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Paul Merrell

Ex-Chief of C.I.A. Shapes Response to Detention Report - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-on-interrogation-program.html

war & peace CIA torture Tenet Brennan Obama Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report cover-up must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Just after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify hundreds of pages of a withering report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, C.I.A. Director John O. Brennan convened a meeting of the men who had played a role overseeing the program in its seven-year history.The spies, past and present, faced each other around the long wooden conference table on the seventh floor of the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Northern Virginia: J. Cofer Black, head of the agency’s counterterrorism center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks; the undercover officer who now holds that job; and a number of other former officials from the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Over the speakerphone came the distinctive, Queens-accented voice of George J. Tenet.
  • Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.The report is expected to accuse a number of former C.I.A. officials of misleading Congress and the White House about the program and its effectiveness, but it is Mr. Tenet who might have the most at stake.
  • Mr. Tenet, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has arranged a number of conference calls with former C.I.A. officials to discuss the impending report. After private conversations with Mr. Brennan, he and two other former C.I.A. directors — Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — drafted a letter to Mr. Brennan asking that, as a matter of fairness, they be allowed to see the report before it was made public. Describing the letter, one former C.I.A. officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the former directors “think that those people who were heavily involved in the operations have a right to see what’s being said about them.”Mr. Brennan then passed the letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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  • Ms. Feinstein agreed to let a group of former senior C.I.A. officials read a draft of the report, although she initially insisted they be allowed to review it only at the committee’s office. Officials said President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, intervened and brokered an arrangement in which the officials could read an unredacted version of the report inside a secure room at the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Ms. Feinstein declined to comment.
  • “While former C.I.A. officials may be working to hide their own past wrongs, there’s no reason Brennan or any other current C.I.A. official should help facilitate the defense of the indefensible,” said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.Spokesmen for the C.I.A. and the White House declined to comment.
  • The April meeting at C.I.A. headquarters highlighted how much of the agency is still seeded with officers who participated in the detention and interrogation program, which Mr. Obama officially ended during his first week in office in 2009.At one point during the meeting, the current head of the counterterrorism center, an officer with the first name Mike, told Mr. Brennan that roughly 200 people under his leadership had at some point participated in the interrogation program. They wanted to know, he said, how Mr. Brennan planned to defend them in public against accusations that the C.I.A. engaged in systematic torture and lied about its efficacy.
  • Mr. Tenet resigned a decade ago amid the wash of recriminations over the C.I.A.’s botched Iraq assessments, and he has given few interviews since his book tour.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 14
     
    Major Obama scandal brewing here. The current head of the CIA, John Brennan, has been caught conspiring with former CIA heads and others to counter the Senate Intelligence Committee's pending report on CIA torture and extraordinary rendition, even as Brennan works to delay the report summary's publication by censoring it, resulting in delay while the Committee argues with the CIA over the deletions. All of which sharply contrasts with Obama's publicly expressed desire to have the report published promptly.    The article also makes a very strong case that those CIA officials who participated in the torture and rendition program have been enabled, on Obama's watch, to act as the censors of the Senate Report.  A must-read
Paul Merrell

The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency's Role in Torture for Years - The I... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...esidencys-role-torture-4-years

war & peace torture CIA Obama-coverup Bush-II Senate-Intelligence-Committee ACLU FOIA war crimes

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • On May 10, 2013, John Brennan presented CIA’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report to the President. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza. The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee’s Torture Report – which Dan Froomkin covered here – has now zeroed in on the White House. Did the White House order the CIA to withdraw 920 documents from a server made available to Committee staffers, as Senator Dianne Feinstein says the agency claimed in 2010? Were those documents – perhaps thousands of them – pulled in deference to a White House claim of executive privilege, as Senator Mark Udall and then CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston suggested last fall? And is the White House continuing to withhold 9,000 pages of documents without invoking privilege, as McClatchy reported yesterday? We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency’s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program, secret.
  • As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, noted  in 2009 – shortly after Hayden revealed that torture started as a covert operation – this means there should be a paper trail implicating President Bush in the torture program. “[T]here should be a Presidential ‘finding’ authorizing the program,” he said, “and [] such a finding should have been provided to Congressional overseers.” The National Security Act dictates that every covert operation must be supported by a written declaration finding that the action is necessary and important to the national security. The Congressional Intelligence committees – or at least the Chair and Ranking Member – should receive notice of the finding. But there is evidence that those Congressional overseers were never told that the finding the president signed on September 17, 2001 authorized torture. For example, a letter from then ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, to the CIA’s General Counsel following her first briefing on torture asked: “Have enhanced techniques been authorized and approved by the President?” The CIA’s response at the time was simply that “policy as well as legal matters have been addressed within the Executive Branch.”
  • Nevertheless, the finding does exist. The CIA even disclosed its existence in response to the ACLU FOIA, describing it as “a 14-page memorandum dated 17 September 2001 from President Bush to the Director of the CIA pertaining to the CIA’s authorization to detain terrorists.” In an order in the ACLU suit, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein confirmed that the declaration was “intertwined with” the administration’s effort to keep the language in the Tenet document hidden. When the administration succeeded in keeping that short phrase secret, all effort to release the declaration also ended.
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  • Enduring confusion about this particular finding surely exists because of its flexible nature. As Bob Woodward described in Bush at War, CIA Director Tenet asked President Bush to sign “a broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation.” As Jane Mayer described in The Dark Side, such an order not only gave the CIA flexibility, it also protected the President. “To give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the President to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how.” When George Tenet signed written guidelines for the CIA’s torture program in 2003, however, he appeared to have deliberately deprived the President of that deniability by including the source of CIA’s authorization – presumably naming the President – in a document interrogators would see. You can’t blame the CIA Director, after all; Tenet signed the Guidelines just as CIA’s Inspector General and DOJ started to review the legality of the torture tactics used against detainees like Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was threatened with a drill and a gun in violation of DOJ’s ban on mock executions.
  • The White House’s fight to keep the short phrase describing Bush’s authorization of the torture program hidden speaks to its apparent ambivalence over the torture program. Even after President Obama released the DOJ memos authorizing torture – along with a damning CIA Inspector General Report and a wide range of documents revealing bureaucratic discussions within the CIA about torture – the White House still fought the release of the phrase that would have made it clear that the CIA conducted this torture at the order of the president. And it did so with a classified declaration from Jones that would have remained secret had Judge Hellerstein not insisted it be made public. As Aftergood noted, such White House intervention in a FOIA suit is rare. “The number of times that a national security advisor has filed a declaration in a FOIA lawsuit is vanishingly small,” he said. “It almost never happens.” But as ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer noted of the finding, “It was the original authority for the CIA’s secret prisons and for the agency’s rendition and torture program, and apparently it was the authority for the targeted killing program as well.  It was the urtext.  It’s remarkable that after all this time it’s still secret.”
  • President Obama’s willingness to go to such lengths to hide this short phrase may explain the White House’s curious treatment of potentially privileged documents with the Senate now – describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program and its seemingly contradictory stance supporting publishing the Torture Report while thwarting its completion by withholding privileged documents. After all, the documents in question, like the reference to the presidential finding, may deprive the President of plausible deniability. Furthermore, those documents may undermine one of the conclusions of the Torture Report. According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Torture Report found that “the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House.” Perhaps the documents reportedly withheld by the White House undermine this conclusion, and instead show that the CIA operated with the full consent and knowledge of at least some people within the White House. Finally, the White House’s sensitivity about documents involved in the torture program may stem from the structure of the finding. As John Rizzo made clear, the finding authorizes not just torturing, but killing, senior al Qaeda figures. Bob Woodward even reported that that CIA would carry out that killing using Predator drones, a program CIA still conducts. And in fact, when the Second Circuit ultimately ruled to let the White House to keep the authorization phrase secret, it did so because the phrase also relates to “a highly classified, active intelligence activity” and “pertains to intelligence activities unrelated to the discontinued [torture] program.” Given what we know about the September 17, 2001 finding, that may well refer to President Obama’s still active drone program.
  • In any case, the White House’s seemingly contradictory statements about the Torture Report might best be understood by its past treatment of CIA documents. By releasing the DOJ memos and other materials, the White House provided what seemed to be unprecedented transparency about what the CIA had done. But all the while it was secretly hiding language describing what the White House has done.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14
     
    See also U.N. Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. is a party to. http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/39/a39r046.htm
Paul Merrell

How a false witness helped the CIA make a case for torture | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...false-witness-ciatorture.html

war & peace CIA torture NSA lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Buried amid details of “rectal rehydration” and waterboarding that dominated the headlines over last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee findings was an alarming detail: Both the committee’s summary report and its rebuttal by the CIA admit that a source whose claims were central to the July 2004 resumption of the torture program  — and, almost certainly, to authorizing the Internet dragnet collecting massive amounts of Americans’ email metadata — fabricated claims about an election year plot. Both the torture program and President Bush's warrantless wiretap program, Stellar Wind, were partly halted from March through June of 2004. That March, Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith prepared to withdraw Pentagon authorization for torture, amid growing concern following the publication of pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib, and a May 2004 CIA inspector general report criticizing a number of aspects of the Agency's interrogation program. On June 4, 2004, CIA Director George Tenet suspended the use of torture techniques.
  • During the same period, the DOJ lawyers who pushed to stop torture were also persuading President George W. Bush to halt aspects of Stellar Wind, a program that conducted warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ communications inside the U.S., on top of the Internet metadata. After a dramatic confrontation in the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft on March 10, 2004, acting Attorney General Jim Comey and Goldsmith informed Bush there was no legal basis for parts of the program. Ultimately, Bush agreed to modify aspects of it, in part by halting the collection of Internet metadata. But even as Bush officials suspended that part of the program on March 26, they quickly set about finding legal cover for its resumption. One way they did so was by pointing to imminent threats — such as a planned election-season attack — in the United States.
  • The CIA in March 2004 received reporting from a source the torture report calls "Asset Y,” who said a known Al-Qaeda associate in Pakistan, Janat Gul — whom CIA at the time believed was a key facilitator — had set up a meeting between Asset Y and Al-Qaeda's finance chief, and was helping plan attacks inside the United States timed to coincide with the November 2004 elections. According to the report, CIA officers immediately expressed doubts about the veracity of the information they’d been given by Asset Y. A senior CIA officer called the report "vague" and "worthless in terms of actionable intelligence." He noted that Al Qaeda had already issued a statement “emphasizing a lack of desire to strike before the U.S. election” and suggested that since Al-Qaeda was aware that “threat reporting causes panic in Washington” and inevitably results in leaks, planting a false claim of an election season attack would be a good way for the network to test whether Asset Y was working for its enemies. Another officer, assigned to the group hunting Osama bin Laden, also expressed doubts. In its rebuttal to the Senate report, the CIA argues the agency was right to take seriously Asset Y’s reporting , in spite of those initial doubts. The CIA wrote numerous reports about the claim “even as we worked to resolve the inconsistencies.” Reports from detainee Hassan Ghul, who was captured in January 2004, supported the possibility that a cell of Al-Qaeda members in Pakistan’s tribal areas might be planning a plot of which he was unaware. And the CIA corroborated other parts of Asset Y's reporting.
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  • Still, the CIA had one further reason for doubting claims that Gul was at the center of an Al-Qaeda election-year plot. Ghu told the CIA about an attempt by Gul, in the fall of 2003, to sell anti-aircraft missiles to Al-Qaeda; the Qaeda figure in Ghul’s story didn't even want to work with Gul. And Ghul later learned Gul was probably lying about his ability to acquire the missiles.
  • Nevertheless, the CIA took seriously Asset Y’s claim that Gul was involved in an election plot and moved quickly to gain custody of him after his arrest by Pakistan in June 2004. Even before CIA rendered Gul to its custody, Tenet started lobbying to get torture techniques reapproved for his interrogation. On June 29, Tenet wrote National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice seeking approval to once again use some of the techniques whose use he suspended less than four weeks earlier, in the hope of gathering information on the election season plot. "Given the magnitude of the danger posed by the pre-election plot and Gul's almost certain knowledge of any intelligence about that plot” Tenet wrote, relying on Asset Y's claims, “I request the fastest possible resolution of the above issues." On July 20, according to the report, top administration officials gave CIA verbal approval to get back into the torture business. Ashcroft stated that most previously approved interrogation techniques would not violate U.S. law on July 22 (though not waterboarding). And by the end of July, CIA started coaxing DOJ to approve other techniques — such as slapping someone in the stomach or hosing them down with cold water or limiting their food — which had already been used by the CIA but never officially approved by DOJ.
  • At the same time, the government was also using the ostensible election-season plot, among others, to persuade the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) – the secret court that approves domestic spying on Americans – to authorize the Internet dragnet. After Bush halted the Internet dragnet on March 26, his aides began working with FISC presiding judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to find a way to use FISA authority -- normally been used to access records for a single phone or Internet account -- to collect Internet metadata in bulk. They provided a series of briefings, including one attended by Terrorist Threat Integration Center head John Brennan and CIA Director George Tenet, to explain the threat. In addition, they provided what – under Stellar Wind – analysts called a “scary memo,” summarizing all the threats facing the country to underscore the urgency of the program. Tenet's declaration included as an appendix to an application submitted in the days before July 14, 2004, laid out the threats CIA and others were fighting that summer.
  • Judge Kollar-Kotelly invoked Tenet's material in a redacted section of her opinion authorizing the phone dragnet, pointing to it as a key reason to permit collection of what she called “enormous” amounts of data from innocent Americans.
  • Soon after the reauthorization of the torture and the Internet dragnet, the CIA realized ASSET Y's story wasn't true. By September, an officer involved in Janat Gul's interrogation observed, “we lack credible information that ties him to pre-election threat information or direct operational planning against the United States, at home or abroad.” In October, CIA reassessed ASSET Y, and found him to be deceptive. When pressured, ASSET Y admitted had had made up the story of a meeting set up by Gul. ASSET Y blamed his CIA handler for pressuring him for intelligence, leading him to lie about the meeting. By 2005, CIA had concluded that ASSET Y was a fabricator, and Janat Gul was a “rather poorly educated village man [who is] quite lazy [who] was looking to make some easy money for little work and he was easily persuaded to move people and run errands for folks on our target list” (though the Agency wasn't always forthright about the judgment to DOJ). The torture program, which was resumed in part because of a perceived urgency of extracting information from Gul on a plot that didn't exist, continued for several more years. The Internet dragnet continued under FISC authorization, on and off, until December 2011. And several other still active NSA programs, including the phone dragnet, relied on Kollar-Kotelly's earlier authorization as precedents – the case for which had also been derived, in part, from one long discredited fabricator.
Gary Edwards

American Thinker: Reality Check on the Record of Big, Bad Capitalism - 0 views

www.americanthinker.com/...ty_check_on_the_record_of.html

obammunism crony-capitalism financial-oligarchs Banksters banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Apr 10
     
    President Obama's core economic tenet is fairness; the unfairness of our economic system needs remedy in his view. Equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity is the root principle. A forced redistribution of wealth will act as an equalizer for the past sins of capitalism.  The administration, the congressional majority, and an agreeable media are systematically dismantling free-market mechanisms and installing a centrally regulated command economy, all for the sake of fairness. Evidence over the last fifteen months is overwhelming:  government takeovers of major industries and individual companies; massive ramp-up of government regulations on industry; tax changes to force re-distribution of wealth; and lectures on behavior by our Grand Arbiter of Fairness, the president. The consequences for all 330 million Americans are enormous. But where is the clear, unemotional evidence of either how bad it's been under capitalism or how many more people will benefit under the new system? What is the alternative system? Where is it working today? All we have seen are a string of anecdotes and a parade of victims. Wall street bonuses are bad; out-of-work people are victim; millionaires don't deserve their wealth; change will make it better.
Joseph Skues

Yes, Islam condones wife beatings - 0 views

www.calgaryherald.com/...story.html

islam condones yes

shared by Joseph Skues on 23 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Joseph Skues on 23 Jan 11
     
    "Recently, Marvin Levant (Dec. 28), Steve Harris (Dec. 30), Syed Soharwardy (Jan. 2), and Riazuddin Ahmed (Jan. 5) debated Islam through the forum of the Herald's letters to the editor. The issue of wife beating and gender inequality in Islam has become convoluted and highly controversial as many Muslims try to sugar-coat the ugly truths and others try to shed some light on the issue. Soharwardy's statement that "Beating one's wife is not only wrong, it is criminal and completely un-Islamic" is incorrect. The Qur'an says that "men are in charge of women because Allah has made one of them (men) to excel the other (women), thus man's superiority over women . . . good women are the obedient ones . . . admonish the rebellious women and banish them, and scourge them (whip them severely to inflict pain) (4:34) . . . smote them (hit or strike with the hand or with a weapon causing pain, beat them . . . (4:62)". Islam does not recognize gender equality. For example, polygamy is accepted in Islam, but polyandry is not. A woman's testimony is considered half as worthy as a man's in court; a son inherits twice as much as a daughter does. Muslim men may marry Muslim, Jewish or Christian women, but Muslim women can marry only Muslim men. In short, sharia law leads to the inhuman treatment of Muslim women by their husbands and others, especially in South Asia and the Middle East. Higher education is emphasized more for sons than for daughters; in cultural honour killings, almost always women are the target for murder. Under sharia, divorced Muslim women get custody of their sons under eight years of age and daughters until puberty, and then the fathers take the children away. Sharia enabled one of the worst fundamentalists, the vile and ruthless military dictator, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, to put more than 15,000 rape victims in jail because they could not comply with the absurd Islamic condition requiring them to have numerous male witnesses of their victimization. They were char
Paul Merrell

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : End Torture, Shut Down the CIA! - 0 views

ronpaulinstitute.org/...rture,-shut-down-the-cia!.aspx

war & peace torture rendition CIA ron paul

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • End Torture, Shut Down the CIA! Written by Ron Paul Sunday July 27, 2014
  • Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, “we don’t torture people”? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, “this government does not torture people”? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier.   Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it “enhanced interrogation” and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA had not only lied about the torture of large numbers of people after 9/11, but it had vastly exaggerated any valuable information that came from such practices. However secret rendition of prisoners to other places was ongoing.
  • The US not only tortured people in its own custody, however. Last week the European Court of Human Rights found that the US government transferred individuals to secret detention centers in Poland (and likely elsewhere) where they were tortured away from public scrutiny. The government of Poland was ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to two victims for doing nothing to stop their torture on Polish soil.
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  • Meanwhile, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior current and former CIA officials are said to be frantically attempting to prepare a response to a planned release of an unclassified version of a 6,500 page Senate Intelligence Committee study on the torture practices of that agency. The CIA was already caught tapping into the computers of Senate investigators last year, looking to see what information might be contained in the report. Those who have seen the report have commented that it details far more brutal CIA practices than have been revealed to this point.   Revelations of US secret torture sites overseas and a new Senate investigation revealing widespread horrific CIA torture practices should finally lead to the abolishment of this agency. Far from keeping us safer, CIA covert actions across the globe have led to destruction of countries and societies and unprecedented resentment toward the United States. For our own safety, end the CIA!
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 14
     
    Ron Paul calls for shutting down the CIA. He's not the first. For example, former President Harry Truman, who established the CIA, said years after he left office that the Agency was operating so far outside its authority that it should be shut down. And JFK was also seriously considering ending the CIA. By statute, the CIA is limited to intelligence gathering, acting as the central intelligence agency for gathering and reporting to the President on all intelligence from all other intelligence agencies.  One error in Paul's article, where he says that the recent decisions were the first time the European Court of Human Rights had connected any EU country to U.S. torture practices. The first was in 2012 in the case of El-Masri v. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, No. 39630/09, European Court of Human Rights (Grand Chamber Judgment of 13 December 2012), http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/fra-press/pages/search.aspx?i=003-4184975-4955119, also at http://tinyurl.com/c88qs74. See also El-Masri Application, http://www.law.columbia.edu/ipimages/Human_Rights_Institute/ctlm%20docs/ElMasriApplication.pdf.
Paul Merrell

Putin Throws Down the Gauntlet - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...ce-to-pull-back-from-the-brink

war & peace Syria Assad Russia U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Would you be willing to defend your country against a foreign invasion? That’s all Putin is doing in Syria. He’s just preempting the tidal wave of jihadis that’ll be coming his way once the current fracas is over.  He figures it’s better to exterminate these US-backed maniacs in Syria now than face them in Chechnya, St Petersburg and Moscow sometime in the future.  Can you blame him? After all, if Washington’s strategy works in Syria, then you can bet they’ll try the same thing in Beirut, Tehran and Moscow. So what choice does Putin have? None. He has no choice.  His back is against the wall. He has to fight.  No one in Washington seems to get this. They think Putin can throw in the towel and call it “quits” at the first sign of getting bogged down. But he can’t throw in the towel because Russia’s facing an existential crisis.  If he loses, then Russia’s going to wind up on the same scrap heap as Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. You can bet on it. So the only thing he can do is win. Period. Victory isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.
  • Of course they’ve noticed. Everyone’s noticed. Everyone knows Washington is on the warpath and its leaders have gone stark raving mad. How could they not notice? But all that’s done is focus the mind on the task at hand, and the task at hand is to whoop the tar out of the terrorists, put an end to Washington’s sick little jihadi game, and go home. That’s Russia’s plan in a nutshell.  No one is trying to cobble together the long-lost Soviet empire. That’s pure bunkum.  Russia just wants to clean up this nest of vipers and call it a day. There’s nothing more to it than that. But what if the going gets tough and Syria becomes a quagmire? That doesn’t change anything, because Russia still has to win. If that means sending ground troops to Syria, then that’s what Putin will do. If that means asymmetrical warfare, like arming the Kurds or the Yemenis, or the Taliban or even disparate anti-regime Shiites in Saudi Arabia, then he’ll do that too. Whatever it takes. This isn’t a game, it’s a fight for survival; Russia’s survival as a sovereign country. That’s what the stakes are. That’s not something Putin takes lightly.
  • The reason I ask this now is because, on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to attend an emergency meeting in Moscow with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to discuss issues that are too sensitive to reveal to the public. There’s a lot of speculation about what the two men will talk about, but the urgency and the secrecy of the meeting suggests that the topic will be one of great importance. So allow me to make a guess about what the topic will be. When Kerry arrives in Moscow tomorrow he’ll be rushed to meeting room at the Kremlin where he’ll be joined by Lavrov, Putin, Minister of Defense Sergey Shoygu and high-ranking members from military intelligence. Then, following the initial introductions, Kerry will be shown the evidence Russian intelligence has gathered on last Sunday’s attack on a Syrian military base east of Raqqa that killed three Syrian soldiers and wounded thirteen others. The Syrian government immediately condemned the attack and accused US warplanes of conducting the operation. Later in the day,  Putin delivered an uncharacteristically-harsh and threatening statement that left no doubt that he thought the attack was a grave violation of the accepted rules of engagement and, perhaps, a declaration of war.
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  • Why would an incident in the village of Ayyash in far-flung Deir Ezzor Province be so important that it would bring the two nuclear-armed adversaries to the brink of war? I’ll tell you why: It’s because there were other incidents prior to the bombing in Ayyash that laid the groundwork for the current clash. There was the ISIS downing of the Russian airliner that killed 224 Russian civilians. Two weeks after that tragedy, Putin announced at the G-20 meetings that he had gathered intelligence proving that 40 countries –including some in the G-20 itself–were involved in the funding and supporting of ISIS. This story was completely blacked out in the western media and, so far, Russia has not revealed the names of any of the countries involved. So, I ask you, dear reader, do you think the United States is on that list of ISIS supporters?
  • Then there was the downing of the Russian Su-24, a Russian bomber that was shot down by Turkish F-16s while it was carrying out its mission to exterminate terrorists in Syria. Many analysts do not believe that the   Su-24 could have been destroyed without surveillance and logistical support provided by US AWACs or US satellites. Many others scoff at the idea that Turkey would engage in such a risky plan without the go-ahead from Washington. Either way, the belief that Washington was directly involved in the downing of a Russian warplane is widespread. So, I ask you, dear reader, do you think Washington gave Turkey the greenlight? Finally, we have the aerial attack on the Syrian military base in Deir Ezzor, an attack that was either executed by US warplanes or US-coalition warplanes. Not only does the attack constitute a direct assault on the Russian-led coalition (an act of war) but the bombing raid was also carried out in tandem  with a “a full-scale ISIS offensive on the villages of Ayyash and Bgelia.”  The coordination suggests that either the US or US allies were providing  air-cover for ISIS terrorists to carry out their ground operations.  Author Alexander Mercouris– who is certainly no conspiracy nut–expands on this idea in a recent piece at Russia Insider which provides more detail on the incident. The article begins like this:
  • “Did Members of the US-Led Coalition Carry Out an Air Strike to Help ISIS? Russia Implies They Did. Russian statement appears to implicate aircraft from two member states of the US led coalition in the air strike on the Syrian military base in Deir az-Zor….This information – if it is true – begs a host of questions. Firstly, the Syrian military base that was hit by the air strike was apparently the scene of a bitter battle between the Syrian military and the Islamic State.  It seems that shortly after the air strike – and most probably as a result of it – the Islamic State’s fighters were able to storm it. Inevitably, that begs the question of whether the aircraft that carried out the air strike were providing air support to the fighters of the Islamic State. On the face of it, it looks like they were. After all, if what happened was simply a mistake, it might have been expected that the US and its allies would say as much.  If so, it is an extremely serious and worrying development, suggesting that some members of the US-led anti-Islamic State coalition are actually in league with the Islamic State.  (“Did Members of the US-Led Coalition Carry Out an Air Strike to Help ISIS?” Alexander Mercouris, Russia Insider)
  • So there it is in black and white. The Russians think someone in the US-led coalition is teaming up with ISIS. That should make for some interesting conversation when Kerry sashays into the Kremlin today. Does Kerry have any clue that Putin and his lieutenants are probably going to produce evidence that coalition warplanes were involved in the bombing of the Syrian military base?  How do you think he’ll respond to that news? Will he apologize or just stand there dumbstruck? And how will he react when Putin tells him that if a similar incident takes place in the future, Russian warplanes and anti-aircraft units are going to shoot the perpetrator down? If I am not mistaken, Kerry is in for a big surprise on Tuesday. He’s about to learn that Putin takes war very seriously and is not going to let Washington sabotage his plans for success. If Kerry’s smart, he’ll pass along that message to Obama and tell him he needs to dial it down a notch if he wants to avoid a war with Russia.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Dec 15
     
    Article published just before Kerry's meeting with Lavrov, et al, after which Kerry announced that Assad stepping down is no longer a U.S. pre-condition of negotiating peace in Syria. It's important to keep in mind here that non-interference in the internal affairs of foreign nations is a fundamental tenet of international law, one that the U.S. regime change position on Syria openly flouted, as it did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. So what is behind Kerry's suddenly-acquired respect for the right of the people of Syria to choose their own leader? Mike Whitney offers us a smorgasbord of reasons in this article, all of which boil down to Russian blackmail, a threat to go public with incredibly damning information on what the U.S. and allies have been up to in Syria. This may be a turning point in the Syrian War, since the positions of the Gulf Coast Council (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, etc.) and the salafist jihadis they have supplied to take down Assad has been unequivocal insistence that Assad agree to step down as a precondition of negotiation.  I.e., the U.S. is forking away from the Gulf Coast Council/jihadi position. How will they react? 
Gary Edwards

The Stunning Hypocrisy of the U.S. Government - BlackListedNews.com - 1 views

www.blacklistednews.com/...M.html

NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA Edward-Snowden hypocrisy

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Please read this rather good summary in this morning’s New York Times of the worldwide debate Snowden has enabled – how these disclosures have “set off a national debate over the proper limits of government surveillance” and “opened an unprecedented window on the details of surveillance by the NSA, including its compilation of logs of virtually all telephone calls in the United States and its collection of e-mails of foreigners from the major American Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Skype” – and ask yourself: has Snowden actually does anything to bring “injury to the United States”, or has he performed an immense public service?
  • The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of “espionage”.
  • It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing “injury to the United States” are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens – and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they’re doing – rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.
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  • The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid.
  • The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone.
  • What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing.
  • The “enemy” they’re seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists.
  • It’s the American people.
  • The people who have learned things they didn’t already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true.
  • What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.
  • And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures.
  • What has been “harmed” is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability.
  • If anything is a crime, it’s that secret, unaccountable and deceitful behavior: not the shining of light on it.
  • At a press conference to discuss the accusations, an N.S.A. spokesman surprised observers by announcing the spying charges against Mr. Snowden with a totally straight face. “These charges send a clear message,” the spokesman said. “In the United States, you can’t spy on people.”
  • “The American people have the right to assume that their private documents will remain private and won’t be collected by someone in the government for his own purposes.”
  • “Only by bringing Mr. Snowden to justice can we safeguard the most precious of American rights: privacy,” added the spokesman, apparently serious.
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 13
     
    Extremely well linked story from "Washington's Blog" excerpt: "The Government's Hypocrisy Is the Core Problem Congress has exempted itself from the prohibition against trading on inside information … the law that got Martha Stewart and many other people thrown in jail. There are many other ways in which the hypocrisy of the politicians in D.C. are hurting our country. Washington politicians say we have to slash basic services, and yet waste hundreds of billions of dollars on counter-productive boondoggles.  If the politicos just stopped throwing money at corporate welfare queens, military and security boondoggles and pork, harmful quantitative easing, unnecessary nuclear subsidies,  the failed war on drugs, and other wasted and counter-productive expenses, we wouldn't need to impose austerity on the people. The D.C. politicians said that the giant failed banks couldn't be nationalized, because that would be socialism.  Instead of temporarily nationalizing them and then spinning them off to the private sector - or breaking them up - the politicians have bailed them out to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars each year, and created a system where all of the profits are privatized, and all of the losses socialized. Obama and Congress promised help for struggling homeowners, and passed numerous bills that they claimed would rescue the little guy.  But every single one of these bills actually bails out the banks … and doesn't really help the homeowner. The D.C. regulators pretend that they are being tough on the big banks, but are actually doing everything they can to help cover up their sins. Many have pointed out Obama's hypocrisy in slamming Bush's spying programs … and then expanding them  (millions more). And in slamming China's cyber-warfare … while doing the same thing. And - while the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country - it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (ba
Paul Merrell

The Stunning Hypocrisy of the U.S. Government | Washington's Blog - 0 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...-hypocrisy-versus-honesty.html

surveillance state NSA hypocricy

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Congress has exempted itself from the prohibition against trading on inside information … the law that got Martha Stewart and many other people thrown in jail. There are many other ways in which the hypocrisy of the politicians in D.C. is hurting our country. Washington politicians say we have to slash basic services, and yet waste hundreds of billions of dollars on counter-productive boondoggles. If the politicos just stopped throwing money at corporate welfare queens, military and security boondoggles and pork, harmful quantitative easing, unnecessary nuclear subsidies, the failed war on drugs, and other wasted and counter-productive expenses, we wouldn’t need to impose austerity on the people. The D.C. politicians said that the giant failed banks couldn’t be nationalized, because that would be socialism. Instead of temporarily nationalizing them and then spinning them off to the private sector – or breaking them up – the politicians have bailed them out to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars each year, and created a system where all of the profits are privatized, and all of the losses socialized. Obama and Congress promised help for struggling homeowners, and passed numerous bills that they claimed would rescue the little guy. But every single one of these bills actually bails out the banks … and doesn’t really help the homeowner.
  • The Federal Reserve promises to do everything possible to reduce unemployment. But its policies are actually destroying jobs. Many D.C. politicians pay lip service to helping the little guy … while pushing policies which have driven inequality to levels surpassing slave-owning societies. The D.C. regulators pretend that they are being tough on the big banks, but are actually doing everything they can to help cover up their sins. Many have pointed out Obama’s hypocrisy in slamming Bush’s spying programs … and then expanding them (millions more). And in slamming China’s cyber-warfare … while doing the same thing. And – while the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country – it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (background). That’s despite Obama saying he’s running the most transparent administration ever.
  • Glenn Greenwald – the Guardian reporter who broke the NSA spying revelations – has documented for many years the hypocritical use of leaks by the government to make itself look good … while throwing the book at anyone who leaks information embarrassing to the government. Greenwald notes today: Prior to Barack Obama’s inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That’s because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of “espionage”. It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing “injury to the United States” are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens – and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they’re doing – rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.
  • Similarly, journalists who act as mere stenographers for the government who never criticize in more than a superficial fashion are protected and rewarded … but reporters who actually report on government misdeeds are prosecuted and harassed. Further, the biggest terrorism fearmongers themselves actually support terrorism. And see this. In the name of fighting terrorism, the U.S. has been directly supporting Al Qaeda and other terrorists and providing them arms, money and logistical support in Syria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries … both before and after 9/11. And see this. The American government has long labeled foreigners as terrorists for doing what America does. Moreover, government officials may brand Americans as potential terrorists if they peacefully protest, complain about the taste of their water, or do any number of other normal, all-American things.
  • This is especially hypocritical given that liberals like Noam Chomsky and conservatives like the director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan (Lt. General William Odom) all say that the American government is the world’s largest purveyor of terrorism. As General Odom noted: Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world. These are just a couple of ways in which the D.C. politicians are hypocrites.
Paul Merrell

Hacked Emails Prove Coordination Between Clinton Campaign and Super PACs - 0 views

theintercept.com/...hillary-superpac-coordination

Auction 2016 Super-PACs Hillary Trump Podesta-emails Citizens-United

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The fact that political candidates are closely coordinating with friendly Super PACs — making a mockery of a central tenet of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision — is one of the biggest open secrets in Washington. Super PACs are only allowed to accept unlimited contributions on the condition that the money is spent independently of specific campaigns. The Federal Election Commission hasn’t reacted for a variety of reasons, including a lack of hard evidence, vague rules, and a partisan divide among the commissioners so bitter they can’t even agree to investigate obvious crimes. But newly disclosed hacked campaign documents published by WikiLeaks and a hacker who calls himself Guccifer 2.0 reveal in stark terms how Hillary Clinton’s staffers made Super PACs an integral part of her presidential campaign.
  • The emails show consistent, repeated efforts by the Clinton campaign to collaborate with Super PACs on strategy, research, attacks on political adversaries and fundraising. The cache also reveal meetings between the campaign and Priorities USA Action, and that campaign officials have helped with the group’s fundraising. The files were apparently hacked from a variety of Clinton staffers and have been posted online in recent weeks by Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0. Obama administration intelligence officials have alleged, without providing evidence, that the email hacks were conducted on behalf of the Russian government in an attempt to disrupt the U.S. elections.
  • Super PACs, known technically as “Independent Expenditure-Only Political Committees,” are a direct result of the Citizens United court decision. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the author of the decision, proclaimed that deregulating outside money would have no corrupting effect upon candidates because there would be strict firewalls between candidates and outside groups
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Correct the Record has long argued it could work directly with the Clinton campaign. When the group launched, it said it would only produce and distribute communications online, and that its work would therefore be exempt from FEC coordination rules. The Super PAC was recently the subject of a complaint filed with the Federal Elections Commission by the Campaign Legal Center, which called on regulators to investigate whether Clinton’s campaign has illegally coordinated with the group. The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, has also alleged that officials working for Donald Trump have similarly blurred the line between the campaign and one of its largest Super PACs, Make America Number 1, by employing common vendors. The Campaign Legal Center argued that Correct the Record has likely made “coordinated expenditures” that could be considered in-kind contributions to the Clinton campaign — such as its spending on “opposition research, message development, surrogate training, reporter pitches, media booking, video production, ‘rapid response’ press outreach, and other ‘earned media.’” “These documents affirm what we’ve been saying all along about Correct the Record,” said Brendan Fischer, an associate counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “They are basically operating as an arm of the Clinton campaign.”
  • While Correct the Record has argued it is exempt from FEC rules, Clinton herself has said she does not work with Priorities USA Action. That Super PAC has spent millions of dollars on independent expenditures, including six-figure media advertising buys, to boost Clinton’s candidacy. The group has raised over $133 million through individual donations as large as $6 million. As other media outlets have reported, Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign attorney, provided a memo with guidance on how the campaign could solicit funds for Priorities USA Action. The memo notes that campaign staffers would have to use certain language when trying to raise money for the Super PAC:
  • Elias’s law firm, Perkins Coie LLP, has provided legal services to the Clinton campaign, Correct the Record and Priorities USA Action, making it a central node in the campaign infrastructure.
Paul Merrell

Researchers Connect 91% of Numbers With Names In Metadata Probe - Slashdot - 0 views

yro.slashdot.org/...s-with-names-in-metadata-probe

NSA NSA-targets metadata names lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • "One of the key tenets of the argument that the National Security Agency and some lawmakers have constructed to justify the agency's collection of phone metadata is that the information it's collecting, such as phone numbers and length of call, can't be tied to the callers' names. However, some quick investigation by some researchers at Stanford University who have been collecting information voluntarily from Android users found that they could correlate numbers to names with very little effort. The Stanford researchers recently started a program called Metaphone that gathers data from volunteers with Android phones. They collect data such as recent phone calls and text messages and social network information. The goal of the project, which is the work of the Stanford Security Lab, is to draw some lines connecting metadata and surveillance. As part of the project, the researchers decided to select a random set of 5,000 numbers from their data and see whether they could connect any of them to subscriber names using just freely available Web tools. The result: They found names for 27 percent of the numbers using just Google, Yelp, Facebook and Google Places. Using some other online tools, they connected 91 of 100 numbers with names."
Paul Merrell

Has questioning 9/11 become more acceptable? - RT Op-Edge - 2 views

rt.com/...9-11-conspiracy-acceptable-708

war & peace war on terror™ polling 9-11

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Sep 13 - No Cached
Gary Edwards liked it
  • Despite the media’s best efforts to dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theories, one in two Americans doubt the government’s narrative and skepticism is slowly seeping its way into the mainstream. Twelve years on from the events of September 11, 2001, and a seemingly nightmarish deja vu has gripped the United States and its war-weary citizens. Again, the public is told that destructive weapons in faraway countries pose a critical danger, and that despite wearing the clothes of humanitarianism, a military solution that will inevitably harm civilians is the only meaningful response. The main difference today is that after an abstract decade-long ‘War on Terror’, Washington finds itself fighting in Syria on the same side as Al-Qaeda and those who are sympathetic to the alleged culprits of the 9/11 attacks.
  • Contrary to how the US media has presented them, movements that have questioned 9/11 continue to gather momentum and are often led by increasingly vocal scientists and academics that claim the account presented in the official 9/11 Commission report could not possibly be accurate.
  • The 9/11 Commission was chartered to provide a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, but even former commission vice-chairman Lee Hamilton wrote an article in the New York Times in 2008 describing how the CIA obstructed the 9/11 investigations, destroyed evidence and failed to respond to the commission’s own lawful requests for information – plus it’s also widely known that the 9/11 Commission report relies heavily on torture testimony.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • If the United States continually lobbies its population to intervene in unpopular new military conflicts using unsubstantiated claims and questionable evidence, there is little doubt that greater numbers of people will reexamine 9/11 and endorse more critical perspectives of it, especially as those campaigns mature and become more sophisticated. There are many who have looked at the evidence and are convinced that Washington is lying, but the real juicy question is who exactly is responsible? Kevin Ryan of the Journal of 9/11 Studies recently published a book, “Another Nineteen,” which is perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of the political and military command structure that spectacularly failed to act on the morning of 9/11. The task at hand for 9/11 advocacy movements is grasping both the scientific and political totality of events and bringing that scrutiny into the mainstream, which it is steadily beginning to do.
  • It’s not easy to reliably gauge public opinion figures on this issue, but in 2008, a comprehensive international poll showed that 54 percent of respondents believed that parties other than Al-Qaeda were responsible, as reported by Reuters. A new poll conducted in September 2013 by polling firm YouGov found that one in two Americans have doubts about the government’s account of 9/11. 
  • There will always be mocking and scathing criticisms of those who question 9/11, but if scientists and experts disagree over the technical fundamentals, this enough is sufficient ground for advocating a new and comprehensive investigation. As it stands, this transformative event that radically altered American foreign and domestic policy and led to the deaths of over a million people has not been sufficiently explained.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Sep 13
     
    On August 31st, 2013, Kevin Ryan appeared on Coast to Coast (http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2013/08/31) for a four hour interview that is available on request. Amazing interview! The long-time co-editor of the Journal of 9/11, Kevin Ryan, offered an evidence-based analysis of other potential suspects responsible for the September 11th attacks in 2001. A former employee of Underwriters Laboratories (UL), Ryan pointed out that the World Trade Center (WTC) was designed to withstand the impact of airliners and the steel used in the buildings was certified by UL to tolerate several hours of intense fire. The steel was tested at 2000 degrees F and a typical office fire burns at 1200 degrees F, he explained, noting that the temperatures measured at the WTC were much lower, around 500 degrees F. This presents a glaring problem since one of the towers was completely destroyed in only 56 minutes, Ryan added. The UL repeated its tests after the disaster and determined the steel columns and floor structures should not have failed, he revealed. A proponent of controlled-demolition theory, Ryan stated definitively that "the evidence really points to the buildings having been destroyed through the use of explosives." Many witnesses reported explosions and flashes of light, he said. Ryan questioned the official government story that 19 young Arab Muslims led by Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed executed this unbelievable attack, observing that such a feat could not have been accomplished by these men as they had no access to plant explosives. Ryan identified former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney as "the two people who were in perfect position to coordinate the attacks of 9/11." Rumsfeld went missing for more than 30 minutes during the height of the attacks and Cheney gave a stand-down order as a plane approached the Pentagon, he reported. Ryan credited Rumsfeld and Cheney with the false conclusions that led to the Iraq
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Sep 13
     
    Be sure to catch the free on-line documentary, "September 11 - The New Pearl Harbor", where director Massimo Mazzucco presents five hours of interviews and evidence comparing the 9-11 events to Pearl Harbor. Massimo confirms the findings of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth; that this was a controlled demolition. He then goes on to name the inside players responsible, and why they did it. Lots of discussion about the 1997 Cheney-Rumsfeld white paper, "The New American Century". The documentary (3 DVD's) is at: http://goo.gl/EIie3d
Paul Merrell

Quitting Over Syria | The American Conservative - 0 views

www.theamericanconservative.com/...quitting-over-syria

war & peace Syria WMD Obama lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The release of the White House “Government Assessment” on August 30, providing the purported evidence to support a bombing attack on Syria, defused a conflict with the intelligence community that had threatened to become public through the mass resignation of a significant number of analysts. The intelligence community’s consensus view on the status of the Syrian chemical-weapons program was derived from a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) completed late last year and hurriedly updated this past summer to reflect the suspected use of chemical weapons against rebels and civilians. The report maintained that there were some indications that the regime was using chemicals, while conceding that there was no conclusive proof. There was considerable dissent from even that equivocation, including by many analysts who felt that the evidence for a Syrian government role was subject to interpretation and possibly even fabricated. Some believed the complete absence of U.S. satellite intelligence on the extensive preparations that the government would have needed to make in order to mix its binary chemical system and deliver it on target was particularly disturbing. These concerns were reinforced by subsequent UN reports suggesting that the rebels might have access to their own chemical weapons. The White House, meanwhile, considered the somewhat ambiguous conclusion of the NIE to be unsatisfactory, resulting in considerable pushback against the senior analysts who had authored the report.
  • In a scenario unfortunately reminiscent of the lead up to Iraq, the National Security Council tasked the various intelligence agencies to beat the bushes and come up with more corroborative information. Israel obligingly provided what was reported to be interceptions of telephone conversations implicating the Syrian army in the attack, but it was widely believed that the information might have been fabricated by Tel Aviv, meaning that bad intelligence was being used to confirm other suspect information, a phenomenon known to analysts as “circular reporting.” Other intelligence cited in passing by the White House on the trajectories and telemetry of rockets that may have been used in the attack was also somewhat conjectural and involved weapons that were not, in fact, in the Syrian arsenal, suggesting that they were actually fired by the rebels. Also, traces of Sarin were not found in most of the areas being investigated, nor on one of the two rockets identified. Whether the victims of the attack suffered symptoms of Sarin was also disputed, and no autopsies were performed to confirm the presence of the chemical. 
  • With all evidence considered, the intelligence community found itself with numerous skeptics in the ranks, leading to sharp exchanges with the Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. A number of analysts threatened to resign as a group if their strong dissent was not noted in any report released to the public, forcing both Brennan and Clapper to back down. This led to the White House issuing its own assessment, completely divorcing the process from any direct connection to the intelligence community. The spectacle of CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind Secretary of State Colin Powell in the United Nations, providing him with credibility as Powell told a series of half-truths, would not be repeated. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Nov 13
     
    More detail about backing up previous reports that the information supplied in the White House "Government Assessment of the Syrian Government's Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013" cooking of intelligence to justify missile strikes on Syria. Note that the same day the Assessment was published by the White House Offiice of the Press Secretary, active duty intelligence officials passed a message to Obama through veteran intelligence officers that the intelligence in the report was unreliable and that there was strong evidence that it was the "rebels" rather than Syrian government that had used sarin gas. http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-military-and-intelligence-officials-to-obama-assad-not-responsible-for-chemical-attack/5348576 Next came a report three days later citing and quoting an anonymous former intelligence official who said the format used and its publication by the White House rather than by the Chief of Intelligence were both strong indications that the document was not the product of the intelligence community. http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/09/obamas-case-for-syria-didnt-reflect-intel-consensus/ Now we learn the reason the White House had to cook its own "public summary of intelligence,"  because many top intelligence threatened to resign if the cherry-picked version of events without reservations explaining the likelihood that it was the rebels who did it. So the Obama Administration, like the Bush II Administration, deliberately lied to the public in an attempt to stampede the nation into another foreign war in the Mideast. The only relevant difference is that Obama didn't get away with launching his own "shock and awe" campaign. Impeachable offense? Yes. Likely to happen? No. Too many hawks in Congress who want war against both Syria and Iran.
Paul Merrell

Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard granted parole - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Israel Pollard parole

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Convicted spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard has been granted parole and will be released from an American jail on Nov. 21, his lawyer announced Tuesday.
  • Both the Justice Department and Pollard's pro bono attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, confirmed his release date Tuesday.
  • Pollard, now 60, worked as a Navy intelligence analyst and passed on top-secret U.S. government information to Israel. Israel's government admitted paying him for the intelligence in 1998. The country granted Pollard citizenship in 1995 and has lobbied for his release for decades.A number of top U.S. officials have argued against releasing Pollard from his life sentences -- including President George W. Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, and Defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. President Bill Clinton wrote in his autobiography that then-CIA Director George Tenet threatened to quit in 1998 when Clinton appeared to be set to release Pollard.He'd previously been denied parole after a July 2014 hearing. He had a second hearing before the U.S. Parole Commission on July 7, 2015.
Paul Merrell

Eight top ex-CIA officials launch bid to rebut 'torture report' | Washington Examiner - 0 views

www.washingtonexaminer.com/...2569273

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report CIA-rebuttal

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • In a bid to bring the "rest of the story" to the nation about the CIA's detention and interrogation of al Qaeda terrorists, eight former top CIA officials, including three directors, are publishing a rebuttal to the sensational Senate Democratic "torture report." Early next month, the Naval Institute Press will release "Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee's Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program." In addition to challenging the Democratic conclusion that CIA techniques, including waterboarding, didn't produce any intelligence, it will be the first time the top officials who oversaw the program will jointly give their review of how it all went down and the successes it brought. Surprisingly, none were interviewed for the Democratic report published in December. It also will include the responses of the Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, left out of the best-selling "The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program."
  • Proceeds generated from the sale of the 352-page "Rebuttal" will go to the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation. The key essays about the program are written by three former CIA chiefs: George Tenet, Porter Goss and retired Gen. Michael V. Hayden. Other contributors include two former deputy directors, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell, former clandestine service boss Jose A. Rodriguez, former CIA and FBI counterterrorism official J. Philip Mudd and former CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo. The intelligence community has been eager to counter the Democratic report by the committee's chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which many said has been unfairly characterized as the main report on the CIA's enhanced interrogation programs.
  • After it came out, current CIA Director John O. Brennan said the interrogations helped produce information that helped set the stage for the 2011 raid by Navy SEALs on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Paul Merrell

Lawmakers seek to strip defense bill of Syria plan, ban US ground troops | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...-program-and-ban-ground-troops

war & peace Iraq Syria Congress legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Democratic lawmakers plan to introduce two bipartisan amendments to the 2015 defense policy bill on Wednesday that would strip provisions authorizing a program to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels to fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).ADVERTISEMENTRep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) plans to introduce the two amendments during a House Rules Committee hearing that will approve parameters for floor debate, including whether any amendments will be allowed a vote.One amendment, from Van Hollen and Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), would take out the provisions in the defense bill that authorize a U.S. plan to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels to fight against ISIS for two years. The plan would cost $500 million and train as many as 5,000 fighters.The second amendment, from Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and others, would ban the use of U.S. forces in ground combat in Iraq or Syria, with the exception of rescue operations for Americans.
  • f adopted by the Rules Committee, the measures are sure to face opposition by the White House, which says the train-and-equip program is a central tenet of the administration’s strategy against ISIS.The measures would also face opposition from Republicans and those who don't want to restrict military options against ISIS, as well as those who believe that some U.S. forces might be necessary to lead Iraqi forces into battle against ISIS.Van Hollen said, although the president has said he won't use ground troops against ISIS, there is no existing limitation on his ability to do that."He has authority to act under the 2001 [authorization for use of military force],” he said.Van Hollen did not say whether he expected the measures to be adopted, but he said there needed to be a separate vote and debate on the two issues.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14
     
    That was on the third. Not a chance of making it into the House bill, in my estimation.
Paul Merrell

And the Winner of the 'War On Terror' Financed Dream Home 2014 Giveaway Is… -... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...anced-dream-home-2014-giveaway

corruption Freeh Kazeminy

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Oceanfront views, 24-hour doorman, heated pool, and perhaps best of all, a “private tunnel to the beach.” This $3 million Palm Beach, Florida penthouse could be yours, but unfortunately it isn’t because this prize has already been claimed by a former high-level U.S. official who helped pave the way for the over decade-long “war on terror,” which has been a near complete catastrophe. Iraq is aflame, the Islamic State is on the rampage, the situation in Afghanistan worsens by the day, and thousands of Americans—and many more Iraqis and Afghans—have died during the post-9/11 conflicts. Meanwhile, the combined cost of the “war on terror” comes to an estimated $1.6 trillion. But if the American people got screwed on the deal, a lot of former senior government officials who played important roles in this debacle have done quite well for themselves. It’s New Year’s Eve and I need to write a final sendoff to 2014, so I thought I’d take a look at the fortunes (literally) of some of these figures: Former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh (I’ll cover former Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge in a New Year’s post).
  • Freeh resigned from the FBI two months before 9/11. When he worked there he was making an annual salary of $145,000 and lived “in a heavily mortgaged house in Great Falls, a Virginia suburb,” according to an old and admiring New Yorker profile. He and his wife now own at least four lavish estates worth many millions of dollars, including a residence in Wilmington, Delaware, a six-bedroom summerhouse worth more than $3 million in Vermont, and a beachfront penthouse at 100 Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida, which was bought for $1.4 million and now has an estimated value of $3 million. How’d that happen? Well, Freeh is one of many former U.S. officials who got paid big speaking fees (reportedly up to $50,000 a pop) by a creepy Iranian group called the People’s Mujahedin, also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, to successfully advocate for its removal from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. He also opened up a consulting firm whose clients have included Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar, who the U.S. Department of Justice accused of taking massive bribes from a British defense contractor. That’s right, Freeh represented a prince from America’s old pal Saudi Arabia, home to fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, and whose export of Wahhabism is credited with giving rising to the Islamic State.
  • Freeh is also hired to conduct investigations, like the controversial report he produced about Penn State’s football program. Nasser Kazeminy, a Minnesota businessman who in 2008 was accused of bribing former Senator Norm Coleman, also hired Freeh to conduct a “thorough investigation” of the allegations against him in the hopes of clearing his name.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In 2011, Freeh issued a public statement saying that his investigation had “completely vindicated” both Kazeminy and Coleman. Sure, Kazeminy had bought Coleman $100,000 worth of presents, but, Freeh said at a press conference, “There was no quid pro quo in the gifts. There was no wrongdoing.” Freeh also met with the Justice Department – which was investigating the bribery charges but declined to bring a case—on Kazeminy’s behalf. Oh yeah, about Freeh’s Palm Beach penthouse. As I discovered through Florida property records, Freeh’s wife co-owns it with Kazeminy, which kind of makes you wonder about just how thorough and impartial his investigation was. The quit claim deed giving Freeh’s wife one-half ownership of the penthouse was signed nine days after Freeh’s vindication of Kazeminy.
Paul Merrell

Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...orturers-and-their-bosses.html

war & peace CIA torture criminal-prosecution

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.”
  • The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president. Continue reading the main story Write A Comment But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Dec 14
     
    New York Times calls editorially for criminal prosecutions of all involved in the CIA's torture program.
Paul Merrell

Did Al Qaeda Cash in on the 9/11 Attacks? | 911Blogger.com - 0 views

911blogger.com/...did-al-qaeda-cash-911-attacks

war & peace 9-11 insider-trading CIA

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • In chapter one Rickards’ otherwise clear vision fails him. The author is absolutely correct that pre-9/11 insider trading did occur. Rickards also correctly notes that “every transaction has two parties,” meaning that every put and call option leaves a paper trail. But Rickards insults our intelligence when he tells us that associates of Osama bin Laden were responsible for the insider trading. Rickards would have us believe, for example, that the terrorists were behind the 600% spike in call options for the military contractor Raytheon, whose stock surged 37% in the weeks after 9/11. Other big winners were L-3 Communications, Northrop Grumman, and Allied Techsystems. According to Paul Zarembka, professor of econometrics at SUNY Buffalo, the put/call options were exercised, meaning that whoever purchased them later collected the profits, blood money. But is it believable that the very same terrorists who sought to destroy America got away with profiting from the subsequent vast expansion of the US war machine? Catching those responsible certainly was the intent of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which led the probe into allegations of insider trading in the weeks after 9/11. At the time, SEC chairman Harvey Pitt told the press “We will do everything in our power to track those [guilty] people down and bring them to justice.” Everyone took it for granted that the paper trail would lead to al Qaeda.
  • Yet, weeks later, the SEC quietly and inexplicably tabled its investigation. Why? Instead of issuing indictments, the SEC took the unprecedented step of deputizing everyone associated with its probe. This totaled hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. Why did the SEC do this? The answer was transparently obvious to former LAPD narcotics investigator Mike Ruppert, who pointed out that the SEC deputized its investigators to effectively gag them, no doubt, to prevent leakage of its actual findings. And what were those findings? Well, probably the inconvenient truth that the paper trail led not to bin Laden but back to Wall Street. As we know, there was leakage despite the SEC’s best efforts to keep a lid on things. The Independent (UK) reported that “to the embarrassment of investigators, it has emerged that the firm used to buy the put options on United Airlines was headed until 1998 by Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, now executive director of the CIA.” George Tenet had personally recruited Krongard, probably to serve as his liaison with Wall Street.
  • The firm in question was America’s oldest investment bank, A.B. Brown, which merged with Bankers Trust in 1997. In 1999, when B.T. - Alex Brown pled guilty to criminal conspiracy charges, after it was revealed that top-level executives had created a $20 million slush fund out of unclaimed funds, B.T. - Alex Brown was on the verge of being closed down when Deutsche Bank scooped it up. Krongard’s former associate at Alex Brown, Mayo Shattuck III, who helped engineer the merger with Bankers Trust, went on to assume Krongard’s former duties as private banker to the firm’s wealthiest clients, personally arranging confidential transactions and transfers. According to the New York Times, in January 2001, Shattuck was named “co-head of investment banking….overseeing Deutsche Bank’s 400 brokers who cater to wealthy clients.” Shattuck’s sudden resignation on September 12, 2001 must therefor be viewed as highly suspicious. Shattuck retired without a word of explanation even though he reportedly had three years remaining on his contract.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • All of the above is conspicuously absent from Rickards’ discussion about insider trading. One may draw his/her own conclusions -- I have drawn mine. Even as we teeter on the brink of a financial meltdown of historic proportions, the insider-writer who would explain all of this cannot bring himself to acknowledge the true extent of Wall Street corruption and criminality, especially regarding 9/11, the fulcrum event that produced the world as we know it.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 14
     
    The mentioned article by The Independent is no longer on that newspaper's web site. But it survives on the Wayback Machine. http://goo.gl/j4nJVX
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Nick Turse, American Monuments to Failure in Africa? | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...monuments_to_failure_in_africa

war & peace U.S. AFRICOM mission-failure

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • As I sit in a room filled with scores of high-ranking military officers resplendent in their dress uniforms -- Kenyans in their khakis, Burundians and Ugandans clad in olive, Tanzanians in deep forest green sporting like-colored berets and red epaulets with crossed rifles on their shoulders -- chances are that the U.S. military is carrying out some mission somewhere on this vast continent.  It might be a kidnapping raid or a training exercise.  It could be an airstrike or the construction of a drone base.  Or, as I wait for the next speaker to approach the lectern at the “Land Forces East Africa” conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it could be a humanitarian operation run not by civilians in the aid business, but by military troops with ulterior motives -- part of a near-continent-wide campaign utilizing the core tenets of counterinsurgency strategy. The U.S. is trying to win a war for the hearts and minds of Africa.  But a Pentagon investigation suggests that those mystery projects somewhere out there in Djibouti or Ethiopia or Kenya or here in Tanzania may well be orphaned, ill-planned, and undocumented failures-in-the-making.  According to the Department of Defense’s watchdog agency, U.S. military officials in Africa “did not adequately plan or execute” missions designed to win over Africans deemed vulnerable to the lures of violent extremism. 
  • This evidence of failure in the earliest stages of the U.S. military’s hearts-and-minds campaign should have an eerie resonance for anyone who has followed its previous efforts to use humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects to sway local populations in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  In each case, the operations failed in spectacular ways, but were only fully acknowledged after years of futility and billions of dollars in waste.  In Africa, a war zone about which most Americans are completely unaware, the writing is already on the wall.  Or at least it should be.  While Pentagon investigators identified a plethora of problems, their report has, in fact, been kept under wraps for almost a year, while the command responsible for the failures has ignored all questions about it from TomDispatch.
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