information obtained by “enhanced interrogation techniques” led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. According to the report, no information obtained by torture was critical to the eventual assassination of the al-Qaeda leader, nor has it been found to be an indispensable element in any of the other terrorism cases that were examined by the Senate committee.
  • What exactly does that mean? It means that torture, far from being an essential tool in the counter-terrorism effort, has not provided information that could not be obtained elsewhere and using less coercive methods. Senator Diane Feinstein, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and has had access to the entire classified document, elaborated, explaining that the investigation carried out by the Senate included every detainee held by CIA, examining “the conditions under which they were detained, how they were interrogated, the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy or inaccuracy of CIA descriptions about the program to the White House, Department of Justice, Congress and others.” It “uncovers startling details about the CIA detention and interrogation program…” The report has 35,000 footnotes and investigators perused 6 million pages of official records, which is why it has taken more than two years to produce. The Senate inquiry’s conclusions inevitably lead to the assumption that there has been a whole lot of lying and obfuscation going on in connection with the so-called war on terror.
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  • There are also other good reasons to oppose torture and torture by proxy through CIA rendition. Most people and governments worldwide believe that torture is immoral, a view that is generally shared by most Americans. Legally there is also a long tradition condemning torture. German and Japanese officers were executed after the Second World War for torturing prisoners and the principle was firmly established that torture, specifically including waterboarding, is a war crime. The US is signatory to the UN’s anti-torture convention and both the United States Code and specific acts of congress require prosecution of any government employee engaging in such activity. In practical terms, torture also opens up a door that should never be opened by anyone who genuinely cares about US soldiers, diplomats, and intelligence officers stationed at their peril around the world. To put it succinctly, if we do it to them, they will do it to us.
  • Torture advocates have assiduously cultivated a number of myths, most prominent of which is the “ticking time bomb.” This is a particular favorite of the redoubtable Alan Dershowitz and a number of prominent neocons. It goes like this – a terrorist is captured who has knowledge of an impending attack on a major civilian target, but he won’t cooperate. How to get the information?  Simple. Get an accommodating judge to issue a legal finding that enables you to torture him until he talks, thereby saving lives of innocent civilians. The only problem with the Dershowitz narrative is that there has never been an actual ticking time bomb. No terrorist has ever been captured, subjected to torture, and provided information that foiled an attack, not even in Israel where routine torture of suspected terrorists captured in flagrante used to be the case (but is now illegal). Advocating a policy of torture, with all that entails, based on a “what if” is fighting evil with more evil, not a solution.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Dec 12
     
    The "ticking time bomb" justification for extraordinary rendition and torture holds no water under the U.S. Constitution. Consider the situation of a person suspected of kidnapping a child who may still be alive; might government lawfully discard the suspect's right to remain silent, the presumption of innocence, and the right to trial by jury in order to torture the suspect for information about the child's whereabouts? Our Constitution commands otherwise. 
Paul Merrell

Report on the Free Flow of Information Act - 0 views

www.fas.org/...freeflow.html

surveillance state s.987 press-shield-legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • 113th Congress Report SENATE 1st Session 113-118 ====================================================================== FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION ACT OF 2013 _______ November 6, 2013.--Ordered to be printed _______ Mr. Leahy, from the Committee on the Judiciary, submitted the following R E P O R T together with ADDITIONAL AND MINORITY VIEWS [To accompany S. 987]
  • Senator Cornyn offered an amendment (ALB13708) that would ensure that all persons or entities that are protected under the Free Press Clause of the First Amendment are covered by the bill's privilege. The Committee rejected the amendment by a roll call vote. The vote record is as follows: Tally: 4 Yeas, 13 Nays, 1 Pass Yeas (4): Cornyn (R-TX), Lee (R-UT), Cruz (R-TX), Flake (R- AZ) Nays (13): Leahy (D-VT), Feinstein (D-CA), Schumer (D-NY), Durbin (D-IL), Whitehouse (D-RI), Klobuchar (D-MN), Franken (D- MN), Coons (D-DE), Blumenthal (D-CT), Hirono (D-HI), Grassley (R-IA), Hatch (R-UT), Graham (R-SC) Pass (1): Feinstein (D-CA)
  • ADDITIONAL MINORITY VIEWS FROM SENATORS CORNYN, SESSIONS, LEE, AND CRUZ On December 15, 1791, the United States of America ratified the Bill of Rights--the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The first among them states: ``Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press[.]'' United States Constitution, amend. I. The freedom of the press does not discriminate amongst groups or individuals--it applies to all Americans. As the Supreme Court has long recognized, it was not intended to be limited to an organized industry or professional journalistic elite. See Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 704 (1972) (the ``liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as of the large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods. Freedom of the press is a fundamental personal right[.]''); Lovell v. Griffin, 303 U.S. 444, 452 (1938) (``The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. . . . The press in its historic connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.''). The Founders recognized that selectively extending the freedom of the press would require the government to decide who was a journalist worthy of protection and who was not, a form of licensure that was no freedom at all. As Justice White observed in Branzburg, administering a privilege for reporters necessitates defining ``those categories of newsmen who qualified for the privilege.'' 408 U.S. at 704 That inevitably does violence to ``the traditional doctrine that liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as of the large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods.'' Id.
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  • The First Amendment was adopted to prevent--not further-- the federal government licensing of media. See Lovell, 303 U.S. at 451 (striking an ordinance ``that . . . strikes at the very foundation of the freedom of the press by subjecting it to license and censorship. The struggle for the freedom of the press was primarily directed against the power of the licensor.''). But federal government licensing is exactly what the Free Flow of Information Act would create. The bill identifies favored forms of media--``legitimate'' press--by granting them a special privilege. That selective grant of privilege is inimical to the First Amendment, which promises all citizens the ``freedom of the press.'' See Branzburg, 408 U.S. at 704 (``Freedom of the press is a fundamental personal right[.]'') (emphasis added). It also threatens the viability of any other form of press. The specially privileged press will gain easier access to news. That will tip the scales against its competitors and make it beholden to the government for that competitive advantage. A law enacted to protect the press from the state will, in fact, make that press dependent upon the federal government--anything but free.
  • Proponents of this bill suggest that, because the Constitution does not provide a reporter's privilege, Congress's provision of a limited privilege cannot raise any constitutional concerns. Those proponents misunderstand--and thus run afoul of--the First Amendment. The First Amendment was adopted to prevent press licensure. While it does not create a ``reporter's privilege'' on its own, it abhors the selective grant of privilege to one medium over another. The American Revolution was stoked by renegade pamphleteers and town criers who used unlicensed presses to overthrow tyranny. Today, ``any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer.'' Reno v. Am. Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844, 870 (1997). If today's town crier or pamphleteer must meet a test set by the federal government to avail themselves of liberty, we have gone less far from tyranny than any of us want to admit. This bill runs afoul of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and amounts to de facto licensing. It would weaken the newly-illegitimate press, render the specially privileged press supplicant to the federal government and ultimately undermine liberty. This legislation also raises a number of serious national security concerns, as discussed in the minority views authored by Senator Sessions. For these reasons, we oppose this bill. John Cornyn. Jeff Sessions. Michael S. Lee. Ted Cruz.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 13
     
    The Senate Committee on the Judiciary reports with a do-pass recommendation a bill to grant a "covered journalist" a limited testimonial privilege against revealing news sources. But the attempt to grant such a shield to mainstream media reporters not only runs afoul of the First Amendment as indicated by the quoted minority view, but also a denial of equal protection of the law for non-mainstream media investigators and lowly citizens. The core problem is the Supreme Court has invariably held that members of the press have no greater protection under the first amendment than the lowly pamphleteer, hence the denial of Equal Protection of the law in this legislation.  The legislation is in direct response to government surveillance of the press and reporters being required by the courts to reveal their sources of classified information. 
Paul Merrell

Senate Intelligence Committee Passes Bill That Codifies, Expands NSA Powers - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...senate-bill-nsa_n_4183183.html

surveillance state NSA legislation Feinstein

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Just days after expressing outrage over reports of widespread surveillance of foreign leaders by the National Security Agency, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) pushed through the Senate Intelligence Committee on an 11-4 vote a bill that enshrines the bulk collection of Americans' phone call records into law, and expands the agency's authority to track foreign nationals who enter the United States. The bill, passed on Thursday, is meant to respond to the revelations of leaker Edward Snowden. But critics immediately charged that it does little more than offer a fig leaf for the NSA's controversial surveillance operations.
  • In his statement, Udall disagreed. "The NSA's ongoing, invasive surveillance of Americans' private information does not respect our constitutional values and needs fundamental reform -- not incidental changes," Udall said. "Unfortunately, the bill passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee does not go far enough to address the NSA's overreaching domestic surveillance programs." Udall is a co-sponsor of a bill introduced earlier this week by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that would end the NSA's bulk collection of phone call records. The passage of Feinstein's bill sets up a confrontation with Leahy's Judiciary Committee over what version of NSA reform Congress will produce. "The Feinstein bill is terrible and would make things worse. I think the Leahy-Sensenbrenner bill begins to address some of the problems" with the NSA, said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Neither bill, Granick said, addresses the NSA's infiltration of Yahoo and Google data centers worldwide, which could provide the agency a pathway to collecting Americans' communications.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 13
     
    Wow! That was quick. The text of the bill wasn't even publicly available yesterday. Diane Feinstein is trying to railroad the NSA's wet dream through the Senate. Earlier in the week, she was calling for a lengthy investigation but suddenly flips sides again. NSA blackmail?
Paul Merrell

Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sia-election-donald-trump.html

Auction 2016 Trump FBI Russian-ties

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.Hillary Clinton’s supporters, angry over what they regard as a lack of scrutiny of Mr. Trump by law enforcement officials, pushed for these investigations. In recent days they have also demanded that James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., discuss them publicly, as he did last week when he announced that a new batch of emails possibly connected to Mrs. Clinton had been discovered.
  • Supporters of Mrs. Clinton have argued that Mr. Trump’s evident affinity for Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — Mr. Trump has called him a great leader and echoed his policies toward NATO, Ukraine and the war in Syria — and the hacks of leading Democrats like John D. Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign, are clear indications that Russia has taken sides in the presidential race and that voters should know what the F.B.I. has found. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage 3 U.S. States Turn Down Russian Requests to Monitor Elections OCT. 21, 2016 Donald Trump Says He Might Meet With Putin Before Inauguration OCT. 17, 2016 Advertisement Continue reading the main story The F.B.I.’s inquiries into Russia’s possible role continue, as does the investigation into the emails involving Mrs. Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, on a computer she shared with her estranged husband, Anthony D. Weiner. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters argue that voters have as much right to know what the F.B.I. has found in Mr. Trump’s case, even if the findings are not yet conclusive.
  • Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, responded angrily on Sunday with a letter accusing the F.B.I. of not being forthcoming about Mr. Trump’s alleged ties with Moscow.“It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity,” Mr. Reid wrote. “The public has a right to know this information.”F.B.I. officials declined to comment on Monday. Intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Mr. Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Republican presidential candidate. Still, they have said that Mr. Trump himself has not become a target. And no evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 16
     
    The same story is running on CNN. There is another story moving on MSM that the FBI has found no evidence of Russian attempts to sway the election between the two candidates, instead being aimed at spreading chaos. Combined with FBI Director Comey's announcement last week that the Hillary email criminal investigation has been reopened, at least three temtative conclusions are suggested: [i] Comey and the FBI have mounted a three-pronged attack on Hillary's election run, on the email front, deFUDding Hillary's claim that Trump has ties with Vladimir Putin, and defanging the Hillary claim that Russia is attempting to elect Donald Trump; [ii] MSM is covering those stories; and [iii[ by implication, those who have real power over the U.S. government have decided they don't want Hillary do win the election. All good news for Trump and bad news for the Clintons.
Paul Merrell

New Political Earthquake in Brazil: Is It Now Time for Media Outlets to Call This a "Co... - 0 views

theintercept.com/...ia-outlets-to-call-this-a-coup

Brazil coup-attempts Greenwald

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • Brazil today awoke to stunning news of secret, genuinely shocking conversations involving a key minister in Brazil’s newly installed government, which shine a bright light on the actual motives and participants driving the impeachment of the country’s democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff. The transcripts were published by the country’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, and reveal secret conversations that took place in March, just weeks before the impeachment vote in the lower house was held. They show explicit plotting between the new planning minister (then-senator), Romero Jucá, and former oil executive Sergio Machado — both of whom are formal targets of the “Car Wash” corruption investigation — as they agree that removing Dilma is the only means for ending the corruption investigation. The conversations also include discussions of the important role played in Dilma’s removal by the most powerful national institutions, including — most importantly — Brazil’s military leaders. The transcripts are filled with profoundly incriminating statements about the real goals of impeachment and who was behind it. The crux of this plot is what Jucá calls “a national pact” — involving all of Brazil’s most powerful institutions — to leave Michel Temer in place as president (notwithstanding his multiple corruption scandals) and to kill the corruption investigation once Dilma is removed. In the words of Folha, Jucá made clear that impeachment will “end the pressure from the media and other sectors to continue the Car Wash investigation.” Jucá is the leader of Temer’s PMDB party and one of the “interim president’s” three closest confidants.
  • It is unclear who is responsible for recording and leaking the 75-minute conversation, but Folha reports that the files are currently in the hand of the prosecutor general. The next few hours and days will likely see new revelations that will shed additional light on the implications and meaning of these transcripts. The transcripts contain two extraordinary revelations that should lead all media outlets to seriously consider whether they should call what took place in Brazil a “coup”: a term Dilma and her supporters have used for months. When discussing the plot to remove Dilma as a means of ending the Car Wash investigation, Jucá said the Brazilian military is supporting the plot: “I am talking to the generals, the military commanders. They are fine with this, they said they will guarantee it.” He also said the military is “monitoring the Landless Workers Movement” (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), the social movement of rural workers that supports PT’s efforts of land reform and inequality reduction and has led the protests against impeachment.
  • The second blockbuster revelation — perhaps even more significant — is Jucá’s statement that he spoke with and secured the involvement of numerous justices on Brazil’s Supreme Court, the institution that impeachment defenders have repeatedly pointed to as vesting the process with legitimacy in order to deny that Dilma’s removal is a coup. Jucá claimed that “there are only a small number” of Court justices to whom he had not obtained access (the only justice he said he ultimately could not get to is Teori Zavascki, who was appointed by Dilma and who — notably — Jucá viewed as incorruptible in obtaining his help to kill the investigation (a central irony of impeachment is that Dilma has protected the Car Wash investigation from interference by those who want to impeach her)). The transcripts also show him saying that “the press wants to take her [Dilma] out,” so “this shit will never stop” — meaning the corruption investigations — until she’s gone. The transcripts provide proof for virtually every suspicion and accusation impeachment opponents have long expressed about those plotting to remove Dilma from office. For months, supporters of Brazil’s democracy have made two arguments about the attempt to remove the country’s democratically elected president: (1) the core purpose of Dilma’s impeachment is not to stop corruption or punish lawbreaking, but rather the exact opposite: to protect the actual thieves by empowering them with Dilma’s exit, thus enabling them to kill the Car Wash investigation; and (2) the impeachment advocates (led by the country’s oligarchical media) have zero interest in clean government, but only in seizing power that they could never obtain democratically, in order to impose a right-wing, oligarch-serving agenda that the Brazilian population would never accept.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 May 16
     
    Gutsy. Glenn Greenwald and his partner live in Brazil. 
Paul Merrell

U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - 0 views

www.intelligence.senate.gov/churchcommittee.html

surveillance state Church-Committee-docs NSA FBI COINTELPRO

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations withRespect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee") Rules and Authorizing Resolution Rules of Procedure and S. Res. 21, 94th Congress
  • Interim and Staff Reports (1975) Interim Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, S. Rep. No. 94-465 Staff Report, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 Final Report, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976) Book I, Foreign and Military Intelligence Book II, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans Book III, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans Book IV, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence Book V, The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies Book VI, Supplementary Reports on Intelligence Activities
  • Hearings Volume 1, Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents (September 16, 17, and 18, 1975) Volume 2, Huston Plan (September 23, 24, and 25, 1975) Volume 3, Internal Revenue Service (October 2, 1975) Volume 4, Mail Opening (October 21, 22, and 24, 1975 Volume 5, The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights (October 29 and November 6, 1975) Volume 6, Federal Bureau of Investigation (November 18, 19, December 2, 3, 9, 10, and 11, 1975) Volume 7, Covert Action (December 4 and 5, 1975) Additional Link Collection of Church Committee Reports and Hearings
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13
     
    The records of the mid-1970s Church Committee investigation into covert government surveillance and illegal repression of political rights are now online. The revelations of this investigation led directly to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other legislation aimed at confining the U.S. military to surveillance of foreign targets and to dismantling of J. Edgar. Hoover's COINTEL program of political repression in the U.S., including blackmailing of elected officials and assassination of dissident political activists. The more recent NSA revelations should be viewed with knowledge that the NSA was already told decades earlier by Congress to butt out of domestic surveillance in no uncertain terms. Yet here we have the NSA gathering the entire "haystack" of U.S. citizens' domestic communications. In any event, this is a historical treasure trove of  prior misbehavior by the U.S. clandestine services, an overpowering  testimony that government officials cannot  be trusted with secret surveillance powers. 
Paul Merrell

The Woman at the Center of the C.I.A.'s Torture Report - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...unidentified-queen-torture

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report accountability

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • or the past eight months, there has been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House, the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a means of identifying characters in the devastating report it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now we know one reason why. The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.
  • Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.” Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)
  • Amazingly, perhaps, more than thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks, no one at the C.I.A. has ever been publicly held responsible for this failure. Evidently, the C.I.A. was adamant in its negotiations with the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee that the American public never learn the names of anyone directly involved in this failure.
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  • According to sources in the law-enforcement community who I have interviewed over the years, and who I spoke to again this week, this woman—whose name the C.I.A. has asked the news media to withhold—had supervision over an underling at the agency who failed to share with the F.B.I. the news that two of the future 9/11 hijackers had entered the United States prior to the terrorist attacks.
  • As NBC recounts, this egregious chapter was apparently only the first in a long tale, in which the same C.I.A. official became a driving force in the use of waterboarding and other sadistic interrogation techniques that were later described by President Obama as “torture.” She personally partook in the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, at a black site in Poland. According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks. “i love the Black American Muslim at AQ camps in Afghanuistan (sic). … Mukie (K.S.M.) is going to be hatin’ life on this one,” she wrote, according to the report. But, as NBC notes, she misconstrued the intelligence gathered from the other detainee. Somehow, the C.I.A. mistakenly believed that African-American Muslim terrorists were already in the United States. The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was false—leading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana. According to the report, the same woman oversaw the extraction of this false lead, as well as the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity. Later, in 2007, she accompanied then C.I.A. director Michael Hayden to brief Congress, where she insisted forcefully that the torture program had been a tremendous and indispensable success.
  • Readers can speculate on how the pieces fit together, and who the personalities behind this program are. But without even pseudonyms, it is exceedingly hard to connect the dots. It seems entirely possible—though, again, one can only speculate—that the C.I.A. overcompensated for its pre-9/11 intelligence failures by employing overly harsh measures later. Once they’d made a choice that America had never officially made before—of sanctioning torture—it seems possible that they felt they had to defend its efficacy, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. If so, this would be worth learning. But without names, or even pseudonyms, it is almost impossible to piece together the puzzle, or hold anyone in the American government accountable. Evidently, that is exactly what the C.I.A. was fighting for during its eight-month-long redaction process, behind all those closed doors.
Paul Merrell

Russian Parliament Calls For Inquiry Into US Media Outlets - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...226068

war & peace Russia investigations Voice-of-America CNN Radio-Free-Europe

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • In a move designed to retaliate against efforts in Congress to start an investigation into Russian media outlet RT, the Russian State Duma has called for the information and telecommunication committee to launch its own investigation into US media outlets to see if they are violating Russian law in any way. The order singled out three outlets, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, both run by the federal government, and CNN, which is owned by major US media outlet Time Warner. The order came at the behest of Konstantin Zatulin, from the ruling United Russia party, and he was quite clear this was a response to the moves against RT. While CNN is sort of a wild card in all of this, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe are roughly the American equivalent of RT, and were launched by the US government back during the Cold War specifically with an eye toward shifting international public opinion in a way favorable to the US, and unfavorable to the Soviet Union.
  • It’s unclear whether the Russian inquiry will go anywhere, though since it is overtly an attempt to retaliate, it will likely depend heavily on whether the US ends up doing anything against RT, and likely will just remain in motion as a threatened tit-for-tat move.
Gary Edwards

PETITION URGING CONGRESS TO IMPEACH PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...impeach-president-barack-obama

Impeach-Obama articles-of-impeachment

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 13
     
    "PETITION URGENTLY REQUESTING THAT CONGRESS LAUNCH AN INDEPENDENT AND COMPREHENSIVE INVESTIGATION INTO UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES ON THE PART OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA To: All members of the U.S. Congress: Whereas, President Barack Obama not only failed to aid U.S. personnel under lethal and prolonged terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, resulting in the deaths of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, but also led an outrageously deceitful cover-up for weeks afterward, rivaling the Watergate-era cover-up that ended the presidency of Richard Nixon; Whereas, the IRS under Obama - in accord with direct instructions from congressional Democrats - has engaged in the most egregious and widespread attack on conservative groups in modern history, with the knowledge of top agency officials; Whereas, the Obama Justice Department, on top of its many first-term scandals, has spied on and harassed journalists at Fox News and the Associated Press, prompting widespread, bipartisan condemnation of the DOJ for "criminalizing journalism"; Whereas, top constitutional attorneys from across the political spectrum now agree that Obama has committed certain specific offenses that unquestionably rise to the level of impeachable "high crimes and misdemeanors"; Whereas, one of these offenses - that of illegally conducting war against Libya - has been deemed by a bipartisan panel of constitutional experts to be "clearly an impeachable offense" and "gross usurpation of the war power"; Whereas, Obama's policy of targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens without any constitutionally required due process - including the drone assassination of an American-born 16-year-old as he was eating dinner - is unanimously deemed by experts, both liberal and conservative, as "an impeachable offense"; Whereas, Obama's Justice Department has presided over the disastrous "Fast and Furious" operation in which approximately 2
Paul Merrell

Torture Report Revives Rogue Image the CIA Has Sought to Erase - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...e-cia-has-sought-to-erase.html

war & peace torture CIA Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • This week’s Senate report on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods is neither the first nor the worst time the agency has run afoul of its congressional overseers. Four decades ago, a series of hearings on Capitol Hill helped reveal that the CIA-run Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, working in concert with the U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries, had “neutralized” -- killed, detained or recruited -- as many as 80,000 people suspected of being members of the Communist Vietcong and used gang rape, beatings and electric shock as well as waterboarding to interrogate prisoners. Then in 1975 and 1976, a Senate panel took a broader look into the dark side of the Central Intelligence Agency and found that the nation’s spies seemed to have few limits, with covert activities that included plotting to assassinate foreign leaders, domestic spying and LSD experiments on unwitting subjects.
  • The Church committee, the investigative panel named for Democratic chairman Frank Church of Idaho, published 14 reports on CIA activities, including efforts to kill leaders in Cuba, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam; a secret program to open Americans’ mail; and a mind-control program called MKULTRA
  • It led to creation of the current congressional intelligence committees to guard against CIA abuses and resulted in an executive order by Republican President Gerald Ford banning assassinations of foreign leaders.
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  • Nevertheless, the new findings are a blow to the agency Brennan leads. “The Senate intel report is right up there with the Church committee in the scathing criticism of the agency,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington.
  • Obama has defended CIA Director John Brennan, who this week said that the agency’s methods produced “intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.” Brennan said the report was wrong to suggest the CIA “systematically and intentionally misled” Congress and the White House.
  • This image of the CIA supposedly having run amok and having done all this torture stuff on its own will stick with a large part of the American public,” said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst who had a 28-year career in the intelligence community. “The idea that the CIA has been lying to the president, lying to the Justice Department, lying to the Congress, and even lying to itself about how effective these programs were -- that’s the real show-stopper in the Senate intel report,” Blanton said. “That’s really the most remarkable piece of it.” The Church committee, despite the breadth of its review, “did not produce this kind of damning indictment using the CIA’s own words and own evidence,” Blanton said.
  • Pillar said the reaction to the CIA’s interrogation methods reflects a public mood change from the “fears and emotions” immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Similarly, Americans at first accepted the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a policy since considered a black mark in American history, he said. “The CIA is where the people who are on the bottom end of the political process happen to work, but this was a much bigger process where the bigger story was how the American mood, as expressed by the public and our political leaders, has changed significantly since the first year or two after 9/11, when there was much more willingness to compromise long-held values in the name of American security,” Pillar said.
  • In 1984, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Republican, wrote an angry “Dear Bill” letter to CIA Director William Casey amid reports that the CIA was covertly involved in mining Nicaraguan harbors. “I’m pissed off,” Goldwater wrote, complaining that Casey had misled the committee on an action that amounted to an act of war. The panel’s Democratic vice chairman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, quit the committee as the “most emphatic way to protest” the Reagan administration’s failure to inform lawmakers.
Paul Merrell

CISA Security Bill: An F for Security But an A+ for Spying | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...ty-bill-gets-f-security-spying

surveillance state legislation CISA

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • When the Senate Intelligence Committee passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act by a vote of 14 to 1, committee chairman Senator Richard Burr argued that it successfully balanced security and privacy. Fifteen new amendments to the bill, he said, were designed to protect internet users’ personal information while enabling new ways for companies and federal agencies to coordinate responses to cyberattacks. But critics within the security and privacy communities still have two fundamental problems with the legislation: First, they say, the proposed cybersecurity act won’t actually boost security. And second, the “information sharing” it describes sounds more than ever like a backchannel for surveillance.
  • On Tuesday the bill’s authors released the full, updated text of the CISA legislation passed last week, and critics say the changes have done little to assuage their fears about wanton sharing of Americans’ private data. In fact, legal analysts say the changes actually widen the backdoor leading from private firms to intelligence agencies. “It’s a complete failure to strengthen the privacy protections of the bill,” says Robyn Greene, a policy lawyer for the Open Technology Institute, which joined a coalition of dozens of non-profits and cybersecurity experts criticizing the bill in an open letter earlier this month. “None of the [privacy-related] points we raised in our coalition letter to the committee was effectively addressed.” The central concern of that letter was how the same data sharing meant to bolster cybersecurity for companies and the government opens massive surveillance loopholes. The bill, as worded, lets a private company share with the Department of Homeland Security any information construed as a cybersecurity threat “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” That means CISA trumps privacy laws like the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986 and the Privacy Act of 1974, which restrict eavesdropping and sharing of users’ communications. And once the DHS obtains the information, it would automatically be shared with the NSA, the Department of Defense (including Cyber Command), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
  • In a statement posted to his website yesterday, Senator Burr wrote that “Information sharing is purely voluntary and companies can only share cyber-threat information and the government may only use shared data for cybersecurity purposes.” But in fact, the bill’s data sharing isn’t limited to cybersecurity “threat indicators”—warnings of incoming hacker attacks, which is the central data CISA is meant to disseminate among companies and three-letter agencies. OTI’s Greene says it also gives companies a mandate to share with the government any data related to imminent terrorist attacks, weapons of mass destruction, or even other information related to violent crimes like robbery and carjacking. 
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The latest update to the bill tacks on yet another kind of information, anything related to impending “serious economic harm.” All of those vague terms, Greene argues, widen the pipe of data that companies can send the government, expanding CISA into a surveillance system for the intelligence community and domestic law enforcement. If information-sharing legislation does not include adequate privacy protections, then...It’s a surveillance bill by another name. Senator Ron Wyden
  • “CISA goes far beyond [cybersecurity], and permits law enforcement to use information it receives for investigations and prosecutions of a wide range of crimes involving any level of physical force,” reads the letter from the coalition opposing CISA. “The lack of use limitations creates yet another loophole for law enforcement to conduct backdoor searches on Americans—including searches of digital communications that would otherwise require law enforcement to obtain a warrant based on probable cause. This undermines Fourth Amendment protections and constitutional principles.”
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Mar 15
     
    I read the legislation. It's as bad for privacy as described in the aritcle. And its drafting is incredibly sloppy.
Paul Merrell

IGs form front line of war on waste and fraud, but weak links remain | WashingtonExamin... - 0 views

www.washingtonexaminer.com/...2556319

Auction 2016 Hillary State-Dept. cover-up

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The ambassador to Belgium, a big campaign bundler for President Obama, was accused of soliciting sex in a park near the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. Members of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail were accused of hiring prostitutes, and a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals, according to the complaints. The Diplomatic Security Service, a law enforcement branch of the State Department, tried to investigate the underlying charges but was blocked by top agency managers including Kennedy and Cheryl Mills, chief of staff to Hillary Clinton, according to whistleblower allegations that surfaced later.
  • DSS agents reported the interference to the inspector general’s office, which confirmed the pressure from the top. A draft IG report written in November 2012 described the underlying cases of misconduct and the strong-arm tactics used by top managers to block the DSS investigations. But that draft report was not made public. Instead, it was shown to top State Department officials who wanted it scrubbed of damaging information. “This is going to kill us,” one top agency official reportedly said upon seeing the draft report, according to CBS News. When the final IG report was issued in February 2013, it made no mention of the individual cases or of management pressure to kill the DSS probes. Instead, the IG report blandly stated that DSS “lacks a firewall” to prevent management interference with DSS investigations.
  • The more candid draft report was leaked by an investigator inside the IG’s office to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and to CBS News. Rep. Ed Royce, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, demanded copies of the draft report and details about the specific cases of misconduct. The IG’s office refused to provide the information. “There is every indication that critical information was missing from the IG report submitted to Congress,” Royce told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview. “And whether it was State’s pressure to remove it or Geisel’s unwillingness to include it, the result is the same. We are not, as required by law, kept fully and currently informed. The bottom line is when federal agencies lack a Senate-confirmed, independent inspector general, the potential for malfeasance really abounds,” he said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Under pressure from Congress, and in the wake of revelations that agency management influenced the IG’s final report, Obama appointed Linick as the State Department’s permanent IG in June 2013, less than a month after CBS broke the news about the IG cover-up. Congress confirmed him three months later. Linick launched a new investigation, and in October 2014 the IG confirmed that at least three DSS investigations were blocked by top State Department officials, including the probe involving the ambassador. While the new IG’s report was critical of management’s efforts to block the DSS investigations, it was silent on whether its own office bowed to the pressure.
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